A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Shock troops

  German soldiers advance over ground pocked with shellholes.

  Through two long weeks Plumer slowly fell back and back, giving up ground but inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers and relieving the pressure that otherwise would have broken his line. French help was beginning to arrive—infantry and dismounted cavalry that Foch had taken from Pétain, whose own lines were left even weaker than they had been at the end of Michael. The Germans noted these movements. Ludendorff ordered Crown Prince Wilhelm, whose army group faced Pétain’s forces in Champagne, to complete his preparations for an offensive there. The game was becoming almost impossibly complex.

  Meanwhile Ludendorff had no more to show for Georgette than he did for Michael—nothing but more casualties and another salient that increased his vulnerability without providing anything of value in return. He had told the kaiser that he could end the war in 1918, cautioning that it would be “a gigantic struggle beginning in one place, continuing in another, and demanding much time” but promising victory all the same. After so much futile action he needed to capture something, some specific thing, that actually mattered. His troops stood just short of Amiens, just short of Hazebrouck, and not far from a pair of high points called Mont Kemmel and Mont des Cats that, if taken, could allow him to dominate Ypres and everything around it. Any one of these would have been a great prize. Instead of making a choice, Ludendorff decided, as at the Michael crisis, to do everything at once.

  On April 24 nine divisions of Marwitz’s Second Army attacked on a narrow front in the direction of Amiens. It was a rare instance of the Germans using tanks; Marwitz had thirteen of Germany’s monstrous and cumbersome new A.7.V tanks, each carrying a crew of eighteen. They routed the British until the BEF’s smaller, more agile Whippet tanks met and routed them. The Germans made progress that day, though at high cost, but after nightfall a fierce counterattack by Australian and French troops drove them back to their starting point. Ludendorff gave up on Amiens. The forward edge of the Michael salient became static once again, this time permanently.

  The next day, at the edge of the Georgette salient, French troops who had just relieved the British on Mont Kemmel (being in Flanders, this was less a real “mount” than part of a long, low ridge) were beginning a Foch-ordered attack when they were hit by a Bruchmüller barrage followed as always by an infantry advance. Many of the French survivors were put to flight, and those who tried to resist were soon overwhelmed. “Gray-blue figures out of the half-buried entrances of the dugouts spring up and try to pull machine guns after them,” one of the attackers observed. “Once they bring one into position, but the hand grenades of our first wave destroy weapon and crew before it can be used. Most of the defenders think no more about resistance; then the firestorm has passed over them, the German shock troops are already before them, and it is better to raise one’s hands. Ever more frequently come the blue figures creeping out of the ground, smeared with mud, with fixed, bewildered eyes.”

  By ten A.M. the Germans had possession of the high ground. They had not only captured Mont Kemmel but swept the defenders away, creating a wide hole in the line. Mont des Cats, a more valuable objective, lay directly ahead and completely open. But Ludendorff, having grown wary of unexpected successes that drew his troops too far into worthless terrain, had ordered the attack force to stop upon reaching Mont Kemmel and wait there for instructions. All that day the Germans remained in place, doing nothing to exploit one of the best opportunities to fall within their grasp during all of 1918. Toward the end of the day a British reserve division arrived from the rear and began filling the gap. It was followed by others, until a resumption of the German advance became impossible. It was a repeat of the earlier failure to make a timely move against Amiens. General von Kuhl, chief of staff of the army group in that sector, said afterward that if the Germans had taken Mont des Cats, the British would have found themselves threatened from their rear and forced to abandon not only Ypres but their positions along the River Yser nearby. Much of what Ludendorff hoped to accomplish in Flanders could have been achieved with that one move. Instead, his troops were once again short of their goal and blocked.

  He made one more try. On April 29, again in the Lys valley, he sent his Fourth Army with all available reserves into an attack aimed at taking Cassel, a town overlooking the port of Dunkirk. It was another bloody fight, it gained nothing, and the Germans’ failure brought Georgette to an end.

