Day 178: Book Excerpt: The First World War- A Complete History

On 25 April 1915, a day of gas and demoralisation for British and French alike on the Western Front, the Anglo-French military landings, from which the Allies expected so much, took place on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Like the naval attack on the Narrows five weeks earlier, the troop landings were carried out in the hope of a swift victory. No victory, however, either swift or slow, resulted. As with the naval attack, there were moments when it seemed that success was within grasp. Opportunities for success existed, but were cast away by mistakes and mischance.

Two separate landing areas were chosen on the Gallipoli Peninsula, one at Cape Helles, at the southern tip of the peninsula, and one further north, opposite the town of Maidos. It was intended that the advance from the southern landings would push the Turks back to the northern landing, trapping them between the two forces. The first landing took place on the northern beach, codenamed Z Beach, shortly before dawn. Two months earlier the low British estimate of Turkish fighting abilities had led Kitchener to comment caustically that Australian and New Zealand troops would be quite adequate for the task of what he called ‘a cruise in the Marmara’. It was therefore Australians and New Zealanders, who had reached Egypt on their way to the Western Front and been diverted for the quick and easy battle against the Turks, who were put ashore on Z beach. Possibly because of a navigational error, they were put ashore not at their original landing place, Gaba Tepe, from where they might have advanced on almost level ground across the central part of the peninsula at its narrowest point, but at Ari Burnu, a smaller cape further north, below the precipitous heights of Chunuk Bair. ‘Tell the Colonel,’ Commander Dix, in charge of the rst landing, called out, ‘that the damn fools have landed us a mile too far north!’

The landing itself was virtually unopposed. Shortly before midday a Turkish battery near Gaba Tepe began to shell the soldiers on the landing beach. Many men pushed inland, where the Turks began to inflict heavier casualties. Still, the Australians pushed forward, up a steep terrain, towards the high ground. In the late afternoon, the company of Turkish troops holding the crest of Chunuk Bair ran out of ammunition and began to withdraw. As a small group of Australians approached the crest, the commander of one of the six Turkish divisions on the peninsula, Mustafa Kemal, who was at that moment reconnoitering the area ahead of the main body of his troops, reached the men who were pulling out. In his memoirs he recalled the dialogue that followed: ‘Why are you running away?’ ‘The enemy, sir.’ ‘Where?’ ‘There.’

Kemal looked across to the hill. The Australians had just reached it. Unless something stopped them, they could quickly move on to the higher ground. ‘One doesn’t run away from the enemy,’ Kemal told his retreating troops. ‘We have no ammunition,’ they replied. ‘If you haven’t any ammunition, at least you have your bayonets.’ Kemal then ordered the Turkish detachment to halt, x bayonets and lie down facing the enemy. ‘As soon as the men lay down, so did the enemy,’ he later recalled. ‘This was the moment of time that we gained.’ One of the Australians, Captain Tulloch, later recalled a Turkish officer standing under a tree less than a thousand yards away, giving orders. Tulloch fired at the officer, who did not move.

Kemal’s own best regiment was at that very moment engaged in routine practise manoeuvres on the eastern slopes of Chunuk Bair. Ordering it forward, he took two hundred men and led them to the crest. He reached it ahead of most of them, and saw, four hundred yards below, an Australian column advancing. Pushing his men forward, he organised each group as it arrived, keeping the Australians from the crest. A battery of guns arrived. Wheeling the rst gun into position himself, and under fire, Kemal knew that if the crest was not held the whole position on the peninsula could be lost.

An Australian scout, returning from the high ground, found a group of Australians sitting in the sun ‘smoking and eating as if on a picnic’. When he told them that the Turks were coming on ‘in thousands’, the officer in charge replied, ‘I didn’t dream they’d come back.’ The Turkish line of retreat along the Bulair Peninsula was denuded of men in order to reinforce the counter-attack. One more Turkish and two Arab regiments were thrown in. Throughout the day the fighting continued. The Australians were held two-thirds of the way up the slope.

