What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
logistics system was imperative. During the height of the battle, the replenishment system proved incapable of delivering the crushing volumes of matériel required at the front. A report of the Ministry of Overseas Military Forces of Canada recorded: “After the Battle of the Somme, it was clearly proven that road and animal transport could not alone bring forward ... the weight of war matériel required to stage a modern battle.”16
Haig was able to overcome contemporary army disdain for all matters of logistics and administration. He had to. As he knew, and as we learned again and again in southern Afghanistan in 2006, there are rarely service publications and books to help you solve the seminal problem of the day. The problems of your generation tend to be off the known chart. Against strong military advice to the contrary, the commander of the BEF sought the assistance of a civilian transportation expert, Sir Eric Geddes to overhaul the sustainment system.17
Sir Eric Geddes took a basic, first principles approach to the problem and confirmed that the system of replenishment sustaining the BEF in 1916 was indeed inadequate. Geddes examined actual requirements in France and then systematically studied the capacity of existing means to get it there. A typical division in the Great War required 150 tons of supply each day.18 Geddes was quick to confirm that matériel moving into France was at a level far below this actual requirement. In essence, the BEF was sipping through a straw when in fact it required a fire hose worth of matériel, some 290,000 tons per week by Geddes’s detailed 1916 estimate.19 Geddes made a number of grounded suggestions to Field Marshal Haig. Key among them was adjusting the capacity of the replenishment system so that matériel would never again constrain British operations. Haig implemented most of Geddes’s recommendations. His ability to ignore conventional bias in his army and invest considerable effort in his logistic architecture had a telling impact on the Canadian Corps inside his BEF.
Lieutenant-General Julian Byng, who assumed command of the Canadian Corps a month before the Somme on 28 May 1916, was instrumental in advancing the Corps’ logistics proficiency.20 This increased proficiency was achieved by emphasizing logistics staff training and attention to administrative detail. Byng was a talented officer who quickly won the trust and admiration of the Canadians, and recognized that they “were too good to be led by politicians.”21 Intelligent, balanced, and insightful, he too was able to overcome the 1912 prejudice of Field Service Regulations (Part 2). Byng, a hard-nosed warfighter, was the beneficiary of a unique background and therefore acutely valuable in increasing the standard of Canadian logistics. His exposure to logistics began early in his career when he served on the staff of General Redvers Buller. Buller was the father of the modern Army Service Corps (Transport Corps) and a key proponent in modernizing British Army logistics.22 Serving with General Buller ensured that the young leader was immersed in operational and strategic-level logistics work at an impressionable point in his career. Today it is extremely rare for Canadian combat arms officers to get similar professional opportunities. This early familiarity with logistics planning was reinforced by Byng’s experiences fighting under Buller in the Boer War. Byng became well versed in the criticality of ground supply, as attacks on logistics lifelines were a large part of the tactics in South Africa.23 He would not have been flat-footed grappling with Taliban IED attacks on his columns rumbling to Pashmul west of Kandahar in 2006. Similar tactics were part of the war in South Africa. The lessons of the Boer War taught him that logistics was worthy of command attention.
Byng fully retrained the staff of the Canadian Corps, greatly improving the formation as Jeffrey Williams observed: “No function that contributed to the Corps’ effectiveness — engineers, signals, supplies, medical, and transportation — escaped Byng’s eagle eye....”24 He also polished the existing sustainment apparatus at the lower levels, taking an active interest in the smallest minutiae of the Corps’ logistics plumbing. Most important, General Byng invested attention into the entire breadth of his formation in a manner that has long vanished from the cap-badge obsessed Canadian Army. If you want to make the army better and more successful on the battlefield, attention must be put into where it is weakest. General Byng had a remarkably grounded touch and he possessed the charisma and social intelligence to achieve his aims. The Canadian Corps was much more adept at sustaining a modern battle by the time Currie, the brilliantly successful Canadian officer who had demonstrated his skills as a division commander at Vimy Ridge, replaced Byng in 1917. Drilled and polished under the enlightened but iron guidance of a soldier’s soldier, the logistics structure of the Canadian Corps stood ready to use the innovations of late 1916 to great advantage in the last year of the war.
LOGISTICS SECRETS OF THE CANADIAN CORPS
The most telling attribute shaping the success of the Canadian Corps was its sheer size. The corps was large, equating in strength to a small British Army. Whereas a British division consisted of approximately 15,000 soldiers, a Canadian division had more than 21,000.25 General Currie had resisted the move to triangularization, which had been implemented in the rest of the BEF in January 1918.26 The attrition of Allied personnel throughout 1916 and 1917 had left the British divisions in the field, “hard-pressed for men.”27 The solution was to reduce each brigade by one battalion so that at least on paper, the BEF could field the same number of divisions. Triangularization eroded the resiliency of imperial formations by thinning out human resources and equipment. Currie’s views regarding this thinning out process contrasted sharply with the imperial plan:
The proposal was also put up to the Canadians, with the suggestion that the battalions thus freed might serve as the basis for two new divisions. General Currie, however, preferred to retain the old organization. He took the view that four strong divisions would be more effective than six weak ones.28
Additionally, Currie had seized an opportunity that came with the breakup of the Fifth Canadian Division to overman the four blooded divisions of the Canadian Corps. Beefing up the four divisions rather than stretching to field a fifth increased the punch of a formation already infused with structural redundancy.29
The next defining attribute of the Canadians was a solid penchant for motor transport. The Canadian Corps logisticians loved their trucks, and the Canadian Corps had more mechanical transport units than other corps in the BEF.
Two additional mechanical transport companies gave it approximately 100 more trucks than a British corps, thereby increasing inherent mobility. The corps maintenance organization was similarly much larger than anything other imperial corps had to work with. A British corps possessed only one medium ordnance mobile workshop, while the Canadian Corps had two.30
This meant that in terms of general transport and repair the Canadian Corps had a significant logistic edge. There was a measure of both combat and logistics resiliency built into the corps that enabled it to absorb the mobility challenges of the Hundred Days. Additionally, Canada’s small national army within the BEF possessed the best machinery in France to get the job done, benefiting from the fact that nearly all corps level transport was motorized. This equipment edge was not enjoyed by other imperial formations.31 The motorized companies were responsible to act as the extension of the railway and deliver combat supplies forward to the horse-drawn logistics units of their respective divisions. They knew in 1918 that motorized flexibility was critical to sustain a more fluid, open style of warfare.32 In an attempt to increase lift within available resources, corps logistics structures were reorganized on 14 April 1918 with the intent of gaining more trucks through efficiency.33 Even though the effort to generate more general lift capability fell short, the initiative was significant as it pointed to vibrant CSS experimentation based on thought, experience, and interest.
Finally, there was a great deal of effort on the part of General Currie and the Canadian government to keep the Canadian Corps together as a fighting formation.34 This desire served to develop cohesion and affiliation among the various staffs and units of the formation. British corps, in contrast, did not retain divisions.35 They were shuffled in and out of different corps regularly. The ability of the Canadian Corps to retain its subordinate formations not only led to cohesion and ease of planning but also a high degree of affiliation. Affiliation may seem trivial at first glance; however it leads to trust and