A Railway War Begins Railways of the Great War with Michael Portillo

World War I was a railway war.

I'm going to find out how the railways

helped to precipitate a mechanised war...

..defined how it was fought...

..conveyed millions to the trenches...

..and bore witness to it's end.

I've taken to historic tracks to rediscover the locomotives

and wagons of the war that was supposed to end all war.

And to hear the stories of the gallant men and women who used them

in life and in death.

By 1914, almost a century had passed

since the world's first locomotives ran in Britain.

Railways had unfurled across Europe

and the continent had enjoyed four decades of peace and prosperity.

But the industrial and technological advances that marked

the railway age had also brought deadly new weapons.

In August 1914 a mechanised war was unleashed.

I'm going to be travelling through Britain and Northern Europe,

uncovering railway stories from the Great War.

In wartime, British railways carried munitions,

supplies and millions of men.

Goodbye.

Evacuated the wounded.

I'm quite impressed by this.

And kept the home front moving.

Whilst on the Western Front, rail technology shaped the war's

weapons, railway spies informed its strategy,

and British railwaymen gave their all to the war effort.

Today I'll see how Britain's railways coped with

the challenge of sending thousands of men into the unknown.

It is said that in that first 24 hours, only one train was late

and only by 15 minutes.

Visit a small station that played a big role in world history.

This is the place where the German Army came

and started World War I on the wrong day.

And discover how desperate times

called for desperate measures in Belgium.

-You have the sabotage of the viaduct in Namur.

-Colossal damage.

I'm starting my quest on European tracks, built with battle in mind,

to chart the birth of the railway war,

before tracing the route of the first British troops to join

the conflict.

Finally, I'll return to France to learn how the early war of movement

gave way to the stalemate of the trenches.

In the early 1900s, Europe's balance of power was looking fragile.

From London,

Britain's leaders were nervously watching a recently unified Germany,

which had become a military power of formidable strength.

This is the War Office.

Here at the heart of the British Empire,

at the start of the 20th century, ministers, admirals and generals

were obliged to plan, to anticipate that, in a mechanised age,

war would bring slaughter on an unprecedented scale.

One indicator that they foresaw its nature

is this handbook issued in 1911, the Railway Manual (War).

Written for the military,

this volume sets out how railways should be used in wartime.

"The efficient operation of a railway system can be ensured only

"when the cordial cooperation of the railwaymen is combined with

"the strictest obedience of regulations by the troops."

In war, the trains were to be run on lines of iron discipline.

Across the Channel,

two rival power blocs were making their own railway plans.

The German Empire had teamed up with its neighbour,

Austria-Hungary,

whilst the giant Russia had allied itself with France.

Faced with potential enemies to the east and west,

Germany feared a war on two fronts.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

Germany asked itself how can it

possibly win a war with hostile Russia to the east

and its old enemy France to the west?

In 1905, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff,

Alfred von Schlieffen,

comes up with his plan, to use the railways

in neutral Luxembourg and Belgium

to sweep into France, surrounding Paris

and outflanking the French Army, which is behind its fortifications

on the German border, knocking France out within a few weeks so

that Germany can turn all its attention to Russia.

Even before Schlieffen, his predecessor, Von Moltke, said,

"To win a war, don't build fortifications, build railways."

In preparation for the Schlieffen Plan, new lines were constructed

and elaborate mobilisation timetables were written.

And here in Metz, on the Franco-German border, a new station

was built, capable of accommodating thousands of troops on the move.

The station is half church, half palace.

The clock tower was designed by the Kaiser himself,

Wilhelm II, and he had within the station an apartment

but the fortified city of Metz was not a place for sleeping easily.

It stands on the fault line of the bitter enmity of Germany and France.

Metz is now in France but in 1914 it was part of Germany, annexed after

the German state of Prussia won a war against France in 1871.

This grand station, opened in 1908,

was a monumental reminder of German strength.

But it was also a design of deadly practicality.

On avait le possibilite de faire entre 60 et 90 trains de

militaire par jour.

And with 11 platforms, you were therefore able to

handle between 60 and 80 military trains a day.

Et une particuliarite de la Gare de Messe

qui est la seule en

France a avoir ce dispositif, cest que la pour chaque voie, deux quais.

And a very unusual feature of the station is that every single

track has two platforms.

Une plateforme haute pour decharger les voyageurs et

une plateforme basse pour decharger le materiel.

One is a high platform, that's to get the passengers off

and the other is a lower platform, very suitable for military trains.

It meant you could unload the soldiers

and the material at the same time.

Et donc c'etait cette guerre qui a imaginer l'empereur dans un

premier temps.