Successive waves of Turks, hurling themselves on their adversary, were killed by machine-gun fire as they clambered over the bodies of the previous wave. More and more Australian wounded were falling back to the narrow breach. ‘There was no rest, no lull,’ one Australian soldier wrote, ‘while the rotting dead lay all around us, never a pause in the whole of that long day that started at the crack of dawn. How we longed for nightfall! How we prayed for this ghastly day to end! How we yearned for the sight of the first dark shadow!’

By nightfall both the Australians and the Turks were exhausted. The two Arab regiments were at the end of their ability to fight on. Throughout the night Kemal tried to get his tired soldiers to drive the Australians into the sea. The Australians held on to the western slopes of Chunuk Bair and could not be dislodged. Many, however, were falling back from the front line, ‘and cannot be collected in this difficult country’, their commanding officer, General Birdwood, reported. Birdwood added that the New Zealand Brigade, which had lost heavily during the day, ‘is to some extent demoralised’. He wanted to evacuate the beachhead. When this request was conveyed by ship to the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, whose original orders had been confidently headed ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’, he replied: ‘Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out.’ Hamilton added that the southern force would be advancing the next morning, ‘which should divert pressure from you’. This was a remarkably over-optimistic assessment of what would be possible in the south, as the events there during April 25 had made clear.

~~The First World War- A Complete History -by- Martin Gilbert

Day 150: Book Excerpt: The War That Ended Peace

Finally, and this is true of our own times as well, we should never underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddle, or simply poor timing. The complex and inefficient nature of both the German and the Russian governments meant that the civilian leaders were not fully informed about military plans even when these had political implications. Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian archduke who was assassinated in Sarajevo, had long stood out against those who wanted war to solve Austria-Hungary’s problems. His death, ironically, removed the one man who might have been able to prevent his country from declaring war on Serbia and thus setting the whole chain reaction in motion. The assassination came at the start of the summer holiday period. As the crisis mounted, many statesmen, diplomats and military leaders had already left their capitals. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was bird watching; the French President and Prime Minister were on an extended trip to Russia and the Baltic for the last two weeks of July and frequently out of contact with Paris.
Yet there is a danger in so concentrating on the factors pushing Europe towards war that we may neglect those pulling the other way, towards peace. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of societies and associations for the outlawing of war and for the promotion of such alternatives as arbitration for settling disputes between nations. Rich men such as Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel donated fortunes to promote international understanding. The world’s labour movements and socialist parties organised themselves into the Second International, which repeatedly passed motions against war and threatened to call a general strike should one break out.
The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centred on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalisation of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behaviour for nations. International relations were no longer seen, as they had been in the eighteenth century, as a game where if someone won someone else had to lose. Instead, all could win when peace was maintained. The increasing use of arbitration to settle disputes among nations, the frequent occasions when the great powers in Europe worked together to deal with, for example, crises in the decaying Ottoman Empire, the establishment of an international court of arbitration, all seemed to show that, step by step, the foundations were being laid for a new and more efficient way of managing the world’s affairs. War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the resources of the combatants and the scale of the damage that new weapons and technology could inflict. Bankers warned that even if a general war were to start, it would grind to a halt after a few weeks simply because there would be no way of financing it.
Most of the copious literature on the events of 1914 understandably asks why the Great War broke out. Perhaps we need to ask another sort of question: why did the long peace not continue? Why did the forces pushing towards peace – and they were strong ones – not prevail? They had done so before, after all. Why did the system fail this time? One way of getting at an answer is to see how Europe’s options had narrowed down in the decades before 1914.
Imagine our walkers again. They start out, like Europe, on a broad and sunlit plain but they reach forks where they have to choose one way or another. Though they may not realise the implications at the time, they find themselves passing through a valley which gets narrower and may not lead to where they want to go. It might be possible to try to find a better route, but that would require considerable effort – and it is not clear what lies on the other side of the hills hemming in the valley. Or it is still possible to reverse one’s steps, but that can be expensive, time consuming and possibly humiliating. Could the German government, for example, have admitted to itself and the German people that its naval race with Britain had been not only misguided but a colossal waste of money?
This book traces Europe’s path to 1914 and picks out those turning points when its options narrowed. France’s decision to seek a defensive alliance with Russia as a counterbalance to Germany was one, Germany’s decision in the late 1890s to start a naval race with Great Britain another. Britain cautiously mended fences with France and then, in time, with Russia. Yet another key moment came in 1905–6, when Germany tried to break up the new Entente Cordiale in the first crisis over Morocco. The attempt backfired and the two new friends drew closer together and started to hold secret military talks which added another strand to the ties linking Britain to France. Europe’s subsequent serious crises – the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the second Morocco one in 1911, and the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 – added to the layers of resentments, suspicions, and memories which shaped the relations among the great powers. That is the context in which decisions were taken in 1914.

