1918 Page 4
Even the most important remaining democracies in Europe, France and Britain were still suffering from the war. In order to finance the war, Britain had borrowed heavily from the international financial market; in particular it had relied on US money. In 1914, the national debt stood at £650 million; by 1919 it had sky-rocketed to £7.4 billion. As a consequence, much of Britain’s national financial power was spent after the war on repaying debt and paying interest on borrowed money. By the mid-1920s, interest on government debt was absorbing an astonishing 44 per cent of all government expenditure. The spending on defence would overtake the interest payments only in 1937, once the writing was on the wall that a war with Germany was a clear possibility.32 Britain – and France, for that matter – had mobilized the empires to fight the war. An awakening belief in the self-determination of the colonies’ indigenous people was the consequence. To say it with Goethe; ‘Spirits that I have cited, my commands ignore’.
France had suffered enormously during World War I. Parts of its territory had been occupied by the enemy, and in order to liberate these territories, la Grande Nation paid a terrible price. Approximately 1.35 million soldiers died in this struggle; together with the civilian casualties, this resulted in a blood loss of approximately 1.7 million people, roughly 4.29 per cent of the French population (compared, for instance, to approximately two per cent for the United Kingdom and 0.13 per cent for the USA).33 The result was a belief in the power of the defence, embodied in the concrete works of the Maginot line, behind which the French Army believed itself protected. A new war against Germany should not cause the same blood loss as la Grande Guerre. As a consequence, the army remained passive in 1939 and 1940, while the Wehrmacht carried out its first invasions of neighbouring countries. Had the French Army occupied the Ruhr area in 1939 (as they had done in 1923) when war was declared and the German Army was busy fighting in Poland, the German war machine would have run dry very quickly. But the shadows of World War I prevented this from happening.
Hand in glove with this development went a radicalization of the political process, not least driven by the experience of violence of wide parts of society during the war years. The consequence of this was that in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the end of World War I did not bring peace, but instead a constant political and military struggle that shaped people’s experiences and made them accept violence as an everyday occurrence.34 Maybe Ernst Jünger, arguably the most famous German writer of World War I, was right when he claimed that:
It is the war that shaped people and their time. A generation such as ours has never walked before into the area of the earth in order to fight for the power over its age. Because never before did a generation return from a gate as dark and tremendous as this war back into the light of life. And yet, we cannot deny it, even though some of us would like to: The war, father of all things, is also our father; it has hammered, chiselled and hardened us to what we are… It has brought us up to fight and fighters we shall remain as long as we exist.35
CHAPTER 2
THE GERMAN ARMY IN 1918
Major General (Ret’d) Dr David T. Zabecki
In his Final Dispatch of 1 March 1919 Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig wrote:
The rapid collapse of Germany’s military powers in the latter half of 1918 was the logical outcome of the fighting of the two previous years. It would not have taken place but for the period of ceaseless attrition which used up the reserves of the German armies, while the constant and growing pressure of the [maritime] blockade sapped with more deadly insistence from year to year the strength and resolution of the German people. It is in the great battles of 1916 and 1917 that we have to seek the secret of our victory in 1918.1
In essence, Haig was defending the strategic legitimacy of the horrendous and widely criticized attritional battles of the Somme in 1916 and Third Ypres in 1917. Collectively they constituted what Haig called ‘the wearing-out battle’. To this day, the battles of 1916 and 1917 remain the primary indictment against Haig’s generalship.
Unquestionably, the Germans were weaker at the start of 1918 than they had been at any point in the war so far. The British campaigns of 1916 and 1917 certainly had inflicted a high level of attrition on the Germans, and their own 1916 attritional campaign against the French at Verdun only made their manpower situation worse. Nonetheless, the German Army on the Western Front still had plenty of fight left, as they demonstrated so forcibly during the five Ludendorff Offensives, also known as the Spring Offensive, from March to July 1918.2 As a tactical instrument of war, the Kaiserheer was the best army of the Great War, and was still so even in its weakened state at the start of 1918. But a little more than ten months later the German Army lay in ruins. How did that happen? How did the best army of the 1914–18 war lose, and why did it disintegrate so rapidly between July and November? There is more to it than Haig’s dispatch would lead us to believe.
Command, organization, and armament of the Kaiserheer of 1918
In the strictest sense, there was no ‘Imperial German Army’. The German Empire was a confederation of four kingdoms, and 22 lesser principalities and states. The King of Prussia was also the Kaiser of the Reich, and in time of war he was Germany’s Oberster Kriegsherr (Supreme Warlord), the titular head of the combined German armies. The military units of the lesser states were mostly integrated into the Prussian Army, but the Kingdoms of Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg all maintained distinct armies. Each had a general staff, but only the Prussian Großer Generalstab (Great General Staff) prepared war plans for the combined German Army. The King of Bavaria retained peacetime command authority over his forces, although the Kaiser had the right to inspect in peacetime to ensure the standardization of training and equipment. Saxony maintained a separate officer corps and a war ministry to administer its army, but the Kaiser exercised peacetime command. Württemberg’s officer corps was integrated with that of Prussia’s, but the Württemberg Kriegsministerium (War Ministry) retained control over certain administrative functions. After more than three years of war many of these distinctions had started to blur by the start of 1918, but some peculiarities remained. Prussians and Bavarians especially continued to regard each other with their traditional degree of wariness.
