1918 Read online

  This volume does much more than reflect the primacy of these four armies and the Western Front as the decisive theatre of operations. It captures vividly the global span and the strategic complexity of nations that had committed the full capacity of their dispersed imperial possessions to winning a war that anticipated what the generation which followed called a ‘total war’. In so doing, its component chapters serve to illustrate the unifying themes that I have assigned to the Army Staff Ride in 2018.

  The first of these is the importance of ‘coalition warfare’, then and now. In 1918 both sides were extensive coalitions and a great virtue of this book is that it offers such a range of perspectives from many of these combatant nations.2 Each coalition experienced the many benefits of partnership, but also the inherent frictions of fighting without unified direction, and there is good reason to conclude that ultimate victory went to the coalition that best cohered its collective strength to strategic effect. As we have learned latterly in Iraq and Afghanistan, coalitions are no easier to manage today and there is much to learn from the way in which in 1918 France, Britain, and Italy managed the loss of one partner in Russia, absorbed the arrival of another in the United States and, belatedly, achieved a more unified military command structure. By contrast, it is arguable that the Germans failed to exploit the full potential of their own coalition with Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire to achieve strategic success.

  The second theme is the ‘restoration of manoeuvre’ to achieve operationally decisive effect. In 1918 this was about breaking the physical stasis imposed by the advantages technology had bestowed upon the defending side in trench warfare. Both sides sought to achieve this by combining material might, technological innovation, and tactical adaptation. The last of these was focused on achieving closer coordination between the expanding capabilities of land and air forces to deliver an integrated ‘all-Arms battle’. The Germans led the way with a series of great offensives in the spring of 1918, but for all their tactical gains, operational success and ultimately strategic victory eluded them. As these offensives culminated in early summer, the Allies wrested back the initiative, their newly unified command structure coordinating their attacks to roll the Germans back, first to their start lines of March, and ultimately further east, liberating much of occupied Belgium and northern France. Today we are embracing our own conceptual transformation as we appreciate that the ability to manoeuvre to gain advantage over an opponent lies not only in the physical, but also in the information domain. This has led the British Army to espouse a new unifying doctrine, that of Integrated Action. This places emphasis on analysing all audiences – friendly, enemy, and neutral – before applying actions across all domains to achieve the appropriate effects upon each audience.

  The third theme is ‘adaptation and innovation’, which focuses on the abilities of the respective armies to learn and implement change (whether their structure, equipment, tactics, training, or leadership) in order to achieve success. The German, French, and British armies of 1918 had transformed out of all recognition from those that had first engaged in 1914. This was a product of constant striving for competitive advantage, with innovation, adaptation, and experimentation (across the technical and tactical domains) central to what we might see now as an institutional learning culture. Peacetime armies have an often-deserved reputation for conservatism, which contrasts starkly with the imperative to be aggressively radical in war. In an era of constant competition we cannot wait to adapt or innovate until war is upon us; we must ensure that we are changing constantly so we can maintain a competitive edge that will deter adversaries from attacking our interests or allies. We can only do this by emulating the armies of 1918 in embracing a learning culture, with the instinct and energy to question orthodoxy, experiment relentlessly, and learn by the experience.

  The fourth theme combines the enduring military issues of ‘command, leadership, and morale’. On the one hand, this highlights the technical challenges of communicating command direction to thousands of men across a dispersed and devastated battlefield, which reflects the modern challenge of assuring our ability to exploit the medium of a contested electro-magnetic spectrum. On the other, it focuses on the human experience of war: the leaders and the led. To modern minds the ability of citizen soldiers to function amidst the horrors of industrial warfare seems almost super-human, but it is certain that the strains that contemporary war will impose upon the human mind and body will be no less than those of a century ago. Hence, we will remain dependent upon the courage and stoicism that has characterized the British soldier down the ages, while ensuring that he or she is consistently provided with exemplary, inspiring, and enlightened leadership.3

  The final unifying theme is ‘conflict resolution’, or, in simpler terms, how wars end. Today we see terms like ‘defeat’ and ‘victory’ as being harder to define given that success is often more about the triumph of a narrative as opposed to the facts on the ground. The experience of 1918 illustrates this conundrum neatly. While the Armistice of 11 November 1918 brought welcome relief to the exhausted armies, it was also met with dismay on both sides. For a German Army that considered itself to be unbeaten, it was not a defeat but a betrayal, a conviction that played its part in the rise of Nazism and the renewal of conflict in 1939. Meanwhile, some on the Allied side, noting that their opponents did not yet accept that they were beaten, felt that the war would not be won until the Germans had been driven back into their homeland and forced to accept defeat. While militarily this was both feasible and pragmatic, fighting on was a political impossibility for all nations.4 As Clausewitz reminds us, the origins of all wars lie in politics and it is to politics they must return at their end.