~~The War That Ended Peace -by- Margaret Macmillan

Day 145: Book Excerpt: Forgotten Wars

On 5 November 1945 three ‘smart young men, unbadged, but with a sense of command’, were ushered into a military court in the great Moghul Red Fort of Delhi. The British may have thought that the date of the trial, the 340th anniversary of the gunpowder plot against the English Parliament, was appropriate. The venue, however, was not. Among Indians, the Red Fort still echoed with memories of the previous British show-trial staged there, that of the last Moghul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, after the rebellion of 1857–8. It was earth from the tomb of Bahadur Shah, who had died in exile in Rangoon, that Bose’s men had intended to convey in a silver casket on their ill-fated march from Burma to India in 1944.
The arguments between the prosecution and defence were hurled back and forth for days. The Indian public hung on every word. Court transcripts were published daily. One proclaimed: ‘This trial is far more sensational than the trial of Jesus Christ and many other trials around the world.’ Vallabhbhai Patel, general secretary of the Congress, got in a shrewder blow. The man who should really be on trial, he asserted, was Lord Linlithgow, the former viceroy, for sentencing 3 million Bengalis to death by famine in 1943. Points of fact arose: were the INA deserters actually executed and, if so, by whom? The British judge advocate general belittled the INA as a Japanese quisling army. The men who had joined it were either traitors or they were forced by bad treatment into its ranks. In rebuttal, the defence team argued that the INA was Indian-officered and led. Were the British quislings to the Americans simply because General Eisenhower was supreme commander in Europe? The accused exculpated their personal actions. Shahnawaz Khan said that he had sacrificed ‘my life, my home, my family and its traditions’ for his country. Dhillon is supposed to have said that the Japanese were ‘leaders of the Buddhist religion’ which was born in India. Indians should therefore work with the Japanese.
The most telling arguments, though, were those that brought international law into the scales. The British, the defence argued, had abandoned their status as a government in Malaya and Burma. Four years before in Singapore, as the garrison surrendered, Colonel Hunt had told captured Indian troops that they should ‘obey the orders of the Japanese in the way that you obeyed the British government. Otherwise you will be punished.’ Other evidence seemed to suggest that the Singapore commander, General Percival, had endorsed this position. So, said the accused, P. K. Sehgal: ‘In return for the loyalty of the Indians, the British representative handed them over to the Japanese like a flock of sheep. Thereby the British had cut off all our bonds of allegiance to the British crown.’ Buoyed up by the public reaction to this claim, the defence went on to argue that Bose’s Azad Hind government was an independent administration created by war. It controlled its own territories, even if they were only the sparsely populated Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It had an effective and autonomous army, and its government had been recognized by, among others, the government of Eire. The Azad Hind government enjoyed exactly the same status as the United States of America after the declaration of independence in 1776. The fact that Bose had failed was neither here nor there. The INA soldiers were officers of an independent army. The floggings and executions they administered in Burma and Malaya were perfectly compatible with the British Army Act of 1911.
What was striking about this line of argument was that it had been put together not solely by the three determined Congressmen among the defence lawyers, Nehru, Bhulabhai Desai and Asaf Ali, but by several hoary old Indian liberals who had been decorated by the British government and were widely regarded as loyalists by both British and Indians. If such men were arguing that the independent Indian nation already existed, how could it be otherwise? The three young officers were ultimately convicted, but only of the lesser charge of rebellion against the king-emperor. The sentences passed were never imposed. Wavell later acknowledged that the first trials should have been of men who could actually be convicted of brutality or murder. The three were later released from jail and given dishonourable discharges from the army. But the British Raj had already suffered a lethal blow. Its legitimacy, long questioned, was now seeping away. Even Ajit Rudra, a senior Indian officer who had once believed passionately that the INA had betrayed their loyalty to the king-emperor, had second thoughts. If the British had willingly released the Indian troops from their allegiance, how could they be classed as traitors?
The effect on soldiers and civilians up and down the crescent was electrifying. As the debate over the INA raged on, hundreds of thousands of Indian troops remained in Southeast Asia under British command. By far the majority were scattered over a demoralized and devastated Burma, suspicious of the BNA and doubting the intentions of the British. Nehru and other Congress politicians had already warned Auchinleck, the army’s commander-in-chief, that it would be impossible to use Indian troops to put down nationalist rebellions in fraternal countries. This hamstrung Dorman-Smith in his attempt to bring the BNA to heel over the next nine months. As Wavell reminded the cabinet on 17 October: ‘SEAC depends almost entirely on [the] loyalty and discipline of Indian troops’. Yet Attlee brushed aside his objections to the despatch of fresh levies of men from India in the face of new tasks confronting the British. It caused new difficulties as the British tried to rebuild their rule in Malaya. Indian troops were also in French Indo-China, attempting to reassert French authority in the face of communist and nationalist rebellions. And such was the drain on manpower that Britain had to risk sending 5 Indian Division from Malaya to Indonesia, where they would fight alongside British troops against the Indonesian nationalists in what was to be the bloodiest of the first wars of peace.

