1918 Read online

  Operation Michael was launched on 21 March 1918 and achieved the most spectacular tactical gains in World War I to that point; but it failed operationally. By 23 March the Second Army in the German centre, which was supposed to be the main effort, was making poor progress, and the Seventeenth Army on the right flank was lagging far behind. In the south, however, the Eighteenth Army was making unexpected progress. The original supporting mission of the Eighteenth Army was to screen the German left flank against French intervention in support of the BEF. Deciding for opportunism over consistency of purpose, Ludendorff shifted the main effort to the Eighteenth Army.

  Reinforcing success rather than failure is generally a wise course of action at the tactical level. At the operational level, it is an extremely difficult thing to do because of the massive troop and logistical shifts required in a short span of time. More often than not, the result is self-inflicted disruption. Thus, Ludendorff completely changed the operational scheme of manoeuvre in the middle of the battle. But the Allies had far more territorial depth to the Eighteenth Army’s front, and there was no clear operational objective in that sector. In the end, the Eighteenth Army made the deepest advance, but all the Germans had to show for it was a much larger front line to hold. The Germans got to within ten miles of the vital British rail centre at Amiens, but they never took it.

  Operation Michael, March–April 1918

  When Michael failed, Ludendorff decided that the BEF was on the edge of collapse and he only had to hit them again, immediately and hard. He wanted to execute Operation Georg, but that proved impossible, because much of the force required for Georg had been committed for Michael. The OHL quickly cobbled together a much scaled-down version of Georg, and then launched Operation Georgette on 9 April 1918. As with Michael it initially made impressive tactical gains, but Georgette was too weak and culminated before it accomplished anything operationally significant. Although the vital Hazebrouck rail centre was not a specifically designated objective, it was in the path of the main attack, which got to within five miles of the city. But Ludendorff on 12 April again altered the entire scheme of manoeuvre, shifting the main effort north toward the line of the Flanders Hills.26 By the time Georgette ended on 1 May the Germans had captured Mount Kemmel and had forced the British to pull back from the Passchendaele Ridge. But both operationally and strategically, Georgette was another failure. After almost six weeks of intensive fighting, the Germans had little to show for their two great offensives other than two very large salients that required far more manpower to defend than did the original starting lines. Moreover, the French had shifted a significant number of reserve divisions north to support the British, making another major assault in the north all but impossible.

  Although Michael and Georgette had been complete failures, Ludendorff saw no alternative but to retain the initiative by attacking again. The British remained the primary strategic target, but because an attack in the north was now out of the question, Ludendorff decided to launch a major attack in the French sector with the specific objective of appearing to threaten Paris. That, he hoped, would draw the French reserves back down to the south to cover their capital. Once the northern sector was sufficiently weakened, the Germans would shift rapidly back to the north and deliver the final knock-out blow to the British. That final offensive would be called Operation Hagen.27

  On 27 May 1918, the Germans launched their third massive offensive, advancing south from the Chemin des Dames. Long-standing popular opinion to the contrary, Paris was never the objective of this operation called Blücher. It was a feint. Its sole purpose was to draw the French reserves out of Flanders. But Blücher was a spectacular tactical success – too successful. The original objective line was the high ground south of the Vesle River. The Germans exceeded that objective on the first day. Rather than following the original plan, Ludendorff again fell victim to his own purely tactical success and ordered his forces to keep driving south toward the Marne River, but with no specifically designated objective. For the third time, he abandoned the scheme of manoeuvre in the middle of the battle, and it was a fatal mistake. It was another attack into the Allies’ depth, with no strategically or operationally significant objective within operational reach. By the time Blücher culminated on the Marne River in early June, the Germans had yet another huge salient of ground to defend and hold. Furthermore, the anticipated number of Allied reserves had not been drawn off from the north, and the German forces were now hopelessly out of position to execute Operation Hagen.

