1918 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Contributors

  Foreword

  General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen

  Chapter 1Introduction

  1918: the final year of World War I and its long shadow in history

  Dr Matthias Strohn

  Chapter 2The German Army in 1918

  Major General (Ret'd) Dr David T. Zabecki

  Chapter 3The French Army in 1918

  Dr David Murphy

  Chapter 4The British Army in 1918

  Dr Jonathan Boff

  Chapter 5The US Army in 1918

  Professor Mitch Yockelson

  Chapter 6The Forgotten Fronts in Europe

  Russia, Italy, and the Balkans in 1918

  Professor Lothar Höbelt

  Chapter 7The War Outside of Europe

  Dr Rob Johnson

  Chapter 8The Great War at Sea in 1918

  The role of sea power in achieving victory

  Professor Dr Michael Epkenhans

  Chapter 9The Air Campaign of 1918

  Dr James S. Corum

  Chapter 10Learning from 1918 on the Western Front

  Major General (Ret’d) Mungo Melvin CB OBE

  Endnotes

  Select Bibliography

  Glossary and Abbreviations

  CONTRIBUTORS

  General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen commissioned into The Royal Green Jackets in 1978. At Regimental Duty he has served in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Germany, Bosnia, and Kosovo and commanded 2nd Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets, from 1998 to 2000. He attended Army Staff College, the Higher Command and Staff Course and the Royal College of Defence Studies. He was Military Assistant to the Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Colonel Army Personnel Strategy, spent a year at HQ Land Command writing the Collective Training Study, and was Director of Army Resources and Plans. He also served as Director of Plans within the US-led Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan and spent three months in the Cross Government Iraq Planning Unit prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. General Carter commanded 20th Armoured Brigade in Iraq in 2004 and 6th Division in Afghanistan in 2009/10. He was then the Director General Land Warfare before becoming the Army 2020 Team Leader. He served as DCOM ISAF from October 2012 to August 2013, became Commander Land Forces in November 2013, and was appointed Chief of the General Staff in September 2014.

  Dr Matthias Strohn FRHistS was educated at the universities of Münster (Germany) and Oxford. He has lectured at Oxford University and the German Staff College (Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr). From 2006 until 2016 he worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is currently on secondment to the British Army’s think tank, the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research in Camberley. In addition, he is a Reader at the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Buckingham where he works in the areas of Military History and War Studies. He holds a commission in the German Army and is a member of the military attaché reserve, having served on the defence attaché staffs in London, Paris, and Madrid. He has published widely on 20th-century German and European military history and is an expert on the German Army in World War I and the inter-war period. He has advised British and German government bodies on the World War I centenary commemorations.

  Major General (Ret'd) Dr David T. Zabecki retired from the US Army in 2007. He started his military career as an infantry rifleman in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. In 2003, he was attached to the US State Department as the Senior Security Advisor on the US Coordinating and Monitoring Mission (Roadmap to Peace in the Middle East), where he negotiated between the Israeli Defense Force and the multiple Palestinian security organizations. In 2004, he was the commander of US forces supporting the 60th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day Landings, Operation Market-Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge. In 2005–06 he was the senior US Army commander in Europe south of the Alps, based in Vicenza, Italy. He holds a PhD in Military History from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University, where his supervisor was the late Professor Richard Holmes. In 2012 he served as the Dr Leo A. Shifirn Distinguished Professor of Military History at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the War Studies Programme at the University of Birmingham (UK). He is the author or editor of numerous military history books. In 2016 his encyclopaedia, Germany at War: 400 Years of Military History, won a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award.

  Dr David Murphy is a lecturer at the Department of History, Maynooth University, Ireland. Since 2006 he has taught defence studies programmes at the Irish Military College and he has also given guest lectures at various international military colleges, including the Royal Netherlands Military Academy in Breda and the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. He is a member of the Royal United Services Institute and is an external examiner for the Department of Defence Studies, King’s College, London. His research currently focuses on WW1 and his publications include Breaking Point of the French Army: the Nivelle Offensive of 1917 (Pen & Sword, 2015), Lawrence of Arabia (Osprey, 2011) and The Arab Revolt, 1916–18 (Osprey, 2008), among others.

  Dr Jonathan Boff FRHistS is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham, where he teaches courses relating to war from Homer to Helmand. He specializes in particular in World War I. His publications include Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford University Press, 2018). He has undertaken consultancy projects for the British Army and the BBC and serves on the Councils of the National Army Museum and the Army Records Society.

