The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

  Hutier's Eighteenth Army had made the greatest gains in the south. Arguably, there was little purpose in reinforcing this success, where resistance was least, when the supposed aim was to drive the British to the northwest. Initially Ludendorff allocated half the available reserves to the Eighteenth Army but then chose on 23 March to maintain pressure across the front as a whole. Rupprecht argued that success was still possible if resources were devoted to continuing the advance to the northwest against the British. But, on 25 March, Ludendorff decided to implement a scaled-down version of Mars aimed at Arras, to help the Seventeenth Army on the right of the existing offensive, as well as continuing south of the Somme. At the time the Germans were only 12 miles from Amiens. Mars, however, failed to break through the British Third Army on 28 March, and the southern axis of advance ground to a halt at Noyon on 29 March. Increasingly, the British front was stabilising. In meetings at Doullens on 26 March, and at Beauvais on 3 April, the allies established unity of command at the strategic level with Ferdinand Foch as supreme allied commander, though tactical control of the British and French armies remained respectively with Haig and Pétain. Michael had cost the allies 254,000 casualties, but the Germans had suffered 239,000 casualties.

  Ludendorff continued to look for purely tactical gains, Rupprecht noting on 5 April that OHL was living ‘from hand to mouth, without acknowledging a fixed purpose’.18 Increasingly, Ludendorff was bypassing Rupprecht and issuing orders direct to his armies in notably abrupt telephone calls. On 1 April he had ordered a scaled-down version of Georg on the Lys, now to be codenamed Georgette. While Ludendorff's conduct of Georgette was to display the same vices as his planning for Michael, it was the first real indication as his utter bankruptcy of his strategic vision.

  Opening on 9 April 1918 after a day's delay due to heavy rain, the offensive was entrusted to the German Fourth and Sixth Armies. These armies, however, were far weaker than those committed to Michael. The frontage was only 20 miles compared to the 50 miles covered by Michael and, of the 26 divisions allocated, only 12 were the specially trained stormtroop formations. Moreover, there was not sufficient artillery available to support both armies simultaneously, so the attack of the Fourth Army was postponed until 10 April. Bruchmüller had been seconded to the Sixth Army and there was another hurricane bombardment of four and a half hours, though mounted after only nine days’ preparation compared to the seven weeks available for Michael. Fortunately for the Germans, Haig had been compelled to commit 46 of his 58 divisions on the Somme, leaving few reserves available in Flanders. Two under-strength divisions of the Portuguese Expeditionary Force held part of the British First Army's front and they immediately collapsed as the Sixth Army pushed towards Hazebrouck.

  When the German Fourth Army began its attack towards Mount Kemmel on 10 April it faced tired divisions sent north to recuperate from the battle on the Somme. Gains so painfully made by the British during the Passchendaele offensive in 1917 were swiftly erased as the British pulled back between 12 and 14 April. On 11 April Haig issued his ‘backs to the wall’ Order of the Day: ‘There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’19 The Germans were within 5 miles of Hazebrouck, another key rail centre for allied supply lines, when Ludendorff changed the direction of the attack to the north, and away from the town on 12 April. The same day, Kuhl urged that all efforts should now be concentrated against the British and that Georgette should take priority over attacks anywhere else. Ludendorff only partially acknowledged Kuhl's pleas. In any case, little progress was being made in the new direction of the offensive towards Ypres. By 19 April it appeared little more could be achieved, though Mount Kemmel was taken from its French defenders on 28 April to improve the tactical position. Ludendorff blamed the troops and, especially, the Sixth Army's chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Hermann, Ritter von Lenz, for the lack of further progress. He also complained that, as on the Somme, troops had stopped to plunder food depots, and officers had not exercised sufficient control to prevent it. By 29 April it was clear that the offensive had failed. Georgette had cost the Germans another 86,000 casualties. March and April had proved the costliest months for German casualties on the Western Front of the entire war, with 232,000 casualties sustained in March and 244,000 in April.20

