by G. J. Meyer
Ludendorff had driven his enemies to make changes that would have momentous consequences in the months ahead. Not only were the rudiments of a system of unified command now in Foch’s energetic hands, but the Americans were involved as never before. Until Michael, Pershing had been jealously husbanding his growing force, concentrating on getting it ready to make war in 1919. But Michael changed his thinking. “The Allies are very weak and we must come to their relief this year,” he told Washington in asking for an acceleration in the shipment of troops to France. “The year after may be too late. It is very doubtful if they can hold on until 1919 unless we give a lot of support this year.” On March 28, having no way of knowing that the emergency was coming under control, he had gone to see Foch and invited him to use the American troops in any way he wished. From that day the Americans were in the fight.
Background: Ludendorff
LUDENDORFF
THINGS HAD NEVER GONE SO BADLY FOR ERICH LUDENDORFF, or gone badly in so many ways over such a long period, as they did in 1918. As his problems mounted, he grew visibly fragile.
All his life he had displayed an insatiable appetite for work, but now his staff noticed him slipping away from headquarters without explanation. A member of the medical staff, writing of Ludendorff, would recall that at this juncture “there were reports of occasional crying episodes.”
Officers who served him became concerned for him personally and about his ability to function. Quietly, with considerable trepidation, they arranged for a psychiatrist who knew Ludendorff, a Dr. Hocheimer, to visit and see what might be done.
Everyone was on pins and needles the day Hocheimer arrived, wondering how he was going to approach Ludendorff and how the general was going to react. Ludendorff was a stiff, distant man with no visible sense of humor and firm control over all emotion except the rage that could break out in moments of intense stress. An ugly explosion was by no means out of the question. What happened was more unexpected than that. It revealed the depth of Ludendorff’s neediness.
He was predictably impatient at being interrupted but consented to see the doctor. “I talked earnestly, urgently and warmly, and said that I had noticed with great sadness that for years he had given no consideration to one matter—his own spirit,” Hocheimer recalled afterward. “Always only work, worry, straining his body and mind. No recreation, no joy, rushing his food, not breathing, not laughing, not seeing anything of nature and art, not hearing the rustle of the forest, nor the splashing of the brook.”
Ludendorff sat for a long time without answering. “You’re right in everything,” he said at last. “I’ve felt it for a long time. But what shall I do?”
Hocheimer urged a move from Ludendorff’s cramped quarters at Avesnes back to the more pleasant accommodations at Spa in Belgium. He recommended walks, breathing exercises, and a change in routine calculated to induce relaxation and the ability to sleep. Ludendorff followed these instructions conscientiously, even eagerly. As long as he continued to do so, his torments eased.
The High Command, posing for the camera
From left: Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Ludendorff.
He and Hocheimer continued to confer. The doctor’s ultimate diagnosis: “The man is utterly lonely.”
Utterly lonely: the theme of Ludendorff’s life. He had spent his first four and a half decades in a terrible solitude. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he had found an escape. And now the solitude was closing in on him again. That is almost certainly part of what he meant when, upon receiving heartbreaking news not long before Hocheimer’s visit, he said that “the war has spared me nothing.”
The third of six children in a respectable family of very limited means (his mother’s family was of aristocratic origin but impoverished), Ludendorff in childhood was notable for three things. He was so obsessed with cleanliness that he spurned games that might dirty his shoes. He was a diligent and talented student, especially in mathematics. And he had no capacity for making friends. He was drawn to a military career—his father had been a cavalry captain—and when he took the entrance examination for cadet school he did so well that he was not only admitted but advanced to a class of boys two years older than himself. His performance remained exceptional in everything except gymnastics—he was without physical grace, another thing that separated him from his classmates. The age difference and his extreme fastidiousness (he never showed the slightest interest in the adventures and misadventures to which schoolboys and junior officers are naturally drawn) kept him always on the outside. He was a drudge and a grind, if an able one.
After receiving his commission, he went through the usual rotation of assignments, distinguishing himself at every step. In his late twenties he was selected for study at the War Academy, an honor reserved for only the most promising young officers. The commandant there, observing his intelligence and performance, singled him out for the ultimate recognition: eventual assignment to general staff headquarters. By age forty he was in Berlin, a major working closely with the chief of the general staff, the fabled Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, whom he came to regard as “one of the greatest generals who ever lived.” After Schlieffen’s retirement, Ludendorff was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became a protégé of the new chief, Moltke the younger. He assisted Moltke in translating Schlieffen’s secret scheme for an overwhelming envelopment of the French army into settled German policy.
But he was still alone.
Then one evening when he was forty-four and apparently consigned to permanent bachelorhood, he noticed a woman stranded in the rain as he was walking home after one of his long days of work. He offered to share his umbrella, and the woman gratefully accepted. She was Margarethe Pernet, beautiful, lively, the mother of three young sons and a daughter, unhappily married. Somehow—it seems miraculous for a man as sealed up inside himself as Ludendorff—the two connected. They were married as soon as Margarethe could divorce her husband.