Like the fragmented and Byzantine civil government of Wilhelmine Germany, the Prussian Army was commanded and administered by three separate and often competing power structures. The Kaiser’s Militärkabinett (Military Cabinet) controlled the career management and personnel actions of all officers, with the exception of the General Staff officers. The Kriegsministerium was responsible for all administrative functions, including recruitment, training, supply, pay, and issuing military regulations. All four kingdoms had war ministries, but in wartime the Prussian Kriegsministerium exercised centralized control. The primary peacetime function of the Generalstab was war planning, and during wartime, the actual conduct of operations.3 The Chief of the Militärkabinett, the Kriegsminister (War Minister), and the Chef des Generalstabes (Chief of the General Staff) all had direct access (Immediatrecht) to the Kaiser. Although all three organs were equal in theory, the Generalstab had by 1918 long since eclipsed the other two.
The Generalstab was both an organization, and an officers’ career branch. Entry to the Generalstab was highly competitive, and required a long and arduous accession process that had a very high attrition rate. In the years before the start of the war only 140 to 160 officers each year were accepted to the three-year Kriegsakademie (War Academy). It was an academically rigorous course with a high level of drop-out. The successful graduates then underwent a two-year probationary posting, followed by a final screening board. Only between six and ten officers per year made the final cut. The Generalstab itself was organized into two major branches, the Großer Generalstab, headquartered in Berlin, and the Truppengeneralstab (Units’ General Staff), which formed the central cadres of the divisional, corps, field army, and army group staffs. Typically, a division had only one single General St
aff officer, the Ia Generalstabsoffizier (operations officer), who also functioned as the divisional Chef des Stabes (chief of staff). General Staff officers alternated assignments between the two branches, and also served for periods as commanders of line units. Most commanders of the line units were not qualified General Staff officers, nor was such a qualification necessary to become a general officer. The Chef des Großen Generalstabes (Chief of the Great General Staff) had no influence on the efficiency reports and career development of the field commanders, unless they also happened to be General Staff officers.4
In time of war the Chef des Großen Generalstabes directed the German Feldheer (Field Army) in the name of the Kaiser. In all but name, he was the German Commander-in-Chief. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, may have been a competent and experienced soldier, but his inept grandson, Wilhelm II, had little qualification for high command. The Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) was the Supreme Headquarters of the Field Army. Throughout most of 1918 the OHL was based in Spa, Belgium. In August 1914, the Chef des Großen Generalstabes was General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the nephew of the great Generalfeldmarshall Helmuth von Moltke. Within the first few months of the war Moltke was replaced by General Erich von Falkenhayn, who in turn was relieved in mid-1916 over the catastrophic failure of his Verdun Offensive. He was replaced by Generalfeldmarshall Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander on the Eastern Front and the victor of the 1914 battle of Tannenburg. Hindenburg was accompanied to the Western Front by his chief of staff, General der Infanterie Erich Ludendorff.
There was no real equivalent in the Allied armies to Ludendorff’s position. Since Hindenburg himself was the Chief of Staff of the German Army, Ludendorff was what we today would call the Vice Chief of Staff. When the Hindenburg–Ludendorff ‘Duo’ assumed control at OHL in 1916, Ludendorff was offered the title of ‘Second Chief of the General Staff’. He instead opted for the title of Erster Generalquartiermeister. A quartermaster was not necessarily a logistics officer in the German Army. A German General Staff officer who was a senior quartermaster (Oberquartiermeister) was a deputy chief of staff. Ludendorff’s position, however, was even more unique. He demanded from the Kaiser and received ‘joint responsibility in all decisions and measures that might be taken’.5 It was an unprecedented level of authority conferred upon a staff officer, even in the German Army.
At all echelons of command, a German chief of staff had far more actual authority than any of his Allied counterparts. Rather than a strictly defined superior/subordinate relationship, a German commander and his chief of staff operated on a more collegial basis. In most armies, the commander initiated the operational planning process; but in the German Army the initial impetus often came from the chief of staff. The chief of staff had the right and even the responsibility to argue with his commander – albeit behind closed doors – right up to the point of decision. But once the decision was made, the entire staff got behind it. A chief of staff who had been delegated Vollmacht (literally, mandate or proxy) by his commander had the authority to issue orders directly in the commander’s name, without necessarily conferring with that commander first. A German chief of staff was effectively a deputy commander in all but name, and if he had Vollmacht he was almost a co-commander. Ludendorff’s authority as Erster Generalquartiermeister even exceeded the normal bounds of Vollmacht.
Another peculiarity of the German command system was the concept that position assignment took precedence over rank.6 The Germans routinely appointed officers to command and staff assignments far above the actual rank they held. Once in the position, however, the officer functioned with the full authority of that position, regardless of the nominal ranks and pay grades of his functional subordinates. Corps chiefs of staff, who may have been Oberstleutnante (lieutenant colonels), routinely issued orders unchallenged to general officers commanding subordinate divisions. As a General der Infantry, Ludendorff himself never wore more than three stars, yet in 1918 he issued orders to field marshals commanding army groups. Such would be unthinkable in the British, French, or American armies.