  The fatal flaw evident in Georgette was to be repeated, with three more offensives launched in quick succession to exploit fleeting short-term advantages. Blücher (and its subsidiary Yorck, both named for Prussian generals of the Napoleonic Wars) on the Chemin des Dames on 27 May was intended to draw French reserves south from Flanders and enable a Neu Georg to be mounted. Once more, Ludendorff was seduced by its early progress to convert what had been intended only as a limited tactical operation into a thrust towards Paris. It was German reserves who ended up being brought from the north. Consequently, Gneisenau (another hero of the wars against Napoleon) followed on the Aisne between Montdidier and Noyon on 9 June. It petered out three days later with no appreciable gains, and with Paris still 37 miles distant. The Kaiser came forward to witness Friedensturm ('peace offensive') in the Champagne-Marne region on 15 July, although precisely what it was intended to achieve was unclear. The pace of German advance achieved – amounting to 35 miles in just four days on the Aisne in May where the French were caught by surprise – was prodigious by previous standards. But it still did not impart sufficient psychological paralysis to create strategic success. Moreover, the Germans merely created vulnerable salients for themselves – the German front had increased from 242 miles on 20 March to 316 miles by 25 June – while the stormtroop divisions suffered very heavy casualties. The allies were capable of replacing their losses, but the Germans were not. Coupled with the heavy losses, the failure of the offensives damaged morale. Conceivably, elasticity in attack and defence encouraged the belief among German troops that ground was of little value once the allies began to counter-attack in July and August 1918.

  The allied counter-attack began on the Marne on 18 July, frustrating Ludendorff's hopes of a sixth thrust of his own in Flanders. This was Neu Georg, now codenamed Hagen for the Wagnerian character who stabbed the hero, Siegfried, in the back. The main counter-offensive by the British came at Amiens on 8 August 1918 assisted by the extraordinary amount of materiel resources now available. The successful British assault on the Hindenburg line on 29 September 1918, for example, saw a bombardment that delivered 126 shells per 500 yards of German line per minute for eight hours. The British rate of advance in the ‘Hundred Days’ of 1918 – approximately 28 miles a month – was greater than that of the allies during the Italian campaign of 1943–45. In part, it reflected a massive improvement in logistical support. What needs to be emphasised, however, is that the technical means to completely break through an opposing defensive system was never available on the Western Front for all the developments in artillery and communications. The Germans were forced back but the line was still continuous on 11 November 1918. By this time, the allies’ own advance had slowed due to determined German rearguard actions, and with the difficulties experienced in supplying their armies across previously devastated battlefields. As late as 19 October 1918, therefore, Haig believed the Germans quite capable of retiring to their own frontiers and holding them so that the war would continue into 1919.

  By November 1918, the Germans had sustained 1.7 million casualties since 21 March. Those losses had been among the best of Germany's remaining troops and those who had the highest morale. Ludendorff's hope of holding the line of the Meuse began to look ever more doubtful as the British Third and Fourth Armies forced the canalised river Sambre on 4 November. In effect, the German army had lost the belief that it could achieve victory. That applied, too, to Ludendorff, whose power began to wane when the spring offensives manifestly failed to bring victory. Younger German staff officers were increasingly a
ghast at the lack of overall strategic direction, the future Field Marshal Wilhelm, Ritter von Leeb, then a major on Rupprecht's staff, concluding on 31 March that not only did Ludendorff have no operational vision but also that he had ‘totally lost his nerve’.21 News of the French offensive on the Marne on 18 July came as Ludendorff and Hindenburg were discussing the prospects for Hagen at Ludendorff's advanced headquarters at Avesnes. Over lunch, Hindenburg suggested using all available reserves for a counter-attack north of Soissons, but Ludendorff angrily dismissed the idea. According to an OHL staff officer, Colonel Hermann, Ritter Merz von Quirnheim, Hindenburg immediately left the room ‘clearly annoyed and scarlet in the face’. After dinner, Hindenburg again raised the idea, only for Ludendorff ‘with an expression of rage on his face’ to turn to leave, ‘letting out one or two words like “madness!” in profound irritation’. Hindenburg demanded ‘a word’ with Ludendorff and they retired to the latter's study out of von Quirnheim's hearing. Hindenburg, who never forgave Ludendorff's open insubordination, reminded him ‘to remember his place’.22 According to Quirnheim, Ludendorff was close to nervous collapse. When summoned to discuss Hagen on 20 July, Fritz von Lossberg, the Fourth Army's chief of staff, was equally appalled to find Ludendorff blaming Wetzell for the setback on the Marne. Ludendorff threatened to resign when Lossberg urged a retreat to the Siegfried line to shorten the German front.

