Trechos de Engines Of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost On The Railways (2010), de Christian Wolmar.
The first [German] trains to be despatched carried infantry brigades destined for the capture of Liège, the vital Belgian railway junction in the Meuse Valley, and over the following two weeks 3 million soldiers were carried by the railways in more than 11,000 trains.
- - -
The Belgians set about disabling their railway system with ruthless efficiency, concentrating on blowing up the tunnels to prevent any hope of rapid repair. After the invasion, the Germans deployed large numbers of men, a force of 26,000 workers, to try to sort out the broken railways but to little avail. Even a month after the German occupation of Belgium at the onset of the crucial battle of the Marne in early September, only a sixth of the 2,400-mile Belgian rail network was functioning. Moreover, the surviving lines were in a poor state. Most of the rolling stock had been destroyed or taken to France by the Belgians, and even where the track had been left intact, signalling equipment was sabotaged. The Belgians also indulged in the kinds of tricks deployed the world over by reluctant railway workers, such as routing trains onto the wrong lines at junctions or "mistakenly" sending them into sidings.
The destruction of the Belgian railways delayed the progress of the German troops but did not entirely put paid to the Schlieffen Plan.
- - -
The early German invasion swept all before it, with the result that the forward troops were soon much further ahead of their rail supply line than had been originally envisaged. At times parts of the German army were seventy or eighty miles from the railhead, which made it impossible to furnish them with food and ammunition from the rear. Consequently, it was back to the old Napoleonic practices of the troops having to live off the land.
- - -
The rapid arrival of the British in France had surprised the Germans, who had not expected them to intervene in their march through France and it had been made possible by the efficient use of the railways. Southampton had been chosen as the port of embarkation and a detailed timetable had been devised by railway and military planners that entailed special trains arriving at the port every twelve minutes, sixteen hours a day. The operation had been conducted remarkably well and by the end of August 670 trains had carried just under 120,000 men to the port for embarkation to France. The smoothness of the movement of troops had even attracted compliments from Lord Kitchener, a man not known to be generous with praise but who fancied himself as something of a logistics expert.
- - -
Indeed, the ability of the French to move troops by rail was not happenstance, but rather the result of Joffre's understanding of how to make the best use of the railways. The lines emanated like the spokes of a bicycle wheel from Paris and there were few efficient cross-country routes (something which still pertains today, as anyone who has tried to take a train from, say, Bordeaux to Strasbourg can testify). The Schlieffen Plan had envisaged a flanking movement at a considerable distance from Paris, on routes that were ill-served by railways because they went round Paris and therefore were only served, at best, by minor lines. Nearer Paris there were better circular routes - including La Grande Ceinture, a kind of railway Périphérique which connected all the radial routes - and therefore Joffre recognized that it was essential to resist the German attacks at the right distance from the capital to allow the French to move easily along the front by rail on the radial lines while denying the Germans access to the Ceinture.
- - -
Fortunately for the French, on the Nord railway, the network most affected by the invasion, they got it right: while the company lost more than half its 2,400-mile network to the Germans it managed to retain the bulk of its stock.
- - -
The Marne could have been even more decisive, resulting in an early end to the war, had not the victorious Allies' pursuit of the fleeing enemy been so slow, hampered ironically by the damage to the railway carried out a couple of weeks previously by the retreating French. By 11 September, the British Expeditionary Force was forty miles ahead of its railhead, and had to pause to await resupply. The consequent delay allowed the Germans to regroup and dig themselves in along the Aisne river, where they were to remain until 1918.
- - -
The route taken by each army during these clashes [Race to the Sea] was determined by the location of two north-south railways: the French and British controlled the line through Amiens, while the Germans were able to use the railways through Lille.
- - -
The fact that the railway systems were highly developed but motor transport was still in its infancy gave defensive forces a key advantage and they were further helped by their ability to make use of local undamaged and familiar lines while the enemy, in hostile territory, only had unknown and frequently sabotaged railways at their disposal.
- - -
An entrenched army well served by a railhead was therefore at a huge advantage in repelling an invader because "reinforcements could always arrive by rail to a threatened position before the attacking side could break through on foot. Railway trains go faster than men walking." [A. J. P.] Taylor stressed that it was the railways, together with the machine gun, that gave defenders the advantage: "This is the strategic reason why the defence was stronger than the attack throughout the First World War. Defence was mechanised, attack was not."