German organizational structure was broadly similar to that of the Allied armies. German Heeresgruppen (army groups) first appeared in 1916. In late 1918 there were four Heeresgruppen on the Western Front. From north to south they were Heeresgruppe Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern; Heeresgruppe Deutscher Kronprinz; Heeresgruppen Gallwitz; and Heeresgruppe Herzog Albrecht von Württemberg. General der Artillerie Max von Gallwitz was the only army group commander who was not a member of one of the ruling families. German Kronprinz Wilhelm was a dilettante figure-head commander; but Rupprecht von Bayern was one of the most competent senior German commanders of the war. Prinz Leopold von Bayern commanded the German Forces on the Eastern Front (Oberost), which after Russia left the war consisted primarily of Heeresgruppe Mackensen, a combined German–Bulgarian force commanded by Generalfeldmarschall August von Mackensen.
Korps (corps) consisted of two or more divisions. A Generalkommando, or GK (corps headquarters), tended to remain in the front lines for long periods of time, while the attached divisions rotated in and out as the situation required. An Armeeoberkommando, or AOK (army command), usually controlled two or more corps, plus the various field-army-level supporting troops such as artillery and aviation. An Armeeabteilung (army detachment) was a lesser organization that might contain only a single corps, along with various field-army-level support units.
In 1918 a typical German division was organized into three infantry regiments of three battalions each; a three-battalion artillery command (Arko); and various engineer, signal, supply, and support troops. Standard divisional authorized strength was 11,643, although actual front-line strength was always somewhat less, and continued to decline as the final year of the war progressed. By the latter half of 1917 the Germans started distinguishing between two types of divisions with different tactical functions. Defensive positions in the line were held by Stellungsdivisionen (positional divisions), which had relatively low mobility. The Angriffsdivisionen (attack divisions) were manned by younger men and trained and equipped to advance rapidly and deeply.7 During the war, the Germans fielded a total of 251 divisions.
Tactical virtuosity
From a tactical perspective, the Great War started in 1914 as a 19th-century war, and ended in 1918 as the first true 20th-century conflict. Since the last major war on the European continent, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, warfighting technologies had advanced so far and so fast that no one really had any idea what modern war would look like or how it should be fought. At the tactical level, the two basic elements of combat power are firepower and manoeuvre. Throughout history the two have alternated with each other for temporary dominance, based on the emerging technologies of the given period. But during the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, firepower technology had advanced far ahead of mobility technology. The bolt-action repeating rifle, quick-firing artillery, and especially the machine gun made the battlefield a very lethal place. Tactical mobility, however, was still limited primarily to the speed of human and animal muscle power. By the end of the war the internal combustion engine was starting to change that, and by the start of World War II firepower and manoeuvre had pretty much come back into balance. But for most of World War I, the problem was one of how to overcome massive firepower with limited mobility. Throughout the war the Germans were the leaders in tactical innovation.
With the exception of the Verdun Offensive in 1916, the Germans spent most of 1915–17 standing on the defensive on the Western Front, while they concentrated on defeating the Russians in the East. Defending against the massive French offensive in Champagne in 1915, and the British offensives at the Somme in 1916 and Arras and Ypres in 1917, the Germans developed and perfected most of the concepts we to this day associate with modern defence warfare. When Hindenburg and Ludendorff assumed command at the OHL in 1916, Ludendorff immediately presided over an all-encompassing review and revision of German tactics based on the batt
lefield lessons to date. Defence was the first function addressed. On 1 December 1916, the OHL published the German Army’s new defensive doctrine as Grundsätze für die Führung in der Abwehrschlacht im Stellungskrieg (Principles for the Leadership in the Defensive Battle in Position Warfare).8
The new doctrine can best be described as flexible defence, or flexible defence-in-depth. It rested on three key principles: Flexibility, Decentralized Control, and Counter-attack. As the war progressed, the Allies centralized the command and control of their offensive operations at ever-higher levels. The Germans responded by giving their commanders in the defence an impressive amount of autonomy. Typically, a German infantry regiment in the defence was deployed with its three battalions in echelon. The front-line battalion commander had the authority to withdraw from the forward positions under enemy pressure as he saw the tactical necessity. More importantly, he had the authority to order the regiment’s other two battalions echeloned behind him into the counter-attack when he judged the timing right.
The Germans conducted two different types of counter-attack. The Gegenstoß (hasty counter-attack) was immediate and violent. Its purpose was to hit the attacking enemy force before they had a chance to consolidate the newly won position or to move up reinforcements and especially artillery. The Gegenstoß was planned, launched, and commanded by the front-line battalion commander on his own initiative. The deliberate Gegenangriff (counter-attack) was centrally planned, more methodically prepared, and commanded at a higher echelon. It was the alternative course of action whenever a Gegenstoß failed or was impractical.