  The Blücher salient was an operational death trap. From west of Soissons to just west of Reims it was 35 miles wide. From the original line of departure behind the Chemins des Dames south to the Marne it was 27 miles deep. Most of the ridges, rivers, and roads in the salient ran east–west, but the German lines of communications primarily ran north–south. Only a single major rail line ran through the salient, along its northern base from Reims, to Soissons, to Compiègne. Major branch lines from each of those three cities ran north into German-held territory. But the Allies held both Reims and Compiègne, and the line from Soissons was blocked where it ran under the Chemin des Dames Ridge, because the Germans themselves had earlier blown up the tunnel at Vauxaillon. The Germans had 42 divisions inside the salient and no way to supply them except with horse-drawn wagons over small and winding roads.

  Ludendorff had no other options at that point. He did not have the strength to attack anywhere else, and he could not afford to sit passively in the Marne salient while his forces slowly withered away logistically. On 7 June, the Germans launched Operation Gneisenau on the western shoulder of the salient, between Noyon and Montdidier. The objective was to shorten the line in that sector, and hopefully take Compiègne to open up the rail line.28 Hastily prepared and under-resourced, Gneisenau was a complete failure even on the tactical level.

  Still faced with the same strategic and operational problem, Ludendorff next ordered a huge two-pronged offensive to cut off Reims on the eastern shoulder of the salient. In addition to taking the rail centre and opening up the line, Ludendorff was certain that the threat to Reims would force the French to shift their reserves. A few days after cutting off Reims, the Germans would then rapidly shift back to the north and launch Operation Hagen against the BEF. The objective of this fifth offensive was Reims, not Paris. The main thrust line of the attack was away from the French capital, not toward it.29

  Launched on 15 July 1918, Operation Marneschutz-Reims (the Second Battle of the Marne) was the last German offensive of the war. The attack got off to a bad start. Ludendorff nonetheless was determined to proceed with Hagen, and on 16 July much of the German heavy artillery in the Marne sector started moving north by rail. By 17 July Kronprinz Wilhelm’s army group concluded that Marneschutz-Reims was a failure, but the heavy artillery kept moving north. The following day Ludendorff went to Kronprinz Rupprecht’s headquarters for a final coordination meeting for Hagen. As he opened the meeting on the morning of 18 July, he dismissed all intelligence reports and rumours that the Allies were massing for a counter-attack in the Marne sector. Almost as soon as he finished making those comments, the reports of the Allies’ attack started coming in.30 From 18 July until the end of the war, the Germans were continually on the defensive.

  Caught totally by surprise, the Germans were slowly and methodically pushed back into the salient created by Operation Blücher. By the end of the first week in August they had been pushed back to their starting point north of the Chemin des Dames. More significantly, by the third day of the Allied counter-offensive, Ludendorff had to face the fact that they would never be able to launch Operation Hagen. On 20 July Ludendorff summoned Loßberg, the German Army’s defensive expert, to the OHL for consultations. Loßberg immediately recommended that the Germans conduct a phased and general withdrawal to the Siegfried Position, the starting line for the 1918 offensives. From there they could entrench to conduct a protracted defence, which in turn would buy time for a negotiated peace while th
e Germans were still in a position to bargain from some strength. Lossberg also recommended the immediate start of construction on the Antwerp–Meuse deep defensive position, which was still only a line on an OHL map. It was sound advice, but Ludendorff could not bring himself to abandon all the territorial gains the Germans had won since 21 March.31 He continually dithered. The OHL only ordered the withdrawal to the Siegfried Position on 2 September, and the start of construction on the Antwerp–Meuse Position on 16 October. Both decisions came far too late.