~~Forgotten Wars -by- Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

Day 115: Book Excerpt: Army Of The West

Field Marshal von Kluge arrived at OB West headquarters on July 3, full of confidence and convinced that he would turn the tide of the battle. He proclaimed that Rommel would now learn to take orders and berated his subordinate in front of other officers for his defeatist attitude. It was well known that von Kluge held Hitler’s respect and had direct access to the Führer. Stung by von Kluge’s harsh criticism, Rommel sent his new C-in-C a lengthy memorandum of the problems encountered by German forces defending Normandy. It was not long, however, before von Kluge began to see these difficulties for himself. Visiting the front, he became aware of Allied air superiority. He witnessed the devastating effects of naval artillery fire in the coastal areas and was shown the destruction wrought by Allied guns with their seemingly unlimited supply of ammunition.

The unpleasant reality of the situation was further reinforced when von Kluge returned to his headquarters at St. Germain to find a new directive from Hitler concerning the conduct of German operations in Normandy. In this memo, the Führer predicted a second Allied landing and ordered the Fifteenth Army to remain in the Pas de Calais. Panzer Group West was to be renamed the Fifth Panzer Army and Eberbach stepped in to take over from Geyr von Schweppenburg, with orders to pull back from the front and make ready for a counter offensive. Hitler did not want to hear about the enemy’s artillery strength and “inferior” Allied infantry was to be overrun by surprise night attacks conducted without artillery preparation. Normandy was to be held at all costs, and although there were no reinforcements available, every part of France had to be defended against possible further landings. Under Hitler’s directive, the well-equipped 11th Panzer Division was scheduled to move from the First Army in southwest France to the Nineteenth Army on the French Mediterranean coast. Three times in July, von Kluge requested that the division be transferred to Normandy, where it was desperately needed, but he was refused on all occasions. Von Kluge’s reports on the lack of reinforcements and staggering casualties met the same response as had those of Rommel and von Rundstedt.

The heaviest fighting over the next few days was at Carpiquet, where the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade attacked the town and airfield on July 4. The fighting around Caen was intensifying, and although the inexperienced 16th Luftwaffe Field Division was brought up to replace the 21st Panzer Division, von Kluge and Rommel decided that the Panzer Lehr would have to be shifted to the American front where the U.S. Army was advancing toward La Haye-du-Puits.

On July 7 the British began their assault on Caen, with 468 heavy bombers dropping 2,562 tons on the city between 9:50 and 10:30 P.M. Operation CHARNWOOD opened with a massive artillery barrage at 4:20 the next morning, using every gun in the Second British Army, as well as offshore naval guns. The 16th Luftwaffe Division’s defences collapsed before the 3rd British Division, while the 59th British and the 3rd Canadian Divisions advanced along a ten-mile front against the 12th SS, driving towards their goal of capturing the city and securing bridgeheads across the Orne River. When the Germans began to withdraw from Caen, the 12th SS mounted a rear-guard action to cover the retreat. The battle at Caen ended on July 9 with heavy casualties on both sides. Major General Kurt Meyer halted the 12th SS withdrawal in the suburbs on the south bank of the Orne, once again preventing Montgomery from achieving his full campaign objectives.