C'etait surtout dans un but strategique et militaire.

And so, from the very outset, the emperor, the Kaiser,

foresaw that this station had a strategic and military function.

One of the key lines serving Metz runs north towards Luxembourg.

And it was in this tiny, neutral state that the Germans

launched their railway attack plan.

On the 28th of June 1914,

in faraway Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the

Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb.

The diplomatic fallout brought Europe to the brink.

I'm in Troisvierges, where the talk finally tipped into action

in August 1914, to meet amateur historian and guide David Heal.

So, it's a broadish station here at Troisvierges and then

into a single track, through the tunnel.

What was the strategic significance of this to the Germans?

Well, the Germans were totally dependent on the railway

and they were aiming to bring an entire army corps through Luxembourg

and this was one of the main rails that they were going to use.

The plans foresaw that there would be a troop train every ten

minutes coming down this line.

Luxembourg was a railway hub, connected to Germany, Belgium

and France.

The first objective of the Schlieffen Plan was to seize

these vital lines.

But, according to David,

a small detachment of German soldiers invaded Troisvierges

a day before their comrades took the rest of the country.

The German Army came and started World War I on the wrong day.

They arrived on the evening of the 1st of August,

when they should've come on the morning of the 2nd of August.

David's pieced together this extraordinary story using

contemporary accounts.

The first the locals knew of the invasion was

when around 16 soldiers

turned up at the station.

They demanded that the station master hand over the telegraph,

which of course is essential for running the railway.

He refused.

The officer in charge said, "If you don't give it to me you'll be shot."

So he took it out of the drawer that it was kept in,

dropped it over and it smashed on the floor, breaking it.

David has uncovered more details in a report filed by the local

police sergeant, who sent one of his gendarmes to the scene.

The gendarme got here, followed the officer commanding around saying,

"Why have you come here?

"We're a neutral country", with Germany one of the guarantors,

to which the officer replied,

"If you don't go away we'll have you shot",

which is the first example I think of what the Germans call

"Schrecklichkeit" or "frightfulness",

the war of terror, to just totally cow the civilian population.

The gendarme then went back to the station

and the sergeant then says that he formed the opinion that he

ought to make a telephone report to the head of the gendarmerie

which I think is wonderful.

The country is being invaded,

he forms the opinion he ought to tell someone.

But then the people of Troisvierges were perplexed to see

the invasion end - almost as rapidly as it had begun.

Then about an hour later,

a German officer turned up from the same detachment bearing a telegram.

He showed this to the officer in charge here and then they went away.

What an extraordinary incident.

The explanation for the apparent bungle lies in the fast-moving

and delicate diplomacy of the summer of 1914.

Thanks to a complex web of alliances, the assassination

of Franz Ferdinand had set off a diplomatic chain reaction.

And by the 1st of August, Germany had declared war on Russia.

Following the logic of their war plans,

German troops began gearing up to invade Luxembourg and Belgium.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, bound by loose ties of friendship

to France and Russia, the authorities were trying to

decide whether British troops should enter the fray.

During the day on the 1st August the German Ambassador in London

spoke to some Foreign Office official who gave

the impression that Britain might well stand aside in the war.

This was reported to the Kaiser who of course was interested

and gave orders that everything was to be put back 12 hours

while they explored what this might mean.

But this poor little detachment that arrived here,

they were so isolated that they didn't get the telegram

saying delay for 12 hours until they'd been here for an hour.

The Kaiser soon learned that Britain had no intention of staying

aloof, and pressed on with his plan.

The next day, the Germans returned to take Troisvierges

and to seize the rest of Luxembourg's railway network.

And meanwhile,

German troop trains were beginning to roll towards Belgium.

In 1914 Belgium was an uncomfortable wedge of neutral territory

between France and Germany, two countries mobilising for war.

Exploiting Belgian railways was fundamental to the German war plan.

Belgium is a nation, not a road, its King told the invaders.

Perhaps, at least, little Belgium could offer a road block.

In fact, to derail the Schlieffen Plan,

the Belgians were ready to go to extreme lengths.

To sabotage their own railways.

I've come to the city of Liege, an important railway

junction near the German border, and vital to the German war plan.

According to Historian Christophe Bechet, by 1914 the Belgians had

prepared a scheme to put the brakes on a potential railway invasion.

-The plan is to slow down the first aggressor.

-Yes.

How do you slow down the aggressor?

Two possibilities.

First possibility, with army operations.

And a second one, because the railways were very important

in the strategy at that time, to

destroy some railways to slow down the supplies of the aggressor.

The Belgians to destroy their own railways?

Yes, own railways.