  Professor Mitch Yockelson is a Professor of military history at Norwich University and the author of four books: Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I; Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918, named one of the best military history books by The Independent (UK); MacArthur: America’s General; and Grant: Savior of the Union. He directs the National Archives and Records Administration-Archival Recovery Program where he leads investigations of thefts of historical documents and museum artefacts. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on 60 Minutes, Fox News, PBS, and the History Channel. The chief historical adviser to the US World War One Centennial Commission, Mitch regularly leads tours of World War I battlefields for the New York Times Journeys and frequently lectures on military history. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

  Professor Lothar Höbelt was born in Vienna 1956 and graduated with honours from the University of Vienna in 1982. He was Assistant Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in 1992, and has been Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Vienna since 1997, and Lecturer at the Military Academy Wiener Neustadt since 2001. The main focus of his research is the history of Austria(-Hungary) in the 19th and 20th centuries. His publications include Franz Joseph I: Der Kaiser und sein Reich: Eine politische Geschichte (2009), and Die Habsburger: Aufstieg und Glanz einer europäischen Dynastie (2009). His latest work is ‘Stehen oder Fallen?’ Österreichische Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (2015).

  Dr Rob Johnson is the Director of the Changing Character of War (CCW) Research Centre at Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow of Pembroke College. His primary research interests are in the history of strategy and war, and their contemporary applications. A former British army officer, he is the author of The Great War and the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as several other works on conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. He is also the author of True to Their Salt (2
017), a history of partnering local forces, and its part in indirect strategies used by Western powers.

  Professor Dr Michael Epkenhans is the Director of Historical Research at the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the German Armed Forces (ZMSBw) at Potsdam. He is an expert in German and European History of the 19th and 20th centuries with a special emphasis on military history. His main field of research is German military history before, during and after the First World War. In addition to his role at the ZMSBw he is Professor at Potsdam University and editor of Germany’s leading journal on military history, the Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift. Professor Epkenhans holds a commission in the German Navy with the rank of Commander (Naval Reserve).

  Dr James Corum teaches military history at Salford University UK, having been Dean of the Baltic Defence College 2009–2014. From 1991 to 2004 he was a professor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In 2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he held a Leverhulme Fellowship, and then an Associate Professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr Corum is the author of several books on military history, including The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (1992); The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940 (1997); The Luftwaffe’s Way of War: German Air Doctrine, 1911–1945, with Richard Muller (1998); Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists, with Wray Johnson (2003); and Fighting the War on Terror: A Counterinsurgency Strategy (2007). His eighth book on Cold War history is Rearming Germany (2011). He is the editor-in-chief of the translation (from German) of the Encyclopedia of the First World War (two volumes) (2012). He has also authored more than 60 major book chapters and journal articles on a variety of subjects related to air power and military history. Dr Corum served in Iraq in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve. He holds a master’s degree from Brown University, a Master of Letters from Oxford University, and a PhD from Queen’s University, Canada.

  Major General (Ret’d) Mungo Melvin CB OBE is the author of Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General, first published to critical acclaim in 2010. In 2011 it was runner-up in the prestigious Westminster Prize; in 2012, it won a distinguished book award as best biography of the year from the US Society for Military History. Now retired from the British Army, General Melvin was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1975, and saw operational service in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the Balkans. During the latter part of his 37-year career as a member of the General Staff he specialized in strategic analysis, professional military education, and doctrine. A former President of the British Commission for Military History, he is currently advising the British Army on the World War I centenary commemorations, and has edited the Army’s battlefield guide to the Western Front (2014). He is author of Sevastopol’s Wars: Crimea from Potemkin to Putin (2017), also published by Osprey. He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow of the Department of War Studies of King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Royal Engineers, Chairman of the Royal Engineers Historical Society, and Vice President of the Western Front Association. He lectures widely on strategy and military history in both the public and commercial sectors.

  FOREWORD

  General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen Chief of the General Staff

  Even after a century, World War I still exerts a strong hold on the consciousness of many nations. For all engaged, it was a transformational experience and its legacy on states, institutions, communities, and individuals was profound. While it was predominantly destructive, it was also constructive, forging new national identities and the establishment of a global ‘league of nations’ intended to prevent future conflict. This legacy and the scale of human loss help to explain the war’s enduring place in popular sentiment and why, in the UK, the centenaries of Jutland, the Somme, and Third Ypres have provoked renewed public interest. Understandably, this has focused largely on human experiences; but for politicians, academics and the military there is much to be gained by understanding how wars start, are fought, and, looking to 1918 as this volume does, how they are brought to an end. For, as each chapter reveals, World War I did not peter out through mutual exhaustion, but continued to the Armistice with growing intensity and extended range: across the Western Front, Russia, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, and Africa; as well as on land, at sea, and in the air.