  Ludendorff had recovered his confidence sufficiently by early August to be predicting success for Hagen. When the British attacked at Amiens on 8 August, however, Ludendorff showed distinct signs of nervous panic: he was later to call it the ‘black day’ of the German army. He tried to micro-manage the response, Kuhl writing that Ludendorff was ‘continually insisting on having a say in all the particulars, talking to all the armies and their chiefs, arranging details often quite contrary to his orders to me’.23 His confidence broken by the British success, Ludendorff tendered his resignation on 13 August only for the Kaiser to reject it. The alternating moods of recognition of defeat and confidence in ultimate victory continued. On the following day at a Crown Council at Spa, Hindenburg and Ludendorff seemed confident that the allied will to fight could now be broken by a ‘strategic defensive’, still enabling Germany to attain its aims. Worn out by overwork, Ludendorff refused to contemplate replacing Wetzell as head of the Operations Section with a more experienced officer, who would be able to bear more of the detailed staff work, primarily because he feared that this might be a precursor to his own removal. In the end, Colonel Wilhelm von Heye succeeded Wetzell in September. Many felt Heye too junior to have much of an impact, but he emerged as an important voice of realism. There was now sufficient concern about Ludendorff's condition for a staff psychologist from Imperial Headquarters, Dr Hochheimer, to be called in on 4 September to treat Ludendorff's nerves. Hochheimer counselled rest, singing German folk songs on waking each morning, and enjoying the roses in the garden of Ludendorff's quarters.

  Bauer, for long an unqualified supporter, was manoeuvring to survive Ludendorff's likely fall, encouraging those such as Heye who believed the military situation critical. Ludendorff now appeared to pin his hopes on influenza having broken out in the French army. On 28 September 1918, with the news that Bulgaria had sought an armistice, Ludendorff had a nervous collapse. Believing him to be out of touch with reality, Heye, Quirnheim and the head of OHL's Political Section, Colonel Paul von Bartenwerffer, took it upon themselves to inform the German Foreign Office that peace negotiations were urgently required. On being informed, Ludendorff decided unexpectedly to urge Hindenburg to seek an armistice, though his intention was merely to win time in order to continue the war.

  Accompanied by Heye, Hindenburg and the Foreign Secretary, Admiral Paul von Hintze, Ludendorff informed the Kaiser of the need for an armistice on 29 September. While the Kaiser and Hintze assumed Hindenburg and Ludendorff wished to appeal for an eventual armistice, they were surprised when Ludendorff demanded it immediately. All were agreed, however, on the need for a new ‘liberal’ government to secure agreement with Woodrow Wilson on the basis of the Fourteen Points, though Hindenburg and Ludendorff had never actually read them. Ludendorff began laying the foundations of the post-war ‘stab in the back’ myth by announcing to his staff on 1 October that ‘those circles which we have above all to thank for having brought us to this point’ could now ‘eat the broth they have cooked for us’.24 Having arrived at Spa after the decision had been taken, Hertling, who had suffered a heart attack in June, resigned as chancellor. Hintze also resigned. Prince Max of Baden was brought in as chancellor on 3 October to handle the negotiations. Max initially demurred from approaching Wilson, but was pointedly told he had not been brought in to create difficulties.