- - -
During the brief mobile war, the French railways had performed heroically and they now settled into a routine. As in Germany and Britain, the military had taken over their operation as soon as war broke out. Vast numbers of freight wagons were prepared for troop transport with the installation of benches and were marked "8 chevaux, 40 hommes", which fortunately for the soldiers were alternatives, not totals.
- - -
After the battle of the Marne, Amiens was safely back behind Allied lines and remained the key junction for the despatch of British troops for the duration of the war.
- - -
As the entrenched armies grew bigger, the demands from both the relief and replacement of tired troops and the equipment requirements meant the railway was over-extended.
- - -
[...] were essential for the logistics of any attack but that very dependence on the railways ensured that none of these attacks ever took the enemy by surprise. The activity on the railways necessary to prepare the attacks could not fail to be seen by scouts from the air or balloons or even from nearby vantage points on hilltops.
- - -
[...] storage tracks were laid for artillery and hospital trains, and to accommodate the large rail-mounted guns that would launch the offensive [in Champagne, 1915].
- - -
These field railways used a tiny 60cm gauge and were designed to supply the front line from railheads without the need for road or animal transport. As a result of this diligence, the Germans had stockpiled vast quantities of equipment for the construction of a network of these light railways.
- - -
The failure of the Somme offensive resulted in a U-turn by the army generals, when it became apparent that not only were light railways crucial during static periods but they were also vital during attacks when troops were moving forward into enemy territory.
Since the light railways ran at slow speeds, and required frequent repair, they were of necessity short, mostly between five and fifteen miles long.
- - -
Breakdowns and derailments were quickly dealt with: teams of men "trained in the gentle art of lifting a loco out of a shell-hole in thirty minutes with not even a sky-hook to pull them, were sent out at a moment's notice wherever needed".
- - -
The more efficient delivery of men and matériel to the front occasioned by these light railways did nothing to relieve the strain on standard-gauge French railways, which, towards the end of 1915, were showing signs of being unable to cope with the workload. The huge increase in passenger numbers and freight being carried compared to peacetime had to be handled by a greatly reduced workforce since many men had left to serve in the forces. The rolling stock of wagons and, especially, locomotives, over half of which dated back to the nineteenth century, was deteriorating, too. Trains were being cancelled and the civilian traffic was hit particularly hard since military trains took precedence. Yet many of the non-military services were equally important, carrying food and basic supplies to the population, as well as soldiers on leave to and from their home towns, and consequently the cancellation of all civilian services was not an option. By the beginning of 1916 the situation on the railways had reached crisis point, with even the military traffic beginning to suffer from shortage of wagons and delays caused by overcrowding, and it began to cause severe anxiety to the military leaders.
- - -
The strategy of attacking Verdun, therefore, was based on the notion that the German attackers, well served by railways, would be able to take over the French positions because their defenders would soon run out of supplies, particularly artillery shells.
- - -
The commemorative monument to La Voie Sacrée recognizes the role of the railways by depicting a steam locomotive as well as three trucks.
- - -
Of course, many of those returning were wounded and both railway lines proved particularly useful for transporting them away from the front as they offered a far more comfortable ride than the bumpy road. [...] In an effort to keep the soldiers separate from the general public, special exchange stations, furnished with canteens and even cinemas, were established, but the problem persisted throughout the war.
- - -
The lack of links between the light rail systems of the 1st and 3rd armies during the Passchendaele attack had meant weapons and other material had to be transferred between the two by a roundabout route on the standard-gauge railways, an utterly inefficient manoeuvre.
- - -
[...] This service required more than a hundred locomotives to provide six trains per day to supply the theatres of Macedonia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and was designed to replace the vast amount of shipping on this route, which was in constant danger of attack. The service, however, was interrupted by the Italian defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 and the German offensive on Amiens the following year, and never reached its full potential, mustering at best two to three trains daily.
There were other demands stretching the resources of the French railway system. The most significant was the transport of the American troops who started arriving during the summer of 1917. [...] The Americans brought a lot of equipment with them, including a huge number of "Pershing" locomotives, and operations on these lines were carried out in great measure by the 50,000-strong US Transportation Corps, most of whom were former railwaymen, but nevertheless their arrival placed further strain on an already overloaded rail network. The level of service was not helped by tensions between the American and French railway workers, which occasionally flared up into full-scale fights.