  Over the past four years, I have found it both intellectually and professionally rewarding to renew and revise my understanding of World War I. While it is ever-more remote in time and there has been a complete transformation in the political, social, technological, and military aspects of warfare, it remains highly instructive to study how our forebears addressed the many challenges with which the war confronted them. Thankfully, a generation of dedicated scholarship has freed us from a tendency to dismiss the war as pointless and wasteful, and therefore not deserving of study. This work has led us to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this war and how it was fought, without diminishing in any way the honour and respectful remembrance that we bear towards its combatants. I believe this volume adds further to that scholarly work, perhaps most significantly in assembling a comprehensive set of international perspectives. Too often we seek to understand wars from a single perspective, which fails to reflect the essentially contested nature of warfare.

  I commend this book to military and civilian audiences alike, as a penetrating and thought-provoking exploration of the final phase of, what was then dearly hoped to be, the ‘war to end all wars’. That this proved a vain hope, is, perhaps, the most salutary lesson of all.

  CHAPTER 1

  INTRODUCTION

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

  Dr Matthias Strohn

  On 28 June 1919, a German delegation signed the Treaty of Versailles with the Allies.1 The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace on the outskirts of Paris, the same place in which in 1871 the united German Reich had been founded. Hostilities had ceased on 11 November 1918, when Germany had surrendered to the Allies, the last state of the Central Powers to do so. And yet, only a few months earlier, it had seemed as if the Central Powers were winning the war; on 23 March 1918, two days after the beginning of Operation Michael in the West, the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, made the joyful statement that ‘The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated’.2 How did the pendulum of victory swing so quickly from one coalition to the other and leave the Central Powers, seemingly expecting to end the war victorious, with the bitter aftertaste of defeat?

  In order to understand the events of 1918, it is
necessary to begin the story in the previous year. Seemingly, 1917 had been a successful year for the Central Powers and a less successful one for the Entente and its associated powers. On the Western Front, the offensives conducted by the Allies did not break the German lines. The main British offensive in Flanders resulted in a bloody stalemate and so did the French offensives against the German positions, in particular at the Chemin des Dames. There was one exception to this general trend. In November 1917, the British had broken through the German lines at Cambrai, not least because of the use of tanks. As a result, church bells in Britain rang for the first time since the start of the war. However, the British did not exploit their success, and German reserves were moved quickly to the front, where they launched a counter-attack. In the end, this battle ended as yet another draw.

  In the Italian theatre of war, eleven battles had been fought on the Isonzo front between Austria-Hungary and Italy between 1915 and the summer of 1917. Although these battles had resulted in huge casualties on both sides, the front had hardly moved. This only changed with the twelfth battle, which lasted from 24 October to 7 November 1917. The Austro-Hungarians, reinforced and spearheaded by German troops, managed to break through the Italian front and routed the Italian forces in front of them. The front collapsed and the Italian Army withdrew to the Piave River, having lost over 3,000 artillery pieces and 334,000 men. Over 290,000 of these were soldiers captured by the Central Powers; a clear indication of the collapse of the moral component of the Italian Army’s fighting power.3

  In the Balkans, the front had also held. In June 1917, Greece entered the war on the side of the Entente, but the army’s poor training and lack of equipment meant that the declaration of war did not result in an immediate increase of fighting power on the Entente side. By the summer of 1917, the Allies had 24 divisions on the Macedonian front. The so-called Allied Army of the Orient contained French, Serbian, British, Italian, Greek and Russian troops in what the Central Powers called ‘Our biggest prisoner of war camp’; the French Premier Georges Clemenceau called them the ‘gardeners of Salonika’ due to their inactivity. 4

  In the greater scheme of these developments, certain set-backs for the Central Powers in the Near East did not seem overly worrying. The Ottomans (with their German advisers and small troop contingents) had been pushed back by the Allied forces, and on 11 December 1917 General Allenby entered Jerusalem, effectively ending Muslim control over the holy city for the first time since the end of the Crusades.5

  The developments described so far would have been enough to make 1917 a successful year for the Central Powers, but one front has not been mentioned yet. On the Eastern Front the Central Powers achieved their biggest victory of the year, indeed of the entire war. In March 1917 the so-called February Revolution (in accordance with the Julian calendar that was being used in Russia at the time) resulted in the Tsar’s abdication and it was clear that Russia would not be able to continue the war for a long period, even though the new Russian Provisional Government tried to do exactly that. At the very latest the failed Kerensky-offensive6 of July 1917 showed that Russia was no longer a reliable partner in the alliance against the Central Powers.

  When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution – supported by the German government which had it made possible for Lenin to return to Russia from his exile in Switzerland – the situation changed rapidly. One of the most popular slogans of the Bolsheviks had been ‘Peace, Land and Bread’, and the new government acted quickly. On 8 November 1917 the ‘Second Congress of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’ signed the Decree of Peace, which called upon all the belligerent nations and their governments to start immediate negotiations for peace and proposed the withdrawal of Russia from the war. On 15 December 1917, Soviet Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers, and on 22 December peace negotiations began in Brest-Litovsk. The Russian delegation, in particular Leon Trotsky, tried to prolong the negotiations and, as a consequence, the Central Powers resumed their offensives. This action had the desired effect and on 3 March 1918, the Bolshevik government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Central Powers had won the war in the East and were the masters of central and Eastern Europe. This eliminated one major theatre of war and opened new strategic and operational opportunities. Yet the political situation in the East still demanded a troop’s presence, in particular in the Ukraine, which was seen as the bread-basket of Europe and whose puppet-regime had agreed to send food and horses to the undernourished people of Germany and Austria-Hungary, who were suffering because of the British naval blockade.7