A new life, a new world, opened for Ludendorff. He delighted in his new family, and the children worshiped him. He remained addicted to a rigid routine, always departing for work no later than seven A.M. and expecting meals to be served not a minute early or a minute late. But now a new dimension was added, a connection, thanks to his ready-made family, to a wider and cheerier range of experience. All the evidence indicates that the marriage was genuinely intimate and happy, and Ludendorff’s career flourished. He became an influential member of Moltke’s planning staff, winning important admirers and powerful enemies as he pushed hard (much too hard, his enemies said) for an expansion of the army in anticipation of war. He was promoted to colonel in 1911, to command of a Düsseldorf regiment in 1913, and to one-star general in charge of a brigade less than a year after that. The outbreak of the war brought an immediate second star and assignment as chief of staff of the Second Army as it prepared to join the invasion of France. Before he could take up this new position, he was detached for temporary duty with the special force created to capture Liège; the plans for attacking the Belgian fortifications were largely his work. This led to his first taste of glory, to his receiving Germany’s highest military honor, and to his reassignment with Hindenburg to the East Prussian front.
His stepsons, all of whom emulated Ludendorff and had been preparing for military careers, went eagerly to war. The eldest, Franz, a promising youngster almost as gifted academically as his stepfather and far more popular with his peers, suffered such serious grenade wounds in 1914 that, after being awarded the Iron Cross, he was declared unfit for further duty. He began to apply for the Flying Corps and finally was accepted, possibly with Ludendorff’s help. His brothers followed his example, and soon all three were pilots flying combat missions on the Eastern Front. Franz suffered a concussion and broken hip in a crash landing, but as soon as he recovered he went back into action. In September 1917 he was shot down over the English Channel and killed. When Ludendorff learned of this, he hurried to Berlin to break the news to his wife. He was stricken, and
perhaps guilty at having made the boy’s flying career possible. Margarethe was shattered.
Ludendorff was especially close to the youngest of his stepsons, who happened to share his first name. In March 1918 he received word that young Erich, still a teenager, had been shot down behind British lines, his fate uncertain. Not long afterward, with German troops advancing across France in the Michael offensive, Ludendorff was told of the discovery of a fresh grave. Its marker said, in English, “Here rest two German pilots.” He went to the grave and had the bodies dug up. One was Erich’s. It was temporarily reburied at Avesnes while arrangements were made for its transfer to Berlin.
That was where Ludendorff was going when he began to disappear from headquarters: to brood at Erich’s grave. That was also when an army doctor heard “reports of occasional crying.”
Nothing could ever be the same. Margarethe was broken, permanently in the grip of depression, grief, and fear. Ludendorff, in his own words, felt that the war had taken everything.
Chapter 34
An Impossibly Complex Game
“With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each man must fight to the end.”
—SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
In departing from his plan for Michael, in pursuing Hutier’s breakthrough all the way to Amiens, Ludendorff had used up the resources needed for the next stage of his campaign. Ninety German divisions had been thrown into the fight, and many emerged with only a few thousand of their men alive and unwounded. The scale of the losses, and the fact that he now had a huge new salient to defend, left Ludendorff with only eleven intact assault divisions to commit to Flanders—barely a third of the number originally planned. Nothing that he had originally intended was now feasible in the near term. The dream of winning the war by midyear was losing whatever grounding in reality it might have had at the start.
Probably what should have come next was a diplomatic initiative. The Germans were not in a weak position from which to offer to open negotiations. Brest-Litovsk had sealed their success in the east, and Michael had been if nothing else a persuasive demonstration of their power in the west. Germany could have offered to relinquish vast amounts of what it had won and still, possibly, have emerged from the war with gains. Even if it gave up all of its conquests, the war would still have demonstrated that Germany was at least as powerful as all its European enemies combined. No one could have denied its claim to world power status.
France, meanwhile, had reached a point where it could no longer replace its battlefield losses; it had almost no eligible recruits except those reaching the age for induction. Britain was not notably better off. In the spring of 1918 the Lloyd George government abandoned a pledge never to send boys under eighteen to the front, and it was considering conscription in Ireland. Neither Lloyd George nor Clemenceau had any interest in a peace that would leave Germany undefeated, but if Berlin had addressed the most abrasive issues—agreeing to give up Belgium and to reverse the draconian provisions of Brest-Litovsk—the Entente’s hawks might have been forced to compromise. Certainly they would have been pressured to do so by a public hungry for peace. If improbable, such an outcome was not impossible.
There continued to be Germans in high places, even influential members of the military, who wanted to make peace. Early in 1918 Max Hoffmann had agreed with the idea of trying for a military decision in the west, but when Michael produced nothing but gains of useless territory, he decided that a change of course was necessary. He would write later that the high command, faced with the hard fact “that it could not take Amiens, in other words, that the breakthrough had not succeeded…should also have realized that decisive victory on the Western Front was no longer within reach…It was its bounden duty to tell the government that the time had come to begin negotiations.”