  Max had no illusions that the price of peace would be high. Max requested that Wilson arrange an armistice on 3 October 1918 on the basis of the Fourteen Points, to which Wilson responded by asking for clarification. Wilson's second and third notes on 14 and 23 October made it clear that an armistice must make any German resumption of the war impossible. Ludendorff had now recovered his nerve and, with Hindenburg, proposed to renew the war, only to find that his position had been undermined. Without permission to do so, Hindenburg and Ludendorff journeyed to Berlin to meet the Kaiser on 27 October 1918, Ludendorff intending to demand rejection of Wilson's notes. Wilhelm pointedly complained that Ludendorff had first demanded an armistice and now, a month later, demanded negotiations be broken off. Knowing that Max had threatened to resign if Ludendorff remained, the Kaiser accepted Ludendorff's proffered resignation while refusing that of Hindenburg. Furious that Hindenburg had remained in office, Ludendorff stormed from the room and refused even to share a car with him. Groener became First Quartermaster General in succession to Ludendorff on 29 October. Groener concluded that Germany could not continue the war once that continuation had been called into question. The scene was thus set for the negotiations leading to the armistice.

  As Germany dissolved into chaos, Ludendorff went into exile in Sweden. Military victory had been intended to compensate for wartime privations and the lack of political reform. When it was not forthcoming, political tensions simply increased with no authoritative political figure to counter them. Ludendorff's own mystique as a military saviour had been destroyed. Hindenburg became president of the Weimar Republic in 1925, one of his opponents in the presidential election being Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been involved in the so-called Kapp putsch against the republic five years earlier and, flirting with fascism, he had also participated in Hitler's abortive Munich beer hall putsch in 1923. He had grown distant from Margarethe, and become increasingly influenced by the extreme views of the widowed Dr Mathilde von Kemnitz, whom he divorced Margarethe to marry in 1926. In the end Ludendorff broke with Hitler. On Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler declared himself both president and chancellor as Führer. When Ludendorff died three years later, the one time ‘silent dictator’ was given a Nazi state funeral against his express wishes.

  CONCLUSION

  IT WAS the seventeenth-century French mathematician, scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who mused that had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed. As outlined in the introduction, the intention behind this volume was to identify seminal events during the First World War that could be characterised as meaningful turning points in military, political, socio-economic or cultural terms, which had significant consequences in the longer term. Some would be familiar but others had gone generally unrecognised. It was not intended to speculate on counter-factual ‘what ifs’.

  Yet, by way of conclusion, it is appropriate briefly to consider the alternative course of events but for the pivotal points suggested. Of course, a major war will throw up countless alternative possibilities if this or that decision had or had not been taken. Such questions can be posed onwards from the fateful decision of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's chauffeur to bring the car to a halt at the very corner in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Prin
cip was standing on 28 June 1914.

  In terms of the flooding of the Yser, the German invasion of France and Belgium had already been thoroughly disorganised by the allied counter-attack on the Marne. Yet there was still the real possibility that the renewed offensive in Flanders could have broken through to the Channel ports but for the British defence of Ypres and, crucially, the Belgians unleashing the floodwaters. Had Turkey not entered the war, there would have been no new fronts in the Middle East with all that was implied for the post-war settlement of the region. The Balfour Declaration might never have been issued. Instead of Gallipoli, Australians would remember more a blooding on the Western Front. Ironically, the first significant Australian action there – at Fromelles in July 1916 – has only recently escaped the shadow of Gallipoli through the discovery and excavation of 250 (mostly Australian) bodies from German burial pits in 2009. This was followed by the opening at Fromelles in 2010 of the first new Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery since the end of the Second World War.

  Had the Ministry of Munitions not been created in 1915, Britain might not have sufficiently grasped the nettle of the mobilisation of all of its resources. Had the documentary film on the battle of the Somme not been made then, the powerful imagery of the Western Front might not have had such an impact on public consciousness then and since. In the same way, had the Germans not deployed heavy bombers against London, the subsequent fear of aerial bombardment might not have evolved in the way it did during the interwar period.