Fritz von Below

Fritz von Below was the commander on whom the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme fell on 1 July 1916. His 2nd Army, which for two years had held a quiet sector of the front in Picardy, took the most powerful blow the Allies had so far delivered in the west. For almost five months, from July as commander of the new 1st Army north of the river, he conducted a defensive battle in which the Germans lost a few kilometres of ground but prevented a breakthrough. The experience of his army, written up with his chief of staff Fritz von Loßberg, became one of the foundations of new German defensive tactics. He is less well known than his cousin Otto von Below, the victor of Caporetto, and is often confused with him.

Before the war

He was born on 23 September 1853 in Danzig into an old Pomeranian-Mecklenburg noble family in which military service was a tradition. His father Ferdinand was a Prussian major-general, and his grandfather Theodor had received the Pour le Mérite as far back as the Napoleonic Wars. Fritz’s younger brother Ernst also became a general. Fritz went through the cadet corps and in 1873 joined the 1st Foot Guards in Potsdam as a second lieutenant. He spent most of his career alternating between the Great General Staff and Guards units. In 1908 he took over the 1st Guards Division, and in 1912, by then a general of infantry, the newly formed XXI Corps with its headquarters in Saarbrücken, near the French border. He never married.

1914–1915: Lorraine and Masuria

In August 1914 XXI Corps became part of the 6th Army of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht. On 20 August, in the Battle of Lorraine, it fought in the centre of the army that repelled the French offensive at Morhange and Sarrebourg. In the autumn, during the Race to the Sea, the corps was moved north to the area of Arras.

At the beginning of 1915 XXI Corps was one of four corps sent to East Prussia. In February, as part of the 10th Army of General Hermann von Eichhorn, it took part in the Winter Battle of Masuria. According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Below then led the outermost enveloping wing, which in snow and frost went round the Russian 10th Army from the north. In mid-February he was awarded the Pour le Mérite for this battle. He did not stay long in the east, however.

The 2nd Army on the Somme

On 4 April 1915 Below replaced the ailing Field Marshal Karl von Bülow at the head of the 2nd Army, with its headquarters at Saint-Quentin. His front ran from Gommecourt in the north across the Somme to the area of Noyon and throughout 1915 was one of the quietest in the west. In the spring of 1916, while the Germans were bleeding at Verdun, Below reported more and more often to the Supreme Army Command on the enemy’s preparations and on the weakness of his own troops. The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, long expected an attack further north, against the 6th Army. According to the British official history, on 25 May Below proposed a pre-emptive attack on both sides of the Somme, and on 2 June reduced it to an attack on Ovillers and Saint-Pierre-Divion. The Supreme Army Command allowed him to prepare but sent only one artillery regiment, so nothing came of the plan. On 6 June his staff correctly predicted that the British would strike above all at the salients at Fricourt and Gommecourt, and warned that the corps south of the river was too weak even for a feint attack.

On 1 July north of the river the Germans repulsed most of the British attack, but on the southern sector they lost the first position. The real surprise was the attack of the French, who had been thought exhausted at Verdun. On the first day the 2nd Army lost more than a hundred guns north of the Somme and the entire artillery of one division south of it. Below demanded reinforcements, especially artillery. When the commander of XVII Corps, with the army staff’s consent, fell back on the south bank on 2 July, Falkenhayn came to Saint-Quentin. He declared that the first principle of positional warfare was not to give up a foot of ground, and to retake any that was lost by immediate counter-attack, “even to the last man”. On 3 July Below repeated this principle in an order to the army. His chief of staff, General Paul Grünert, was blamed for the withdrawal and replaced by Colonel Fritz von Loßberg, a defence specialist who in the autumn of 1915 had halted the retreat of the 3rd Army in Champagne.

For the next two weeks Below patched the front with one division after another brought in from other sectors, often committed to the fighting battalion by battalion. When on 14 July the British took Bazentin Ridge in a surprise night attack, he handed all available reserves, four divisions, to General Friedrich Sixt von Armin during the night with orders to stop the breach.