- - -
In the East it was the absence of railways which resulted in a more mobile war.
- - -
The [Russian] railways were split, as in France, between those near the front, which were under military control, and the lines in the interior, which remained the responsibility of the ministry of transport.
- - -
The Germans were able to nimbly move troops around by rail to focus their attack on the Russians' weak points. The crucial manoeuvre undertaken by the Germans was, after a couple of smaller battles, to re-engage their troops so quickly by rail that a single German army was able to hold off the rather disjointed attacks of two Russian ones.
- - -
The battles between the Austrians and Italians largely took place in the mountains separating the two countries and consequently the Austrians built several long and heavily engineered narrow-gauge lines, together with many lighter lines and cableways, to supply their armies in the South Tyrol.
- - -
The collapse was stimulated partly by the arrival of Lenin from his exile in Switzerland in April 1917, in a special train which the Germans allowed through the front because they were keen to sow chaos and disorder in Russia.
- - -
The Communists established control over much of the west of the country in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution thanks to the use of the railways.
- - -
[T. E.] Lawrence led his first raid on the railway at Abu Na'am in March [1916] and there were some thirty more attacks in the following months, most carried out by Arab forces led by Prince Abdullah and supported by forces of the Egyptian Army and a small French contingent. They were supplemented by a few bombing raids by aeroplanes on the railway, which was at the limit of their range from their base in Egypt. Lawrence's attacks took a disproportionate toll on the Turkish forces. Very few of the attackers were killed in these engagements, while the Turks usually lost dozens, if not more, each time. [...] the number of trains was reduced from the peacetime level of two daily to two every week, which created food and fuel shortages in Madinah, stimulating internal dissent.
- - -
With no appetite back home to prolong the war, peace eventually became inevitable, stimulated by the inadequacy of the transport system. This [was a] hasty end to the war, strangely, left Germans still on French soil and no foreign troops on theirs. [...] According to the official report on transportation: "The growing impossibility of railway and road reconstruction keeping pace with the rapid advance of the allies was undoubtedly an important factor in influencing the mind of General Foch when he agreed to accord an armistice." The war on the Western Front had, quite literally, run out of steam, but its rather unsatisfactory end contributed to the next one.
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_gun#World_War_I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciurea_rail_disaster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYxHRDGtlrY
- - -
The Belgians set about disabling their railway system with ruthless efficiency, concentrating on blowing up the tunnels to prevent any hope of rapid repair. After the invasion, the Germans deployed large numbers of men, a force of 26,000 workers, to try to sort out the broken railways but to little avail. Even a month after the German occupation of Belgium at the onset of the crucial battle of the Marne in early September, only a sixth of the 2,400-mile Belgian rail network was functioning. Moreover, the surviving lines were in a poor state. Most of the rolling stock had been destroyed or taken to France by the Belgians, and even where the track had been left intact, signalling equipment was sabotaged. The Belgians also indulged in the kinds of tricks deployed the world over by reluctant railway workers, such as routing trains onto the wrong lines at junctions or "mistakenly" sending them into sidings.
The destruction of the Belgian railways delayed the progress of the German troops but did not entirely put paid to the Schlieffen Plan.
- - -
The early German invasion swept all before it, with the result that the forward troops were soon much further ahead of their rail supply line than had been originally envisaged. At times parts of the German army were seventy or eighty miles from the railhead, which made it impossible to furnish them with food and ammunition from the rear. Consequently, it was back to the old Napoleonic practices of the troops having to live off the land.
- - -
The rapid arrival of the British in France had surprised the Germans, who had not expected them to intervene in their march through France and it had been made possible by the efficient use of the railways. Southampton had been chosen as the port of embarkation and a detailed timetable had been devised by railway and military planners that entailed special trains arriving at the port every twelve minutes, sixteen hours a day. The operation had been conducted remarkably well and by the end of August 670 trains had carried just under 120,000 men to the port for embarkation to France. The smoothness of the movement of troops had even attracted compliments from Lord Kitchener, a man not known to be generous with praise but who fancied himself as something of a logistics expert.