  With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to say that the impressive victory in the East was levelled by the United States’ entry into the war on 6 April 1917. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the chief of the Prussian and Great General Staff between 1857 and 1888, had allegedly described the US Civil War as ‘two armed-mobs running around the countryside and beating each other up, from which very little of military utility could be learned’. This view of an unprofessional, ill-equipped US Army might have persisted in 1917, but the entry of the US into the war arguably changed the outcome of World War I and thus shaped the history of Europe and the world. The question of whether the US involvement was crucial or not for the outcome of the war is one that has been debated passionately ever since – and to a degree this is also visible in some of the chapters in this book. This is not the right place to enter into this debate; it suffices to say that the arrival of the US doughboys gave a huge moral boost to the Allies, while the Germans realized that their ever-dwindling resources would now have to be used not only against equally exhausted British and French troops, but also against the fresh (albeit inexperienced) Americans. Also, the US Army saw its fair share of fighting: during the war, the USA lost nearly 53,500 men. This figure is dwarfed by the losses of the other major belligerents, for example 1.3 million French soldiers and approximately 900,000 from Britain and the Empire. Over the entire war, France and Britain lost an average of 900 and 457 men a day, respectively. The overall American average for its participation stood at 195 deaths a day, but this includes the first year of US participation in the war, when the army was being built-up and trained. Once American troops started fighting in earnest, their losses mirrored those of their Allied counterparts. In the summer and autumn of 1918, deaths stood at an average of 820 a day, not far off the French figure and almost twice as many as the British.8 These figures can be interpreted in different ways, and indeed they have been over time. They can be seen as proof of the ferocious fighting that the American encountered, or as their overall lack of preparation for the realities of war in 1918.

  Economically, the US was in a different league compared to the other belligerent nations. In 1913 its gross domestic product was more than twice that of Russia or Germany.9 Its pre-war steel production outclassed all the other nations; it exceeded that of France, Germany and Britain combined.10 Interestingly, in this war, unlike in World War II, US armament production did not dominate the scene; its heavy weapons and aircraft largely came from French factories, even though the US provided much of the steel that was used in those factories and the petrol needed to fuel them. The most important contributions – in addition to manpower – were of food, raw materials, and finance. While it was at war, the US outspent all the other belligerents: $42.8 million per day from mid-1917 to mid-1919, compared with Britain’s $32.6 million, France’s $32.4 million, Germany’s $32.2 million and Italy’s $10.4 million.11

  With these figures in mind, it seems clear that for the German Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, the Supreme Headquarters of the Field Army) the only option was to bring the war to a successful conclusion in the West, before the US presence would decide the outcome of the war. Remaining on the defensive was not seen as an option, because in the long run the Central Powers would not be able to withstand the combined forces of the enemy.12 A small window of opportunity presented itself to the Germans: the end of the war in the East made it po
ssible to transport troops to the Western Front. The situation in the East still demanded a military presence there if the natural resources were to be utilized for the Central Powers. Nevertheless, troops were moved from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. Divisions in the East had to release their younger soldiers (men under 35) and had their ranks filled with older replacements from the home front or the Western Front. Also, materiel and horses were moved from the Eastern theatre of war to the West. In total, the Germans moved 33 divisions to the Western Front from other fronts, and they increased their manpower in this theatre of war by approximately one million men.13 All this, they thought, would enable them to bring the war to a successful conclusion in the spring of 1918. In 1918, the main enemy in the West were the British. The OHL was convinced that once the British Army had been defeated and driven back into the sea, the French Army and the American contingent would not present major obstacles on the path to victory. The USArmy was still too small and inexperienced. It was supposed that France would not be able to mobilize more troops and that it was running out of manpower. To a degree, there was also the belief that ‘Germanic virtues’ would be superior to ‘Gallic weakness’; a rather interesting idea considering that the French Army had been fighting the Germans very successfully since 1914.14 In accordance with this general thinking, the German offensives would have to be directed, directly or indirectly, against the British forces on the continent.

  The first offensive, code-named Michael, was supposed to focus on the area of St Quentin. The reason for this was obvious: it was the junction of the British and French armies. Three armies were prepared for this offensive on the German side, and it was unleashed on 21 March 1918. Initially, the offensive predominately hit the British Fifth Army, which crumbled under the onslaught. General Erich Ludendorff, Erster Generalquartiermeister (First Quartermaster General) and practically the head of the German Army in 1918, succumbed to temptation: rather than follow the original operational design, he reinforced the German Eighteenth Army in the southern sector of the offensive, which had made the most progress in the early phase of Operation Michael. Ludendorff thus traded operational and possible strategic victory for tactical glory. As a consequence, when the offensive was called off on 5 April, it had achieved impressive tactical gains, but had not won the war – and it had cost both sides dearly. But whereas the Allies could replenish their reserves, the Germans could not.