1918 Read online

  Subsequent operations followed this general pattern; on 9 April 1918 the German launched Operation Georgette with 36 divisions against the British in Flanders towards the direction of the channel ports. On 11 April, the situation had become desperate for the British forces, and the commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, issued his famous order of the day, stating that ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end’. Logistical problems – a common issue for the German Army in 1918 – and exposed flanks created issues for Ludendorff, as did counter-attacks by the British Second Army and a five-division detachment of the French Armée du Nord. As a consequence, Ludendorff ended the offensive on 29 April.

  The German offensives, 1918

  German chances of ending the war successfully were dwindling, but they were not yet willing to give up. The main objective remained the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in Flanders. After reinforcements had arrived in the northern sector of the front, the Allies were now too strong there for a direct assault. Consequently, Ludendorff conceived a large-scale diversionary attack in the Champagne area, south of south St Quentin and west of Reims, designed to make the Allies believe that the Germans were conducting a direct attack on Paris. Ludendorff hoped that this operation, code-named Blücher, would force the French to withdraw their reserves from Flanders to establish a blocking position in front of Paris, thus enabling the Germans to deliver the coup de grâce to the BEF in an operation code-named Hagen. On 27 May the Germans attacked at the Chemin des Dames, which had seen the futile French Nivelle offensive in 1917. The Germans massed 5,263 artillery tubes against 1,422 French and British guns. The resulting 3.7 to 1 ratio was the highest artillery superiority achieved by the Germans during any battles on the Western Front. By the end of the day, the German troops had advanced a total of 21 kilometres, exceeding the objective for the entire operation. This was the largest single-day advance on the Western Front during World War I. Again, Ludendorff now faced a dilemma: continue the tactically successful operation, or shift back to the original objective, the British troops in the north. Again he succumbed to tactical temptation. Général de Division Ferdinand Foch realized that the offensive was an operational dead end for the Germans and he kept his nerve. Even though the offensive would bring the Germans within 70 kilometres of Paris, it did not result in an operational success. Actually, quite the contrary was true, as it created a bulge that left the Germans in a vulnerable and logistically difficult positon. The operation was finally halted by Kronprinz Wilhelm’s Army Group on 4 June 1918. The subsequent deployment of the dwindling German reserves (Operation Gneisenau) again took place against the French and not the British. Operation Gneisenau was indented to extend Blücher westwards, thus drawing in more Allied reserves and also linking the salient created by Blücher with the salient at Amiens. The French had been warned of this attack by German prisoners, and as a result, the offensive became a failure after some impressive gains on the first day. On 12 June, the offensive was called off, because it was obvious that it would not achieve its objectives, but would be very costly and result in casualties that the Germans were no longer able to absorb.

  Operation Hagen was now postponed and Ludendorff concentrated his forces for a final offensive against the French forces. Logistics played an important role here. Ludendorff hoped to improve the logistical situation of the German troops in the salient created by Operation Blücher, in particular by seizing the logistical hub of Reims. The offensive began on 15 July, but did not achieve any of its objectives. Operation Marneschutz-Reims, as the offensive was called, was a failure. Now the Germans were exhausted and the tide had turned.

  On 18 July, French forces, supported by American, British and Italian troops, counter-attacked in the second phase of this battle, which has also become known as the Second Battle of the Marne.15 For their attack, the Allies had over 3,000 guns available (although no prior artillery preparation took place in order to keep the element of surprise). As a consequence of this attack, the German Kronprinz suggested a general withdrawal from the Marne salient on 24 July, against considerable initial opposition from Ludendorff, who finally agreed to this withdrawal on the night of 25 to 26 July. In retrospect, it might be fair to consider this Allied operation as the clear and obvious turning point of the war. This is not necessarily a view shared amongst more Anglo-centric historians who identify 8 August as the turning point and the beginning of the final episode of the war, also called the ‘Hundred Days’. On 8 August, Allied forces, including British, Canadian, Australian, US and French units, attacked German troops east of Amiens. For the first time, German troops collapsed before the enemy and a high number of Germans were captured on this day – approximately 13,000 by the British Fourth Army and a further 3,000 by the French forces. It was this collapse of morale which caused Ludendorff to call 8 August ‘the black day of the German Army in the history of this war’ and ‘the worst experience I had to go through…’16

  There then followed Allied offensive after offensive, the idea being to keep up operational momentum in order to wear down the dwindling German reserves that had to be moved from one field of battle to another. The French under Général de Division Charles Mangin attacked between the Aisne and Oise on 20 August, followed by attacks by British and French forces on the northern end of the Siegfriedstellung (the Siegfried Position – the Allies called it the Hindenburg Line) between 23 and 26 August. On 12 September, the Americans began their offensive in the St Mihiel sector. This limited offensive was regarded as a success, although the Americans under Pershing were not content with the limited scope of the operation. The reason why Maréchal Foch had restricted this offensive was because he wanted to deliver a decisive blow in the Argonne Forest. This offensive was unleashed on 26 September with 31 French and 15 American divisions, 4,000 guns and 700 tanks. Despite this huge concentration of force, the Allied offensive soon encountered severe problems in determined German resistance, logistical problems and the unsophisticated US way of fighting. The Germans were not able to trade space for time, because they had to protect a vital railway link in their rear. As a consequence, the fighting in this sector continued until the end of the war, even though in the last phase, lasting from 1 to 11 November, the US forces broke through the German lines and were now able to exploit and fight in open warfare. Further north, the BEF fought the battles for the Siegfried Position between 27 September and 8 October. The breaching of this formidable defensive line resulted in a German withdrawal and was – if this was still needed – the clear sign that Germany would not even be able to fight a defensive war successfully.