- - -
Indeed, the ability of the French to move troops by rail was not happenstance, but rather the result of Joffre's understanding of how to make the best use of the railways. The lines emanated like the spokes of a bicycle wheel from Paris and there were few efficient cross-country routes (something which still pertains today, as anyone who has tried to take a train from, say, Bordeaux to Strasbourg can testify). The Schlieffen Plan had envisaged a flanking movement at a considerable distance from Paris, on routes that were ill-served by railways because they went round Paris and therefore were only served, at best, by minor lines. Nearer Paris there were better circular routes - including La Grande Ceinture, a kind of railway Périphérique which connected all the radial routes - and therefore Joffre recognized that it was essential to resist the German attacks at the right distance from the capital to allow the French to move easily along the front by rail on the radial lines while denying the Germans access to the Ceinture.
- - -
Fortunately for the French, on the Nord railway, the network most affected by the invasion, they got it right: while the company lost more than half its 2,400-mile network to the Germans it managed to retain the bulk of its stock.
- - -
The Marne could have been even more decisive, resulting in an early end to the war, had not the victorious Allies' pursuit of the fleeing enemy been so slow, hampered ironically by the damage to the railway carried out a couple of weeks previously by the retreating French. By 11 September, the British Expeditionary Force was forty miles ahead of its railhead, and had to pause to await resupply. The consequent delay allowed the Germans to regroup and dig themselves in along the Aisne river, where they were to remain until 1918.
- - -
The route taken by each army during these clashes [Race to the Sea] was determined by the location of two north-south railways: the French and British controlled the line through Amiens, while the Germans were able to use the railways through Lille.
- - -
The fact that the railway systems were highly developed but motor transport was still in its infancy gave defensive forces a key advantage and they were further helped by their ability to make use of local undamaged and familiar lines while the enemy, in hostile territory, only had unknown and frequently sabotaged railways at their disposal.
- - -
An entrenched army well served by a railhead was therefore at a huge advantage in repelling an invader because "reinforcements could always arrive by rail to a threatened position before the attacking side could break through on foot. Railway trains go faster than men walking." [A. J. P.] Taylor stressed that it was the railways, together with the machine gun, that gave defenders the advantage: "This is the strategic reason why the defence was stronger than the attack throughout the First World War. Defence was mechanised, attack was not."
- - -
During the brief mobile war, the French railways had performed heroically and they now settled into a routine. As in Germany and Britain, the military had taken over their operation as soon as war broke out. Vast numbers of freight wagons were prepared for troop transport with the installation of benches and were marked "8 chevaux, 40 hommes", which fortunately for the soldiers were alternatives, not totals.
- - -
After the battle of the Marne, Amiens was safely back behind Allied lines and remained the key junction for the despatch of British troops for the duration of the war.
- - -
As the entrenched armies grew bigger, the demands from both the relief and replacement of tired troops and the equipment requirements meant the railway was over-extended.
- - -
[...] were essential for the logistics of any attack but that very dependence on the railways ensured that none of these attacks ever took the enemy by surprise. The activity on the railways necessary to prepare the attacks could not fail to be seen by scouts from the air or balloons or even from nearby vantage points on hilltops.
- - -
[...] storage tracks were laid for artillery and hospital trains, and to accommodate the large rail-mounted guns that would launch the offensive [in Champagne, 1915].
- - -
These field railways used a tiny 60cm gauge and were designed to supply the front line from railheads without the need for road or animal transport. As a result of this diligence, the Germans had stockpiled vast quantities of equipment for the construction of a network of these light railways.
- - -
The failure of the Somme offensive resulted in a U-turn by the army generals, when it became apparent that not only were light railways crucial during static periods but they were also vital during attacks when troops were moving forward into enemy territory.
Since the light railways ran at slow speeds, and required frequent repair, they were of necessity short, mostly between five and fifteen miles long.
- - -
Breakdowns and derailments were quickly dealt with: teams of men "trained in the gentle art of lifting a loco out of a shell-hole in thirty minutes with not even a sky-hook to pull them, were sent out at a moment's notice wherever needed".
- - -
The more efficient delivery of men and matériel to the front occasioned by these light railways did nothing to relieve the strain on standard-gauge French railways, which, towards the end of 1915, were showing signs of being unable to cope with the workload. The huge increase in passenger numbers and freight being carried compared to peacetime had to be handled by a greatly reduced workforce since many men had left to serve in the forces. The rolling stock of wagons and, especially, locomotives, over half of which dated back to the nineteenth century, was deteriorating, too. Trains were being cancelled and the civilian traffic was hit particularly hard since military trains took precedence. Yet many of the non-military services were equally important, carrying food and basic supplies to the population, as well as soldiers on leave to and from their home towns, and consequently the cancellation of all civilian services was not an option. By the beginning of 1916 the situation on the railways had reached crisis point, with even the military traffic beginning to suffer from shortage of wagons and delays caused by overcrowding, and it began to cause severe anxiety to the military leaders.