The 1st Army

On 19 July the Supreme Army Command divided the Somme front. The troops north of the river formed a new 1st Army under Below’s command, while the 2nd Army in the south was taken over by General Max von Gallwitz, who, although junior in seniority, was at the same time given command of the whole grouping. Loßberg went with Below to the 1st Army. From then on it was his army that bore the main weight of the British attacks: at Pozières, Guillemont, Ginchy and in Delville Wood. On 11 August Below received the oak leaves to the Pour le Mérite. At the end of August both armies were placed under Rupprecht’s army group, and Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff took over the Supreme Army Command. On 8 September, at a conference in Cambrai, Ludendorff recommended a more “elastic” defence with a thinly held front line, which Loßberg opposed.

The hardest day came on 15 September, when the British used tanks for the first time at Flers and Courcelette and their aircraft bombed, among other targets, Below’s headquarters at Bourlon. The 1st Army’s front bent but did not break. In his autumn reports Below stressed that the Allies outmatched him above all in heavy artillery and ammunition, which destroyed fortifications and gave the soldiers no rest. In October he opposed Rupprecht’s proposal to abandon the salient on the Ancre, since it would have meant giving up heights with a valuable view over the British rear, and the Ancre Heights continued to be defended. In November, however, he himself began to consider a withdrawal. On 13 November the British attacked on the Ancre and took Beaumont-Hamel, but with the first snows the battle died away.

Lessons of the Somme

On 30 January 1917 the 1st Army staff issued a study, “Experience of the 1st Army in the Battle of the Somme”. In it Below and Loßberg recommended a thinly held front line, with supports kept close behind in depth, and immediate counter-attacks by the reserves. According to the British official history, a new German manual grew out of their conclusions, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie credits Below with a part in the creation of a new infantry training manual that was still used by the post-war Reichswehr. In the winter the exhausted 1st Army sat in flooded shell holes, and in February and March 1917 it withdrew from the Ancre and, as part of Operation Alberich, fell back to the Hindenburg Line.

Champagne and illness

At the beginning of April 1917 Below’s staff was moved to Rethel in Champagne, where a French offensive was expected. The 1st Army was inserted between the 7th and 3rd Armies, on the sector from the Aisne at Berry-au-Bac to the Suippe. Below took it over on 16 April, the day the offensive of General Robert Nivelle began. His troops repulsed attacks on the Aisne in the Second Battle of the Aisne, and from 17 April defended the heights at Moronvilliers in the Third Battle of Champagne, where the French took several summits but did not break through the front.

The 1st Army held this sector around Reims for the next year, as part of the army group of Crown Prince Wilhelm. On 27 May 1918 its right wing attacked together with the 7th Army in the Third Battle of the Aisne, but failed to encircle Reims. On 9 June Below was appointed commander of the 9th Army, but he was already seriously ill. The army therefore continued to be commanded in his place by its previous commander, General Johannes von Eben, including in the Second Battle of the Marne. On 7 August Below was placed at the disposal of the army, and after the armistice he left the service.

Death

He died of pneumonia in Weimar on 23 November 1918, less than two weeks after the Armistice of Compiègne. He was buried in the Invalids’ Cemetery in Berlin. He did not have time to write memoirs, and his papers went to the German Federal Archives. In 1938 his name was given to new Wehrmacht barracks in Saarbrücken, which after 1945 were taken over by the French army and later by Saarland University.

Assessment

The Neue Deutsche Biographie calls the defence of the Somme his “impressive success”. Below did indeed hold the front in conditions the German army had not known before: under artillery fire many times stronger than its own and with the enemy dominant in the air. He also recognised early and correctly where the blow would fall, although the Supreme Army Command did not give him the means to forestall it. The British official history rated his staff highly, and the 1st Army’s lessons helped the Germans to defend themselves more effectively at Arras and in Flanders in 1917.

This defence, however, came at an enormous price. The principle of not giving up a foot of ground and retaking every lost position at once, which Below took over from Falkenhayn and faithfully enforced, cost the Germans hundreds of thousands of men on the Somme, many of them in counter-attacks for scraps of ruined ground. Modern estimates of German losses in the whole battle most often fall between about 430,000 and 600,000 killed, wounded and taken prisoner. Some historians also point out that the brain of the defence was Loßberg rather than Below himself, and that as late as September 1916 Loßberg opposed the more elastic methods that Ludendorff demanded. As a commander Below was conscientious and solid, but cautious. His name has survived in historiography mainly thanks to the Somme and to his being constantly confused with his cousin Otto.