  The Allies now had the initiative. After pushing the Germans back north of the Chemin des Dames Ridge and eliminating the threats to their own rail centres at Reims and Compiègne, they followed up on 8 August with a successful surprise attack to the west of Amiens, eliminating the threat to that key rail centre. A shocked Ludendorff called 8 August 1918 ‘the black day of the German Army’. Loßberg did not agree with him. In his own memoirs Loßberg wrote: ‘The exact turning point of the war did not come on 8 August 1918, but rather on 18 July 1918’, the day that the French had launched their offensive against the German troops in the Marne sector.32

  When Général de Division Ferdinand Foch was appointed Supreme Allied Commander in the spring of 1918, one of his most important priorities was the securing of the Allies’ own vital rail lines.33 The counter-attacks of 18 July and 8 August accomplished that. He now turned all his attention to his enemy’s rail system. The Germans had six great trunk line railways running from Germany to the Western Front.

  Behind the German lines facing the British in the north the two key rail junctions were Berlaimont and Roulers.34 Running north–south between Metz and Liège, the main German rear-most lateral line had a capacity of 300 trains per day. A roughly parallel lateral line closer to the front ran from Metz through Mézières to Valenciennes. In the south, Mézières was the major choke-point closest to the French and American lines. Foch considered Mézières the jugular of the German forward logistical network.35 If the Germans lost the four-tracked line south of Mézières, the entire German position in northern and north-eastern France would be threatened. That would leave the lines in the north running through Liège as the sole remaining withdrawal route for the German Army. It is precisely this concentration on the enemy’s rail system that marks the key difference in the operational approaches of Ludendorff and Foch in 1918, and the main reason that Foch out-generaled Ludendorff.

  The Allied General Offensive of 1918 consisted of a set of four converging attacks across the Western Front, with each vectoring toward a key rail objective.36 Starting on 26 September, the US First Army and French Fourth Army in the Meuse–Argonne sector attacked in the direction of Mézières. The following day the British First and Third armies attacked in the general direction of Cambrai. On 28 September, the Flanders Army Group in the north attacked between the sea and the Lys River toward Liège. And on 29 September the British Fourth Army supported by the French First Army attacked in the direction of Busigny.

  From that point on, the war was decided by the Allies’ superior numbers. Under severe pressure all along the Western Front, and with their vital rail centres under constant threat, the Germans had very little flexibility in shifting their strategic reserve divisions, even though they had the nominal advantage of operating on interior lines. Ludendorff himself only made the situation worse. From 18 July until his final relief on 26 October, he was a psychological wreck, wildly swinging between the extreme poles of optimistic euphoria and defeatist depression. On 28 September, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite continuous prodding from Rupprecht, Kuhl, Loßberg and others, the Erster Generalquartiermeister procrastinated in taking the bold defensive measures necessary to stabilize the situation. By the time Generalleutnant Wilhelm Groener replaced Ludendorff on 26 October, there was little left for him to do but organize the withdrawal to Germany following the Armistice on 11 November.

  Strategic bankruptcy

  The Germans entered the war with a weak civil government that grew even weaker as the war progressed. In the process, the military leadership increasingly dominated the political leadership on all matters of strategy. One consequence of Germany’s traditional fear of a protracted war of attrition was that its military thinking focused all too often on the short rather than on the long term. Consequently, strategic decisions often were made without adequate consideration of the second and third order effects. One such mistake was the decision to invade France through Belgium in 1914. There was little doubt that such an action would bring Great Britain into the war, but far too many military leaders disregarded the consequences. The Germans committed the same fundamental error once again in 1917, when the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, combined with the ham-fisted Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, brought America into the war on the side of the Entente. Germany’s military leaders assumed that any American army could not possibly be a significant force on the European battlefields until well into 1919. The German Navy’s leadership assured Hindenburg and Ludendorff that Britain would be starved into submission long before that; and besides, not a single troopship carrying American soldiers would reach European waters without being sent to the bottom. Both assumptions proved erroneous, and German soldiers paid the price on the Western Front battlefields of 1918.

  Despite the specific intention of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany from 1914 through 1917 had been fighting a two-front war, the fear of German military planners since at least the days of Frederick the Great. When Russia finally was knocked out of the war that September, the strategic problem eased somewhat, but only temporarily. American entry into the war brought the problem back in another dimension.