- - -
The strategy of attacking Verdun, therefore, was based on the notion that the German attackers, well served by railways, would be able to take over the French positions because their defenders would soon run out of supplies, particularly artillery shells.
- - -
The commemorative monument to La Voie Sacrée recognizes the role of the railways by depicting a steam locomotive as well as three trucks.
- - -
Of course, many of those returning were wounded and both railway lines proved particularly useful for transporting them away from the front as they offered a far more comfortable ride than the bumpy road. [...] In an effort to keep the soldiers separate from the general public, special exchange stations, furnished with canteens and even cinemas, were established, but the problem persisted throughout the war.
- - -
The lack of links between the light rail systems of the 1st and 3rd armies during the Passchendaele attack had meant weapons and other material had to be transferred between the two by a roundabout route on the standard-gauge railways, an utterly inefficient manoeuvre.
- - -
[...] This service required more than a hundred locomotives to provide six trains per day to supply the theatres of Macedonia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and was designed to replace the vast amount of shipping on this route, which was in constant danger of attack. The service, however, was interrupted by the Italian defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 and the German offensive on Amiens the following year, and never reached its full potential, mustering at best two to three trains daily.
There were other demands stretching the resources of the French railway system. The most significant was the transport of the American troops who started arriving during the summer of 1917. [...] The Americans brought a lot of equipment with them, including a huge number of "Pershing" locomotives, and operations on these lines were carried out in great measure by the 50,000-strong US Transportation Corps, most of whom were former railwaymen, but nevertheless their arrival placed further strain on an already overloaded rail network. The level of service was not helped by tensions between the American and French railway workers, which occasionally flared up into full-scale fights.
- - -
In the East it was the absence of railways which resulted in a more mobile war.
- - -
The [Russian] railways were split, as in France, between those near the front, which were under military control, and the lines in the interior, which remained the responsibility of the ministry of transport.
- - -
The Germans were able to nimbly move troops around by rail to focus their attack on the Russians' weak points. The crucial manoeuvre undertaken by the Germans was, after a couple of smaller battles, to re-engage their troops so quickly by rail that a single German army was able to hold off the rather disjointed attacks of two Russian ones.
- - -
The battles between the Austrians and Italians largely took place in the mountains separating the two countries and consequently the Austrians built several long and heavily engineered narrow-gauge lines, together with many lighter lines and cableways, to supply their armies in the South Tyrol.
- - -
The collapse was stimulated partly by the arrival of Lenin from his exile in Switzerland in April 1917, in a special train which the Germans allowed through the front because they were keen to sow chaos and disorder in Russia.
- - -
The Communists established control over much of the west of the country in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution thanks to the use of the railways.
- - -
[T. E.] Lawrence led his first raid on the railway at Abu Na'am in March [1916] and there were some thirty more attacks in the following months, most carried out by Arab forces led by Prince Abdullah and supported by forces of the Egyptian Army and a small French contingent. They were supplemented by a few bombing raids by aeroplanes on the railway, which was at the limit of their range from their base in Egypt. Lawrence's attacks took a disproportionate toll on the Turkish forces. Very few of the attackers were killed in these engagements, while the Turks usually lost dozens, if not more, each time. [...] the number of trains was reduced from the peacetime level of two daily to two every week, which created food and fuel shortages in Madinah, stimulating internal dissent.
- - -
With no appetite back home to prolong the war, peace eventually became inevitable, stimulated by the inadequacy of the transport system. This [was a] hasty end to the war, strangely, left Germans still on French soil and no foreign troops on theirs. [...] According to the official report on transportation: "The growing impossibility of railway and road reconstruction keeping pace with the rapid advance of the allies was undoubtedly an important factor in influencing the mind of General Foch when he agreed to accord an armistice." The war on the Western Front had, quite literally, run out of steam, but its rather unsatisfactory end contributed to the next one.
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_gun#World_War_I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciurea_rail_disaster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYxHRDGtlrY
