by G. J. Meyer
In the second half of 1917, first on the northeastern front and then at Caporetto and Cambrai, the Germans had introduced a new offensive system to complement their defenses. Called the “Hutier method” because it was first used by a cousin of Ludendorff’s named General Oskar von Hutier, this system promised to be a way of breaking the deadlock in the West. It involved a new kind of assault unit made up of detachments of only six or eight men, so-called storm troops trained not to try to overwhelm the enemy’s defenses with sheer mass but to make use of whatever cover the terrain afforded, slip around and past the strongest positions (instead of stopping to destroy them), and so move deep into enemy territory with unprecedented speed. The bypassed strongpoints would later be reduced by larger, more heavily armed units following in a second wave. Though such tactics had been tried on only a modest scale on the Western Front, there seemed no reason why they should not prove effective in much larger operations—if the Germans took the offensive.
General Oskar von Hutier, at left
First to employ the new offensive doctrine.
That was the question facing the high command: whether to attack or stand on the defensive as in 1915 and 1917. The decision was Ludendorff’s, and from the start he favored the offensive. He was influenced in that direction by what Plumer had achieved with his limited attacks at Ypres late in 1917, but what decided him was the U.S. army. American troops were arriving in France by the scores of thousands every month (the number would grow to a quarter of a million monthly by mid-1918). Though almost all were still in training, they would soon be a force of overwhelming size. Green though they were, the Yanks were well fed, enthusiastic, and equipped with the best of everything. Still unbloodied, they displayed a kind of innocent eagerness that was no longer possible for the British, French, or Germans.
Ludendorff calculated that the Americans could not be a problem until the middle of 1918, but that thereafter they would tip the scales conclusively. If Germany was to win the war in the west, it had only the first half of the year in which to do so. It was with this in mind that a new booklet, “The Attack in Trench Warfare,” a treatise explaining the Hutier method and how to use it, was distributed to the armies of Germany. Selected officers were pulled out of the line for an eight-day retraining course that was soon expanded to four weeks. The best German divisions in the east, along with soldiers under age thirty-five culled from less capable units, were loaded onto trains and moved back to Germany for rest, refitting, and instruction. The goal was to create forty-two elite mobile divisions made up of the best soldiers Germany still had—fit young fighters skilled in the use of grenades, light machine guns, flamethrowers, and trench mortars and schooled in the new system. After years of standing in a defensive posture that offered no chance of victory, after ordeals like Passchendaele, these men wanted to attack. They “pined for the offensive,” Ludendorff said, “and after Russia’s collapse expected it with relief.” Something similar was true of the home front. People not only wanted an end to the war but expected—had been taught to expect by German propaganda—that the end would come soon and in the form of an unambiguous victory.
The remaining question was where to attack. That came down to a question of whom to attack—the British or the French? To explore it, on November 11 Ludendorff met with Generals Friedrich von der Schulenburg, chief of staff of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group, and Hermann von Kuhl, chief of staff of the army group commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Both were seasoned commanders (Kuhl had been Kluck’s chief of staff during the 1914 drive on Paris), and both had strong opinions. Schulenburg urged an attack on both sides of the Verdun salient—not as ridiculous an idea as it might at first seem, the French having drastically reduced their defenses in that sector. He saw a possibility of shattering the line around Verdun and driving the French back toward Paris. Kuhl pushed for Flanders, arguing that it was the only place where strategic objectives could be achieved. If the BEF’s line could be pierced, the British would have their backs against the sea and might be destroyed or forced to escape to England. Ludendorff himself laid out a number of other possibilities, giving particular attention to the point near St. Quentin where the British and French lines met. He declared that no offensive could go forward unless three conditions were met. The Russians and Italians must continue to pose no threat. The attack must come at the earliest possible time—in March at the latest, in February if possible. Wherever it came, even if against the French, the objective must be the defeat of the British. The BEF, so tiny at the start of the war, was now the dominant element in the Entente’s strength. If it could be eliminated, the French would be unable to continue. If it could be eliminated by midyear, the Americans would not matter.
Fifteen days later any lingering worries about a possible revival of the war on the Eastern Front were put to rest when three Russian soldiers waving a white flag approached the German line in Courland in the far north. They said they had been sent by General Kirilenko, a new chief of staff appointed by the Bolsheviks. Their mission was to communicate their government’s wish for a negotiated peace. Within days German and Russian delegates, among them Max Hoffmann and German foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann (who had succeeded Arthur Zimmermann), were gathering in the city of Brest-Litovsk.
Many peace feelers were being put forward at about this time, usually secretly and with tangled motives, and the leaders on both sides were speaking publicly about their willingness to make peace on reasonable terms. The Entente was trying to arrange a separate peace with Vienna, which would have been fatal to Germany in the east. The Germans were using intermediaries to see if one member of the Entente or another—now London, now Paris, now Petrograd—might be ready to talk. And the pope, who had regarded the war as madness from the start, continued to rouse the ire of Italian nationalists by looking for some common ground upon which an armistice might be arranged. The story of these pronouncements and initiatives, some of them sincere and others cynical, is complicated, interesting, and at points amusing or sad. But there was never much chance of working out a general peace.
The only conceivable peace, as long as the deadlock continued, was a return to the status quo ante. But at this stage only Russia and Austria-Hungary would have embraced such an idea, and they were willing to do so only because they had failed. Berlin and London and Paris and Rome still saw victory as possible or even likely in the long run, and none would settle for less. In a sense, all were unable to settle for less. Having told their peoples that this was a fight of good against evil, they would have found a decision to reconcile with the enemy (not to mention everything sacrificed in fighting that enemy) awkward to explain.
Germany’s leaders were more divided than those of the Entente on the question of war aims. Hindenburg and Ludendorff still expected to win, and therefore they had no interest in peace terms not dictated by Berlin. By contrast, Count Georg von Hertling, the aged Bavarian Catholic and former professor of philosophy who had become chancellor on November 1 after Michaelis resigned, said he wanted a place in history as the “reconciliation chancellor.” But even for him reconciliation meant a peace that brought gains to Germany—Luxembourg and Liège, perhaps, as well as France’s Longwy-Briey basin with its rich deposits of coal and iron. In this he was supported by Richard von Kühlmann, who pursued negotiations in many directions so energetically and ingeniously that Hindenburg and Ludendorff came to regard him as another of their problems. But he never did so with the intention of ending the fighting; his objective was to get any one member of the Entente to drop out of the war, freeing the generals to finish off the others.
If Kühlmann’s activities were less disastrous than Zimmermann’s had been, they were sterile nevertheless. With Lloyd George secure as prime minister in Britain and Clemenceau totally dominant in Paris, separating their two countries was impossible. Both men understood that Europe could not possibly be returned to what it had been at the start of the war. The Russia that had been France’s most
important ally in 1914 no longer existed. Postwar Russia, broken and reduced, would be little better than a satellite of Germany—unless Germany too were broken. More than at the beginning, this was now an all-or-nothing war.
It was all or nothing for Ludendorff too. On December 27 he met again with Schulenburg and Kuhl. (It is revealing of Ludendorff’s power that he was free to settle momentous questions without involving the two crown princes to whom Schulenburg and Kuhl formally reported, or Hindenburg or the kaiser, or any member of the government.) Schulenburg continued to want an offensive at Verdun, and Kuhl still favored Flanders. Undecided, Ludendorff instructed army and army group staffs all along the front to develop plans for possible offensives: not only at Verdun and in Flanders but at St. Quentin, Arras, Champagne, and even the all-but-impenetrable Vosges Mountains west of Strasbourg. He feared that an attack at Verdun could be answered and undone by a British response in Flanders. Though he agreed with Kuhl that Flanders was ideal strategically, he feared that the ground there would be dangerously muddy so early in the year. He continued to show particular interest in the St. Quentin option, but his colleagues were not enthusiastic. Kuhl had already sent him a memorandum arguing that although a breakthrough might be fairly easy at St. Quentin, exploiting it would require defeating the British while simultaneously blocking the French from coming to their aid. This, he said, was likely to be asking too much of the troops. Ludendorff’s own operations chief, Major Georg Wetzell, expressed his own fears that the St. Quentin option was too ambitious and that either Flanders or Verdun would be preferable. There was of course nothing unhealthy in open disagreement over such questions; the debate reflected Ludendorff’s ingrained willingness to consider the opinions of those military (as opposed to his civilian) associates whom he trusted. But the fact that he remained undecided about the location of an attack that he wanted to take place within ten or twelve weeks is suggestive of a lack of strategic clarity.
Georg von Hertling
Aspired to be “the reconciliation chancellor.”
Fresh good news came from the Eastern Front: by Christmas the Germans and Russians had agreed to a thirty-day armistice during which negotiations would proceed, and Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky arrived at Brest-Litovsk to take charge of the Russian delegation. But this development was balanced by trouble behind the lines. On January 14 cuts in bread and flour rations ignited strikes across Austria. Seven hundred and fifty thousand workers went out, including hundreds of thousands in Vienna, and they demanded not just food but peace. The disorder spread to warships in Austria-Hungary’s Adriatic ports and to Germany’s Kiel naval base, where authorities apprehended the protest leaders and inducted them into the army. The intensity of the discontent, and the extent to which the dissidents were organized, became clear when the executive committee of a Workers Council issued a January 27 call for a general strike and as many as a million German workers (exact numbers, in these matters, remain impossible to establish) went out the next day. Many of the strikers were munitions workers, which made the walkout intolerable to the military authorities. Equally intolerable—and deeply troubling—was the political content of the strikers’ rhetoric. The Workers Council, echoing its allies in the Reichstag, called for “the speedy conclusion of peace without annexations and indemnities, on the basis of self-determination of peoples.” After a week of street violence in which a number of people were killed, the strike was not settled but crushed by the army. Forty thousand strikers, supporters, and family members were arrested. Between thirty-five hundred and six thousand of the leaders were inducted into military service and told they were bound for the front. In the eyes of conservatives and even moderate elements of the German public, Ludendorff and the army had preserved law and order. The episode heightened Ludendorff’s sense that the home front was dangerously unstable, that the war had to be won before the urban rabble became absolutely unmanageable and the nation’s resolve was destroyed.
Leon Trotsky
Gave up on negotiations with Germany.
He found additional reason for concern when, on February 11, liberal members of the Reichstag issued a statement calling for a political offensive against Great Britain—emphatically not a military offensive—“including an unequivocal declaration of the sovereignty and integrity of Belgium.” This statement served as a highly unofficial (and officially repudiated) response to a January speech in which Lloyd George had suggested a willingness to accept a negotiated settlement. Lloyd George had not been looking for a response—the purpose of his speech was not to get negotiations started but to persuade the British labor unions that responsibility for the continuation of the war lay with Berlin—and Ludendorff was not wrong in regarding the whole affair as meaningless. He remained confident that Germany could come out of the war as master of Belgium and more if his domestic adversaries were not permitted to deflect him from the victories that lay ahead.
On January 21, after a tour of the Western Front, Ludendorff announced his decision. The attack would be at St. Quentin, in Picardy east of the old Somme battleground at the juncture of the British and French lines. This was not the attack he really wanted—that would have been farther north. But Flanders would have to wait until it was sure to be dry enough not to suck the Germans into another Passchendaele. St. Quentin presented no such danger. It would be code-named “St. Michael” after the sword-bearing archangel who was patron saint of the German Reich. By forcing Haig to shift his reserves southward it would, according to Ludendorff’s plan, set the British up for a later pair of Flanders offensives, St. George One and Two.
Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was puzzled by the Michael plan (the “St.” prefix was soon abandoned). An intelligent and skillful army group commander, a descendant through his mother of the Stuart kings of England, he asked what its strategic objective was supposed to be. “We make a hole and the rest will take care of itself,” Ludendorff replied. “That’s how we did it in Russia.” It was not an answer that many strategists, thinking calmly, would have found satisfactory.
Wetzell had offered a word of caution before the question was closed. If Michael went ahead, he suggested, it should be kept within strict limits. If the troops succeeded in breaking through, the generals should be content to allow the resulting threat to draw the British reserves down from Flanders. The advance should not continue into the tangled wasteland that the Battle of the Somme had created and that the Germans had made worse with their scorched-earth withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line.
Ludendorff disregarded this advice.
Background: Kaiser Wilhelm II
KAISER WILHELM II
ALTHOUGH WILHELM II HAD ACTUALLY DONE VERY LITTLE to ignite the war (his biggest contribution was a careless failure to restrain the Austrians at the outset, and he tried to reverse course as soon as he understood the danger), the war might never have happened if not for what he was.
That was the story of his life. In the quarter of a century between his becoming emperor and the outbreak of hostilities, he had accomplished almost nothing. If Germany flourished in almost every sphere from economics to the arts, its success was not his doing. But his personality had cast an unsettling shadow across Europe all the same, alienating powerful neighbors, increasing Germany’s isolation, and worsening the tangle of ambition and fear that finally drew all the Great Powers into the abyss.
To take a word from Wilhelm II and the Germans, a penetrating psychoanalytic study by Professor Thomas A. Kohut of Williams College, the kaiser’s personality was “fractured.” It made him an immensely complicated, dangerously unstable, deeply damaged public figure, sometimes appealing but more often offensive, full of bluster and swagger but terribly insecure, intelligent but only in superficial and unreflective ways, made up of parts that never formed a coherent whole. He was “one of those strange figures in history whose personalities have had more effect on the course of affairs than their deeds.”
The kaiser’s complexities rose partly out of his ancestry. T
he grandson on the paternal side of modern Germany’s first emperor, on the maternal side of the majestic Victoria who was Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, he was heir to two awesome and radically different traditions. Britain at the time of his birth was not quite a democracy by today’s standards, but it was a distinctly liberal society in which most political power resided in Parliament and the monarch was well along the path to becoming a revered figurehead. Hohenzollern Prussia on the other hand, and the empire that Prussia created when Wilhelm was still a boy, were autocracies that concentrated nearly all power in the crown. England had long been the richest country on the planet and the center of the world’s greatest empire, and it possessed all the assurance that came from generations of dominance. Germany by contrast, after centuries of fragmentation and weakness, was a newcomer to the world stage. Like an overgrown adolescent it was both surprised by and overly proud of its new strength, unsure of itself, often unsure of how to behave. It had an inferiority complex that made it quick to respond resentfully to trivial, even imaginary, slights.
All this was made personal for the boy Wilhelm by his parents, the character of their marriage, and their unhappy destinies. Princess Victoria of Britain (Queen Victoria’s eldest child) and Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia and Germany were an attractive, intelligent, and well-intentioned couple who unquestionably loved each other and their many children. Despite the immense advantages with which they began, however, their lives and careers were tragic. Vicky, as she was known in the family, was a strong-willed and opinionated young woman who had been raised by her parents—especially by her adored father Prince Albert, who had begun life as a member of provincial German royalty—to regard English culture and England’s liberal political traditions as pinnacles of human achievement. When she went to Berlin as Fritz’s teenage bride, she did so with a self-imposed mission: to transform the backward Germans and their feudal politics into a mirror image of enlightened Britain. She made little effort to conceal her disdain for her new home, making herself an object of distrust not only to the Junker establishment but to her in-laws.