  Even though the German Army still put up fierce resistance, it was obvious that it was exhausted. In six months, the strength of the German Army had fallen from approximately 5.1 million men to 4.2 million.17 To make matters worse, the casualties were particularly high among the best-trained troops, the storm troopers. The OHL predicted that it would need 200,000 men per month to replace casualties. Convalescents returning to the front could make up 70,000–80,000 per month, but the next annual class of 18-year-olds would only provide an overall figure of 300,000 men, resulting in a further weakening of German combat power.18 On top of this, the Germans were no longer in well-prepared defensive positions. Morale was low: they had expected a victorious outcome of the war at the end of their offensives, but now the war dragged on with no sign of victory. The influenza epidemic had further weakened the German troops. Major Ludwig Beck, the later Chief of the General Staff, wrote in his diary that ‘the front is held by a mere spider-web of fighters’.19 On 4 September 1918 Ludendorff ordered the field army in the west to abandon the sophisticated defence in depth for a more traditional and linear way of fighting.20 Moral, manpower and training were no longer available to the necessary degree in order to fight the defence in depth. However, saying that the initial collapse of the German Army was fully caused by problems on the German side would be unfair to the Allies.
All Allied armies, in particular the British and the French, had made steady and sometimes astonishing improvements in their fighting techniques. Some historians have argued that the Allies had overtaken the Germans on what they regarded as their area of expertise: the tactical and operational conduct of war on the battlefield.21 On 30 September the OHL told the army group commander that it would no longer be able to provide any reserves and that the units and formations had to make do with what they had.22 It only took a few more days to realize that all last battle-worthy reserves had been thrown into the fight and had been consumed. As a consequence, Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff agreed that Germany had to ask the Allies for an armistice. On 4 October 1918, the Reichskanzler (Chancellor), Prinz Max von Baden, sent a message to that effect to the American President Wilson, whom the German saw as the most honest broker.

  With the arrival of autumn, the reports from the other fronts began to paint a positive picture for the Allies, too; the Allied armies in the Balkans finally defeated Bulgaria, which signed an armistice on 29 September, and those in Palestine routed the Ottoman forces. The Ottoman Empire surrendered on 31 October, followed by Austria-Hungary on 3 November. The Central Powers had lost the war. As a consequence, German sailors mutinied in Kiel harbour in early November – they were not willing to sacrifice themselves in a glorious but deadly final assault on the Royal Navy. The German naval command had planned this in order to preserve the honour of the German Navy, which would make it possible to rebuild a great fleet in the future. By 6 November all of north-western Germany was under the control of the so-called workers’ and soldiers’ councils. On 8 November the revolution reached Saxony, Hesse, Franconia, and Württemberg in central and southern Germany, respectively. Faced with increasing pressure, Chancellor Prinz Max von Baden unilaterally declared the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II on 9 November, and Germany officially surrendered two days later. Signed at 0500hrs (French time) on 11 November, the Armistice came into effect at 1100hrs.

  Interestingly, the returning German troops were often greeted enthusiastically by their garrisons’ population. The troops seemingly offered some protection against marauding revolutionaries – but this hope would prove short-lived, not least because many units were dissolved quickly after their return home. But the troops had also achieved what many Germans saw as their war aims, regardless of the real war aims of the military and political elite: Germany had stood ‘against a world of enemies’ and the army had defended the fatherland; Germany was intact and had not been invaded as it had been in many wars before. For instance, the regimental history of the 13 Infantry Regiment from Münster states that ‘on 8 December the city saw the festive return of the undefeated regiment to its old garrison’. The regiment reached its old barracks in the centre of the city ‘covered in flowers’. 23

  But this joyous view was not shared by everybody. On 10 November 1918, a German soldier was recuperating in a military hospital in Pasewalk, a small town in Pomerania. In his memoirs, that have to be taken with more than a pinch of salt, he remembers how a priest came to the convalescents and told them that the war was lost and that Germany was now a republic. ‘All had been in vain,’ the soldier wrote, ‘in vain the sacrifices and the hardships, in vain the hunger and thirst of sometimes endless months, in vain the hours, in which we, embraced by fear of death, did our duty and in vain the death of the two million who had died.’ The consequence of this event, so the writer stated, was that ‘I decided to become a politician’.24 This particular phrase stands at the end of chapter seven of one of the most infamous books ever written by one of the most infamous people in history. The book was Mein Kampf and the writer was Adolf Hitler. This is not the place to analyse Hitler’s role in World War I.25 It suffices to say that without World War I, there would have been no World War II. At the beginning of World War I, Hitler was a nobody and at the very bottom of the class-based Wilhelmine society. In this system, he would never have risen to power. Only the political upheaval of 1918 and the subsequent political challenges made his rise possible – ironically as a consequence of the democratic structure that Germany adopted with the Weimar Republic.