  By the end of 1917 all of Germany’s coalition partners were weak and growing weaker, requiring Germany to prop up especially Austria-Hungary. Three years of war had wrecked the German economy. The British maritime blockade brought the German civilian population to the verge of mass starvation during the infamous Turnip Winter (Steckrübenwinter) of 1916/17. Some historians have suggested that the Royal Navy played the decisive role in the war by completely breaking the morale of the German nation. Richard Holmes, however, has argued that although the blockade increased Germany’s growing sense of desperation, it no more broke the country’s morale than strategic bombing did during World War II.37

  When Ludendorff and the army group chiefs of staff met at Mons on 11 November 1917, Germany’s strategic situation was bleak at best. The combined populations of the four Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey) was 144 million. The combined population of Entente powers was 690 million, including colonies. The German Army was drawing on the country’s last manpower reserves, and planning to call up the conscription class of 1919 a year early. The economic disparities were even greater than the population differential – even before America entered the war. In 1913 the American economy was larger than that of France, Britain, and Germany combined – minus their colonies. The United States produced more steel than all three combined. The Allies’ total oil requirement in 1918 was 9.5 million tons, 6.6 million of which America supplied. The United States that year also supplied enough foodstuffs to feed 18 million Frenchmen for a year.38

  Political chaos

  The weak and insecure personality of Kaiser Wilhelm II was not the least of Germany’s internal political problems. By 1918 Hindenburg had pretty much replaced the Kaiser in the minds of most Germans as the ‘Father Figure of the Nation’. Initially, Wilhelm II liked to associate himself with Hindenburg, lending credence to the myth that the Kaiser was still Germany’s Supreme Warlord. But by 1917 Wilhelm had come to view the Generalfeldmarschall’s popularity with the people as a direct threat to his own position. The Kaiser also loathed Ludendorff as an upstart bourgeoisie. Ludendorff only rates one passing mention in the Kaiser’s memoirs.39 By 1918 the Kaiser had come to fear Hindenburg, who ironically remained loyal to the end to the office of the Kaiser and the idea of the monarchy, although he thought very little of Wilhelm personally.
>
  Hindenburg and Ludendorff had a contentious and increasingly hostile relationship with Germany’s wartime chancellors: Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg; Georg Michaelis; Georg Graf von Hertling; and finally, Prinz Max von Baden. As relations with Bethmann Hollweg continued to deteriorate, Ludendorff went so far as to order German commanders not to talk to the Chancellor during his visit to the front in June 1917.40 The final straw came the following month when the Reichstag started debating the Peace Resolution. Hindenburg and Ludendorff forced Bethmann Hollweg to resign by threatening the Kaiser with their own resignations. Wilhelm completely gave in to The Duo because he feared the consequences. The Kaiser, with the backing of the OHL, appointed Michaelis as Chancellor, but the Reichstag nonetheless passed the Peace Resolution a couple of days later. Michaelis was forced out of office three months later and replaced by the ageing Hertling.

  Supported by Hindenburg, Ludendorff increasingly meddled in political affairs, ultimately leading to what some historians have called the ‘Silent Dictatorship’. Ludendorff, however, refused to consider the idea of an outright military dictatorship, despite at one point having the chancellorship almost thrust upon him.41 Nonetheless, by the final months of the war Ludendorff held almost total political power in his hands, marginalizing the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and the Reichstag. Disingenuously, Ludendorff later quibbled in his memoirs: ‘Unfortunately, the government did not state clearly and emphatically in public that it, and not General Ludendorff, was governing.’42 In the attempt to exercise increasingly tighter control over all aspects of Germany’s wartime economy and society, Ludendorff and his close circle at the OHL forced through three successive political measures that not only failed to achieve their stated intent, but actually caused greater damage and inefficiency, and lost effort at the time when Germany could afford it least. Throughout 1918 the combined effects of these three measures progressively corroded the German Army from within.