All along the Belgian border,

military engineers built special cavities into tunnels,

ready to be loaded with explosives and detonated at short notice.

Then, on the 2nd of August 1914,

Germany demanded free passage along Belgian roads and railways.

King Albert refused, and gave the saboteurs the green light.

First of all, the crucial sabotage of tunnels.

Yeah.

Here is the reparation of the tunnel.

-Here you have the sabotage of the viaduct in Namur.

-Yes.

A very huge sabotage.

Yes. Colossal damage.

Dozens of smaller acts of defiance further disrupted the invasion.

Railway workers and troops derailed trains, hid equipment,

and emptied locomotive water tanks.

Here, it's a typical derailment made by Belgian troops.

This devastation held up the Germans for weeks on some

parts of the border, such as in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.

But here in Liege, with its vitally important strategic railways,

it was a different story.

Of the four tunnels in the province of Liege, only one sabotage

completely worked.

It was in Trois-Ponts.

Of the eight explosive charges, seven blew up,

and it takes four months to repair the tunnel.

But, catastrophically, most charges laid in the provinces

key tunnels failed to detonate.

For the other tunnels, the German special troops devoted to the

reparation of the railways repaired the tunnels in a couple of days.

This fiasco was blamed on explosives stored in damp conditions,

and on troops unused to laying them.

So, it's a very mixed picture,

some of the Belgian sabotage works well, some of it doesn't work well,

but the German war plan depended on knocking out France very quickly.

Was the Belgian roadblock effective in delaying the Germans at all?

Yes, I think that they succeeded in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.

But if the sabotage in the Liege province would have been as

effective as in the province of Luxembourg,

I think the Belgian Army would have stopped the Schifflien Plan

in its own territory.

It's interesting to speculate how different the course of the war

might have been had the Belgian railway saboteurs succeeded.

As it was, the Belgian people could only hope that their allies

would come to their aid.

And soon, help was on its way from across the Channel.

On the fourth of August 1914,

the British Government declared war on Germany.

At the start of 1914, few in Britain expected a war

but the Army had a plan for mobilisation, defined here

in its Field Service Regulations of 1909 as being the process by which

an armed force passes from a peace to a war footing, that is to say

its completion to war establishment in personnel, transport and animals.

The British Army was small but professional.

If it could be moved quickly enough across Britain

and across the Channel it could make a difference.

But first,

the British railways would need to deliver some 80,000 men

to the designated embarkation port, here in Southampton.

Historian Ian Beckett has researched how the port was

prepared for that daunting task.

So give me the lie of the land here in Southampton.

Well, over there, that's the old terminus building of the

London South Western Railway Company.

The lines came in from there to what was the old ocean quay.

They had got double railway track

that ran into the port entrance and they had laid that before the war.

And then in four days, in August of 1914, they decided they needed

a third railway line running from the terminus into the port,

and so that's an extraordinary engineering effort

to get that done so quickly.

Prior to the conflict, the War Office had consulted with

Britain's powerful railway companies to draw up secret timetables

in order to move the vast quantities of men and material

required for a 20th century war.

On the 18th of August we know that something over 20,000 men went out,

just over 1,200 horses, I think there were 210 bicycles,

20 motor cars and about 600 other vehicles, and that's just one day.

Amazingly, despite the scale of the challenge,

mobilisation exceeded all expectations.

They had originally planned to have 70 trains a day coming in,

they were actually getting 90 trains running in. It's said that in that

first 24 hours only one train was late and only by 15 minutes.

-We'd settle for that now, wouldn't we?

-Certainly would. Absolutely.

By the 26th of August 1914, just three weeks after

the outbreak of war,

the railways had helped to send nearly 66,000 men to France.

Kitchener, who became Secretary of State for War in August 1914,

immediately praised the railways

and, in effect, the British Expeditionary Force gets to France

just in time to play a major role in the first battles of the war.

Had it not got there in time,

the course of that first campaign may well have been very different.

From Southampton, the British Expeditionary Force crossed

to Le Havre, before boarding French trains bound for Belgium.

During August 1914 the German advance was slower

than envisaged in the Schlieffen Plan.

Meanwhile, trains had swept up the British Expeditionary Force

from the corners of the United Kingdom

and taken it to Channel ports and then across to the Continent.

The Germans were astonished, within a few days of the outbreak of the war,

to encounter Tommies ready to fight them on Belgian soil.

This confrontation took place on August the 23rd at Mons,

where an outnumbered British force bravely held off the German

advance before being forced to withdraw.

Meanwhile, further south,

French troops had suffered a series of punishing defeats.

Overwhelmed, the Allies commenced a long and exhausting retreat,

relentlessly pursued by the Germans.