  The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, was generally regarded in Germany as a harsh and unjust peace. One major point of discontent was the infamous clause 231, the ‘war-guilt clause’, which stated that Germany had to accept all responsibility for the outbreak of the war. It was almost universally rejected in Germany.26 Even the head of government, the Social Democratic Reichsministerpräsident Philipp Scheidemann, who on 9 November 1918 had publicly proclaimed the end of the monarchy and the new era of democracy, made clear in in a speech given to the national assembly on 12 May 1919 that he was against the treaty: ‘What hand should not wither that puts itself and us in such chains.’27 Retrospectively, one might argue that the problem was that the treaty lacked a clear direction. Paul von Hindenburg allegedly once said that ‘An operation without a point of main effort is like a man without character’. If this is true, then this was a treaty without character; it was not harsh enough to keep Germany down permanently, but too harsh to appease Germany and to incorporate it into the club of Western democracies. On the Right, the culprit was identified quickly: socialists and democratic parties had willingly accepted the defeat of Germany and had stabbed in the back the army that had been undefeated in the field.28

  In addition, there was a widespread fear of Bolshevism and Left extremism in Europe. The fact that this ideology could eventually be contained did not mean that the threat had not been real. The expansion of Bolshevism was stopped in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21). This war, largely forgotten in the West now, showed that the idea of Bolshevik expansion was not only an intellectual idea, but a real threat. And another factor played a role in the general perception of Bolshevik and extreme left movements: Jewish intellectuals and politicians, including individuals such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky in Russia and Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, were proportionally over-represented in prominent positions. It was therefore relatively easy to coin the extreme Left as a ’Jewish threat’. Once these ingredients – stab-in-the-back, the ‘Jewish factor’, and war-guilt – are combined, one can begin to see the recipe for Hitler’s ideology. When one adds to this the experience of the British blockade, the picture is even more revealing. The impact of the blockade on the German nation and also the German psyche is widely forgotten today, but it did play an important role in the inter-war period and World War II. The experience of this still lives on in the unofficial name in German for rickets: it is still called the ‘English disease’. The exact number of deaths caused by the malnourishment during the blockade is hard to quantify. An official German publication from 1918 claimed that 763,000 civilians died from starvation and disease caused by the blockade up until the end of December 1918.29 Other studies have found that the figure is more likely to be in the region of 424,00030 – all excluding the deaths that were caused between January and June 1919 when the blockade was lifted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. These figures also exclude the number of people who perished due to the influenza epidemic which hit Europe in 1918. All countries were affected, but the German population more so than others, because the people did not have the strength to resist the virus, which, interestingly, targeted predominately the young and usually fitter members of society. The consequences that some drew from this were logical: in a future war against the United Kingdom, Germany would suffer the same fate as in World War I. Consequently, it was important to find agricultural land close to home that might be utilized to feed the German population and that could not be cut off by the enemy. Geo-strategically, this land was to be found in the East. The fact that ‘racially inferior’ people lived there only made this more appealing to the National Socialists.

  This ideological package and its firm grounding in the events of the end of World War I explain some of the support that Hitler gained in Germany and Austria before, and also into World War I
I. In propaganda terms, it was fairly easy to argue that large parts of the Nazi actions and ideology were directed at the Treaty of Versailles and the Novemberverbrecher, the ‘November criminals’, who had signed the armistice in 1918. Hitler’s stunning successes, both in political terms before the outbreak of World War II and then the military victories in the first half of the war, have to be seen in this context; and they seemed to prove him right. To put it provocatively: if Hitler had died in 1940 after the defeat of France, he might have gone down in history as a great statesman and military leader.

  At the end of World War I, societies all over Europe felt that the old ruling establishments had driven their countries into an abyss, and drastic changes in the political regimes all over the continent occurred. The US withdrew, once again, politically from Europe, even though its monetary ties to Europe remained strong. In fact the US did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and it did not join the League of Nations, which had been founded on 10 January 1920 in order to resolve future international disputes peacefully.31 Three empires disappeared – the German, Austrian-Hungarian and Russian monarchies were no more – altering the balance of power in Europe. New states were created in Central and Eastern Europe. In the direct aftermath of the war, many European states became democracies. However, when World War II broke out in 1939, true democratic states were a minority in Europe and most states had adopted some form of authoritarian rule, from Franco’s Spain in the West to Stalin’s Russia in the East.