Ludendorff saw no such duty. He was a man for whom, in the words of a longtime member of his staff, “all political questions were military questions.” He had settled the political questions of eastern Europe with his victories, and Michael’s disappointing conclusion did nothing to deflect him from wanting to do the same in the west. It is by no means clear that in the aftermath of Michael he remained an entirely rational man. He became not only bent on but obsessed with victory, impervious to the promptings of reason and reality alike.
Speed—haste—continued to be essential to Ludendorff’s plans. The number of American troops in France was growing explosively. If they or the British and French were given an opportunity to take the offensive, the Germans might never regain the initiative. If the St. George One operation that Ludendorff had planned for Flanders was no longer feasible and St. George Two could go forward only on a reduced scale, Ludendorff would settle for that. The British, after all, had also been weakened by Michael. They had been forced to reduce their reserves in the north to stop the German advance. By late March, even before the end of Michael, Ludendorff was shifting troops and artillery to Flanders. Arrangements were hurriedly made for a scaled-down operation to which Ludendorff’s staff gave the almost derisory name Georgette. It was a feeble substitute for the showdown toward which all of Ludendorff’s changing plans continued to be aimed, but he embraced it as a step in that direction.
While Michael was limping to its close and preparations for Georgette were just getting started, Lloyd George traveled to France for an April 3 meeting at which, with the Americans participating, the Allies agreed to strengthen the authority earlier conferred on Foch. He was given “all powers necessary” for “the strategic direction of military operations” on the Western Front. Haig had by now lost interest in this idea. With the French taking over part of his line and fresh British troops arriving from Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq), he no longer saw any need to be strategically directed by anyone. His reluctance fueled Lloyd George’s enthusiasm. His chagrin would reach its peak, as would Lloyd George’s satisfaction, when on April 14 Foch was given the title of General in Chief of the Allied Armies. In terms impossible to mistake, this made the Frenchman Haig’s commanding officer.
Georgette (sometimes called the Battle of Lys, or Fourth Ypres) opened modestly on April 9 with an attack by nine German divisions on an eleven-mile front. As at the start of Michael, there was heavy predawn fog. Again Bruchmüller preceded the advance of the storm troops with a five-hour barrage of crushing intensity, and again the Germans made startling early gains. The British were taken by surprise; Haig’s intelligence specialists, having observed German artillery moving to the north, guessed wrongly that the attack would come at Vimy Ridge. The worst of the barrage fell on the pair of Portuguese divisions that had been more or less donated to the Entente by a Lisbon government, since fallen, friendly to England. The morale of the Portuguese troops was low—they had been left in the trenches far too long and had never understood what they were doing in this war in the first place—and they were to have been rotated out of the line and sent home later that very morning. When Bruchmüller’s fire came down on them, they broke and ran. The storm troops advanced three and a half miles, running into resistance toward the end of the day and beginning to take heavy losses. It happened to be Ludendorff’s fifty-third birthday, and the kaiser was at German headquarters. He gave a little speech celebrating this latest triumph—so he saw it—and extolling Ludendorff’s brilliance. He honored the general by presenting him with a little metal statuette of—Kaiser Wilhelm II!
Georgette’s main objective was Hazebrouck, a railway junction from which, if they captured it, the Germans would be able to disrupt the BEF’s supply lines and shell the Channel ports. The defenders, through the first two days of fighting, were Horne and his British First Army. But by the second night, the Germans having torn a thirty-mile hole in his line, Haig was asking for French assistance and sending in the Second Army under Herbert Plumer, who had just returned from helping to stop the Germans’ Caporetto campaign in Italy. The fighting was ferocious and costly to both sides, and as day followed day it continued to be inconclusive. On April 11 Haig
issued an order of the day that would be derided in the trenches and celebrated at home: “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 man must fight to the end.” These words were marvelous theater, grist for the propaganda mills of London, but otherwise empty. Many of the troops greeted them with sarcasm. The part about holding every position was tactically deplorable, as Plumer would soon demonstrate. As for the BEF having its back to the wall, Haig knew very well that there were doors in that wall, and he was not unwilling to use them. At the time he issued his order, he was discussing with General Wilson a possible removal of his armies from France via the Channel ports.
On April 12 Ludendorff attacked again with an increased number of divisions. This new effort got to within five miles of Hazebrouck but then petered out. On the following day, probing for weak spots, the Germans attacked on the northern edge of the Ypres salient, where Plumer’s defenses were thin. To avoid having his line shattered and his troops overrun, Plumer disregarded Haig’s order of April 11 and began to pull back, abandoning all the ground for which Haig had paid a quarter of a million casualties in 1917. Lloyd George, when he learned of this, sourly rejoiced. He felt vindicated in his criticism of the assault on Passchendaele. “The conquest was a nightmare,” he said. “The relinquishment of it was a relief and inspiration.” He was right on both counts. By shortening his line, Plumer strengthened it enough to make a German breakthrough impossible. Once again he demonstrated to his men that he would not sacrifice their lives in pointlessly heroic gestures.