In bocage country to the west, the Americans had advanced only five miles in six days and were now encountering fierce opposition as they moved toward Périers. The bocage, or hedgerow, country in this area favored the German defenders. Each massive stone hedge, overgrown with trees and thickets, formed a natural defensive position from which German gunners fired unseen at advancing infantry. Tanks and infantry could move only from row to row, and were quickly exposed if they tried to use the narrow roads. As the British and Canadians occupied Caen on July 10, Bradley decided to pause and rest his American formations in order to replace the forty thousand casualties suffered to date. On the Russian front, the Soviet Operation BAGRATION, launched on June 22, was realizing tremendous success against Army Group Center. Germany’s line of defence in Russia had been shattered, and the Soviets now launched an offensive against Army Group North, tearing a fifty-mile gap through the German lines in two days of bitter fighting.

By July 11, the Panzer Lehr Division came into action against Bradley’s troops in the St. Lô area. Suffering heavy casualties, the Americans were becoming bogged down in the hedgerows of St. Lô and flooded marshlands of Carentan. Bradley called on Montgomery for help, requesting a ten-day respite in order to rebuild and resupply for an American breakout. Monty agreed to launch a British attack to cross the Orne and began planning Operation GOODWOOD, his next effort to break through the German lines outside Caen. A few days later, an ULTRA decrypt confirmed that the Germans were still awaiting a landing by Patton’s FUSAG, which they believed would be sent across the Straits of Dover and used to cut off the German forces in Normandy. Churchill sent the decrypt to Roosevelt on July 15 with a notation that “Uncertainty is a terror to the Germans.”

The continuing success of FORTITUDE, now five weeks after the D-Day landings, is also confirmed in a memo written by Rommel on July 15. He wrote to von Kluge that Army Group B had lost ninety-seven thousand men since June 6 but had received only six thousand replacements. Seventeen tanks had been sent to replace the 225 lost. Overwhelming Allied air and artillery superiority was smashing the German army in Normandy to pieces. He further noted that no new forces could be brought up to the Normandy front except by weakening the Fifteenth Army on the Channel or the Mediterranean forces stationed in southern France. Rommel asked von Kluge to forward the report directly to Hitler. The next day, Rommel also sought Hitler’s permission to withdraw the twenty-eight thousand German troops stationed in the Channel Islands. Hitler refused.

On July 17 Rommel set out for his daily tour of the front. After visiting the 276th and 277th Infantry Divisions, he continued on to Sepp Dietrich’s Headquarters, where he met with Dietrich and Meyer. Expecting a British attack within twenty-four hours, Rommel wanted Meyer’s 12th SS to support the 272nd Infantry Division. His daily tour completed, Rommel left in his staff car, but on his way back to La Roche–Guyon, he was spotted and attacked by two Spitfires. In the ensuing car crash, Rommel suffered severe head injuries. Unconscious and covered with blood, he was taken first to a shelter and then to the hospital at St. Germain. He would never return to the battlefield. Von Kluge was placed at the head of Army Group B in addition to his posting as C-in-C West. He moved from OB West headquarters at St. Germain to those of Army Group B at La Roche–Guyon.

As Rommel had predicted, the Allies renewed their offensive the next day. Montgomery’s Operation GOODWOOD, the largest offensive yet launched against German lines, was sent across the Orne on July 18, led by the British VIII Corps with the Canadian II Corps supporting the right flank. Across the river, the 1st SS Panzer Leibstandarte Division was dug in at Bourguébus Ridge southeast of Caen. To the west, Bradley’s American forces entered St. Lô that same day. Both attacks soon broke down into heavy fighting, with the British attack being brought to a halt by elements of the 21st Panzer Division. Eberbach had anticipated Montgomery’s offensive and deployed the forces of the I SS Panzer and LXXXVI Corps in four defensive belts nearly ten miles deep, with a fifth belt acting as a reserve.

