The First World War was bedevilled by weather. Monstrous rainfalls turned the battlefields of France and Flanders into quagmires. Less well known, though, were the horrors of the “white death” from cold and huge snowfalls on the Alpine front, and the violent swings in climate from Gallipoli to Mesopotamia. There could hardly be a conflict in world history that suffered such an extraordinary run of horrendous weather, as hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives to the elements.
And yet when Britain entered the war in August 1914 the conditions seemed so promising. The troops of the British Expeditionary Force marched off to war under blue skies.
Ominous dark clouds began to gather just as the war ground to a halt and both sides dug in along trenches that stretched the length of the Western Front. The first warnings came in September 1914 at the First Battle of the Aisne when the Allies tried to push back the German lines. “The rain has caused a great drop in the temperature, and there is more than a distinct feeling of autumn in the air,” wrote Colonel Ernest Swinton, a British war correspondent. “The state of the roads, after the heavy rains, made movements slow . . . besides adding to the discomfort of the soldiers holding the line.”
Conditions deteriorated further in mid-October as British troops entered Ypres in an effort to head off a German advance towards the Channel. The low-lying region around Ypres, with its heavy clay soil, was notorious for flooding. Rains lashed down for weeks. Based on regimental diaries and private reports, Rudyard Kipling wrote: “No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water. In order to keep the men at all dry, they have to stand on planks rested on logs in the trenches, and in the less wet places bundles of straw and short fascines are put down. Pumping has been tried, but not with much success.”
The First Battle of Ypres lasted until November 22, when hostilities ground to a halt. Conditions deteriorated further as December 1914 was one of the wettest on record, while violent storms lashed the coasts and delayed reinforcements from Britain. .
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The worst weather of the war probably coincided with the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, in 1917. The British attacked in the summer to take advantage of dry ground, but heavy rain fell just before the campaign began. Despite forecasts of continuing rain, General Haig pressed on with the attack as the battlefield turned into a sea of mud. The British suffered 300,000 casualties and the German lines remained intact. In fact, the rains were so extraordinary that a popular belief grew that the great guns on the Western Front had triggered the downpours by upsetting the atmosphere.
The British military paid surprisingly little attention to weather forecasting until the first poison gas attacks in 1915, when the direction of the wind became a matter of life and death. Afterwards great advances were made in meteorology. When thunderstorms led to large losses of aircraft, the British developed a new way of forecasting using radio interference to locate lightning. The research by Robert Watson Watt led him after the war to use radio waves to detect aircraft — and invent radar.