By the end of the month both sides were approaching Paris,

the nerve centre of the French railway network.

Like the Germans,

the French had made extensive preparations for a railway war.

This is Paris's Gare de l'Est,

for France the traditional enemy lay to the east.

This painting exudes the sorrow of partings, perhaps for ever,

as the troops board trains for the battle.

But these soldiers, dressed in the colours of their national flag,

would have felt patriotic determination to defend their

motherland from another German invasion.

France's answer to the Schlieffen Plan was known as Plan 17.

It was a flexible scheme to deploy troops rapidly to meet

the German threat, and it made full use of the adaptable French

railway system, centred on Paris.

Lines radiating out from the capital were linked within

the city by a kind of railway ring road.

Between 1870 and the eve of World War I,

the French quadrupled the number of lines leading to the German border.

Two beltways of tracks encircling Paris provided

a network of rims and spokes, like a bicycle wheel

with two circumferences.

Here was the means of concentrating troops rapidly.

The British Railway Gazette commented that Paris was the best

example in the world of a big city properly organised for harmonious

cooperation in war time.

At the end of August 1914, this web of tracks was poised to play

a game-changing role in the conflict.

I've come to the banks of the River Marne,

which gave its name to a pivotal battle.

According to Ian Senior, who has been researching the first

phase of the war, it came at a moment

when the Germans were fast becoming victims of their own success.

The Germans by now advancing through Belgium and into France

are a long way from home, are they suffering logistical difficulties?

Yes, the railheads, by the time of the Battle of the Marne,

were about 60 miles back from the front line.

Which is just at the crucial sort of limit for effective supply.

So you're unloading your trains and then how are you getting your

supplies and your men to the front line.

They had a sort of shuttle service.

They had lorries.

The problem was that by now

the lorries were breaking down in large numbers.

I mean, one German Army at this period needed something

like 1,500 tonnes of supplies each day, that's five train loads a day.

They just about managed it, but only just.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Germans, the Allies were rallying.

The French Commander in Chief, Joseph Joffre, had come up

with a bold plan to regroup, creating a new army near Paris.

How did Marshal Joffre assemble that army?

It couldn't have been done without using railways.

We're talking about 120,000 men in all, and most of them

came from Alsace and Lorraine where they weren't needed any more.

And then two other divisions were from north Africa,

there was a Moroccan division, there was an Algerian division,

and so they're also brought up by

the railways all the way from Bordeaux.

Amazingly, this new force was gathered within a matter of days.

And, meanwhile, the leader of the German First Army,

General von Kluck, was making a fateful decision.

His troops had been on course to pass to the west of Paris,

but he sent them to the east of the city instead.

It was the chance Joffre had been waiting for.

His newly-formed 6th Army was nearby and ready to pounce

I think they would all have gone from Gare de l'Est,

and they got to a place called Noisy-le-Sec, and Guyenne

and then had to march

the rest of the way which took them the best part of a day, really.

The 6th Army caught the Germans by surprise.

Joined by the British, between the 5th and the 9th of September,

Joffre's troops fought a series of battles along the Marne valley.

And, for the first time, the Allies forced the Germans to retreat.

It marked the end of the German advance.

The Schlieffen Plan was dead.

Looking back on the Battle of the Marne, how important a role do

the railways play?

Absolutely crucial, Joffre could not have assembled that new 6th Army

without them, without that the French wouldn't have won the battle.

I mean, you must remember,

Joffre is credited with saying that, above all,

it was a war of railways

Their superior rail resources had helped the Allies

to triumph at the Marne, but the war was far from won.

The Germans retreated 30 miles,

as far as the Aisne river,

digging defensive trenches to hold off further Allied attacks.

Using the railways, the two sides then began what's

since become known as the Race to the Sea.

The German attempt to race men and munitions by train

towards the Channel coast, to sweep to the north of the allied forces,

was halted here at Nieuwpoort, in Belgium.

The railway battles of northern France had stalled.

Both sides now dug in from here to the Alps.

It was no longer a war of movement,

but its outcome could hinge on which side could better deploy

its railways to stock the Western Front with shells and soldiers.

Next time, I'll find out about the brave railwaymen who made

the ultimate sacrifice...

One of them in particular is a Private F Bays who had

joined the 17th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers,

and was killed in action on July 1st.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme.

..how railways helped turn a munitions crisis into victory...

In 1918, on the 29th of September,

we fire just shy of one million shells in 24 hours in the assault

on the Hindenburg line.

Terrifying.

..and discover the railway guns that helped to turn the tide of war.

My goodness, one shell, 400 casualties.