Heavy losses in both men and tanks were sustained on both sides. For two days of bitter fighting, Canadian and British forces fought their way to the third belt of defence, but the German gun line on the crest of Bourguébus Ridge remained intact. On the afternoon of July 20, just as Montgomery’s troops were preparing to assault the ridge, a prolonged downpour turned the battlefield into a sea of mud, ending the siege with gains and losses for both sides. The battle had exhausted the German panzer divisions and prevented their transfer to the American sector south of the Cotentin. To meet the British and Canadian assault at Caen, two panzer divisions that had been moving to the American front were recalled. The Germans, however, still held vital ground at Verrières Ridge. Rommel’s defensive zone held firm but constant air attacks dropping twelve thousand tons of bombs were taking their toll. The demoralization of senior German commanders at this time is reflected in the Army Group B situation reports: “The extraordinary vigour and the colossal material superiority of the enemy in the fighting east of Caen on July 18 and 19 are indicated by the fact that he fired 103,000 artillery shells on the left flank of the 86th Corps and the 1st SS Panzer alone, and according to his own reports, dropped in our positions 7,800 tons of bombs from 2,200 two and four-engined bombers.”

~~Army Of The West: The Weekly Reports of German Army Group B from Normandy to the West Wall -ed- James A. Wood

Day 28

The machine gun played such a central role in the war that World War I is now sometimes referred to as the machine-gun war. The Gatling gun had been invented much earlier, but it was a toy compared to the 1870 invention of the British engineer Hiram Maxim. He devised a system that used the explosive gases set off by one bullet to propel the next one. The gun therefore ejected each spent cartridge and inserted a new one. Ammunition was fed into the firing chamber using a belt-fed system. A water-filled steel jacket surrounded the barrel; it kept the temperature cool enough so the barrel would not crack or melt as a result of the intense heat generated by the explosive gases.

The major problem with the Maxim gun was that it was relatively heavy and difficult to use. In particular, it needed several men to operate it, and it wasn't highly reliable. Because of this, it had seen limited use before the beginning of World War I. In 1896, however, the Maxim was improved quite significantly. The Vickers Company in England purchased the Maxim Company, and Vickers redesigned and improved the gun. First, Vickers decreased the gun's weight by using lighter metals in its construction, and then he simplified the action. Basically it was now a water-cooled gun that used .303 British shells, the same shells that were used in the standard British rifle, the Lee-Enfield.

Although it took six men to operate it—one to fire it, one to feed ammunition, and four to move it around and set it up—it was quite reliable once it was set up, and as a result it became a favorite weapon among British troops. It was three feet, eight inches long with a firing rate of 450 to 600 rounds per minute, and it had maximum range of about 4,500 yards. It could be fired for twelve hours without overheating or breaking down, and about ten thousand rounds could be fired each hour. At the end of this time, however, the barrel had to be changed. It was particularly effective against troops in the open, and it was one of the major reasons for the stalemate in the war. Later in the war (after 1916) it was used in airplanes, both by the British and the French.

Another machine gun referred to as the Lewis gun was also used extensively. It was an American-designed gun that was much lighter than the Vickers. It was widely used by the British. Strangely, although it was designed by a US colonel named Isaac Lewis in 1911, it was not used extensively by American troops in the war. Lewis, in fact, became disillusioned with the US Army in 1913 because its leaders refused to adopt his gun, and he left the United States, went briefly to Belgium, and then went to the United Kingdom, where he worked with British manufacturers to build the gun. At twenty-eight pounds, it was only about half the weight of the Vickers, and its length was barely over four feet, so it could easily be carried by a single soldier. It used the British .303 bullet (although some models use the .30-06), and its rate of fire was about six hundred rounds per minute, with an effective range of about 880 yards and a maximum range of 3,500 yards.
The French 75 millimeter field gun also played an important role in several battles, particularly near the beginning of the war. It had a recoil mechanism that allowed the barrel to slide back and forth after it was fired before returning to its original firing position. Because it did this without moving the gun, no reaiming was required. It was tremendously accurate and could fire fifteen shots per minute. For anyone in the open it meant certain death, and in the Battle of Marne over two thousand German soldiers were mowed down in four minutes.

~~The Physics of War -by- Barry Parker