  In recognition of the war’s importance across so many fields of human endeavour, since 2014 the British Army has run an extended programme of reflective study, as part of a national commitment to mark its centenary. Appropriately, our work has been known as ‘Operation Reflect’, with two of its aims being to honour all those who served and to remember all those who suffered and died. However, this reflection has also had a strong instructive element, with its other two aims being to educate modern soldiers about the actions and achievements of their forebears and, perhaps most importantly, to learn lessons that may help to guide our development for an uncertain future.

  The importance that I attach to learning from the past is worth expanding upon. It is not in many fields that actions a century old can retain the ability to inform and instruct a modern professional cohort, but in the military sphere I am clear they do. For a start, mercifully, wars are not frequent events, so armies must prepare for them, in part, by studying how conflict is and has been conducted. Such study reveals, as Carl von Clausewitz observed, that war has a ‘nature’ (violent, contested, and determined by human will) that is constant, and a character (the ways and means of its conduct) that continuously changes. Therefore, in training for war, the military must understand, and be ready to deal with, both constant and changing elements. It is to help modern soldiers meet these intellectual challenges that I established the Army’s Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research (CHACR), under whose auspices this volume has been published. Its role is to conduct and sponsor research into the nature and character of conflict, and act as a hub for military scholarship, to sustain and develop the conceptual (i.e. the thinking) component of fighting power (the others being physical and moral). Hence, it has been instrumental in shaping and supporting Operation Reflect and in encouraging modern soldiers to study the history of the war and their profession in general. The CHACR is just part of a raft of initiatives that have been implemented to re-emphasize the conceptual component of fighting power within the British Army.

  I find World War I a particularly rich source of instruction as it came at a time when the British Army was neither designed for, nor recently experienced in, a major conflict against a peer competitor and when technology was driving a rapid evolution in the character of conflict. Thus it had to adapt rapidly to a war for which it was unprepared, most notably by creating a mass citizen army that endured a brutal induction to the character of modern warfare. While its failings and losses cannot be ignored, the British Army was by 1918 a victorious force that combined mass with professional sophistication. This argues that its ability to adapt and innovate, while fighting every step for over four years, was genuine and greater than has sometimes been acknowledged.

  I think this resonates with today’s challenges. As in 1914, the British Army exists within an uncertain strategic environment in which the threat of miscalculation could lead to direct conflict – a conflict we would not choose, but in which we might be compelled to fight. And this could well be further afield than Europe. This conundrum of coordinating coherent strategy and precious military resources across multiple theatres echoes that faced by Britain’s government throughout the war. Another parallel is the rapid evolution of the means of warfare and the ways in which they are employed. World War I saw industrial capacity and technical innovation transform warfare, a highly interactive and gradual process that all armies struggled to master. In our own time it is pervasive information that is driving a rapid ev
olution in the character of conflict; a challenge that demands a similar commitment to innovation and adaptation. Hence, understanding how a small army can adjust its structure rapidly, expand, exploit emergent technology, adapt its doctrine and innovate tactically is close to the heart of our modern conceptual challenge. Studying past conflicts will not offer us a ready template for how to fight the ‘war we might have to fight’, but it will reveal many enduring truths about how armies prevail amidst the violent, contested, and frictional nature of war.

  In pursuit of such insights, Operation Reflect has addressed its core themes through a series of major ‘staff rides’1 to the battlefields of the Western Front. These have been significant endeavours, each engaging over 100 participants, including representatives from many of the combatant nations: Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and, in 2018, the United States. The first of these, in 2014, took an overview of the war on the Western Front, while the second, in 2016, focused on the battle of the Somme in 1916 that so marked the British Empire’s experience of the war. The third and final Army Staff Ride in 2018 will focus on the decisive events on the Western Front in 1918, which brought the war against Germany to an end.

  In preparation for the 2016 staff ride, Dr Matthias Strohn assembled a selection of thematic essays by leading historians, providing a companion volume for those participating, which set the strategic and military contexts for the Somme in 1916. This new volume has been born of similar intent to provide a strategic context for those participating in the Army Staff Ride in 2018. This staff ride is the most ambitious yet, reflecting the full span, scale, and significance of the ultimately decisive events on the Western Front in 1918. Most importantly, it is being conducted in partnership with our French, German, and American allies, whose chiefs share my emphasis on learning from our shared past. Accordingly, the staff ride programme has been constructed around the central theme of ‘four armies in four days’: focusing by turn on the German spring offensives; the French counter-attack in the Second Battle of the Marne; the British Expeditionary Force’s counter-offensives from Amiens to the breaking of the Hindenburg Line; and the American Expeditionary Force’s offensive through the Meuse–Argonne region to the Meuse River.