  Ludendorff’s situation was now worse than it had been at the start of Michael. He still regarded the destruction of the BEF in Flanders as both possible and the key to everything, but because Georgette had brought French and British reserves streaming back northward, he again needed to draw those reserves away before delivering the conclusive blow. To accomplish this, he decided to attack the French where the movement of their reserves had left them weakest, along Pétain’s thinned-out line in the Champagne country around Reims. Bruchmüller’s artillery and all available infantry divisions were loaded onto trains and sent to join in an offensive that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group had long been preparing east of the Michael battleground.

  But Ludendorff no longer had the army with which he had begun the year. His casualties since the start of Michael now totaled nearly three hundred and fifty thousand, one of every ten German soldiers in the western theater. More than fifty thousand of his best troops had been killed, and replacements of comparable quality did not exist. More than a hundred of his divisions, nearly all of the elite assault units among them, had seen action, often suffering mightily. “The absence of our old peace-trained corps of officers was most severely felt,” Ludendorff would observe in his War Memoirs.

  Taken prisoner

  French troops being marched to the rear by their German captors.

  “They had been the repository of the moral strength of the country.” He was writing euphemistically. In using the word “absence,” he was speaking of annihilation.

  Many of the surviving troops were demoralized by the failure of their ordeal to produce the promised victory. Though French and British losses had been comparably horrendous, Americans were now arriving in France in army-size numbers: eighty thousand in March, one hundred and eighteen thousand in April, two hundred and forty-five thousand in May. Though they had seen no action of consequence, their best-trained divisions were now part of Foch’s reserve and available for use.

  Making them available had been a stupendous challenge. In 1916 the U.S. army was smaller than the number of British casualties in the Battle of the Somme, smaller than the French or German losses at Verdun. It had so few senior officers that, after the American declaration of war, the volunteers and draftees were organized into divisions of twenty-seven thousand men each—nearly twice the size of European divisions, so that only half as many commanders and staffs were required.

  After hurrying the First Division to France, the War Department kept the rest of its army at home for months of training. As troops began to cross the Atlantic in serious numbers, arguments arose over how to deploy them. The Entente commanders, the British especially, wanted to absorb them into their own armies piecemeal, as they arrived. “Black Jack” Pershing, whose taciturn dignity was at variance with the Europeans’ image of Americans, refused absolutely. The American Expeditionary Force, he made clear, would go into action only when it was ready. It would do so as an autonomous entity, operating separately from the British and the French. First, however, he was going to put it through considerably more training behind the front.

  The next question was where to put the AEF. The northern part of the front was British home ground and out of the question. The Champagne region, blocking the way to Paris, belonged to Pétain and the French. That left the east, the region just south of Verdun. This was agreeable to Pershing: a breakthrough there, if it captured the rail center at Metz, could hurt the Germans badly. He established his headquarters at the town of Chaumont in Lorraine. The First Division went into trai
ning nearby, and as more troops arrived a Second Division was assembled. The men were quartered in barns, the officers wherever French families had bedrooms to spare. At the midlevel of Pershing’s officer corps were men who would be giants of another, later war: Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and George Patton.

  Pershing himself had much to learn about combat on the Western Front, and though a capable executive, he was not a military genius. He refused to follow the advice of his allies and give first priority to the disciplines of trench warfare. With the confidence of a newcomer, he insisted that what lay ahead was a war of movement, of breakthrough and advance. Blind to the impact of the machine gun on infantry operations (his troops would pay a high price for this blindness), he saw skill with the rifle as the key to success.

  There was no greater challenge than supplying the AEF as it took shape not only far from home but far from France’s coasts. Three Atlantic ports were given over to the use of the Americans and were expanded to permit the unloading of a swelling stream of ships. The French were reluctant to give up control of rail lines connecting the ports with the American theater of operations, but they were won over with a kind of bribe. France was given three hundred American locomotives, and the Americans got hundreds of miles of track.

  Millions of tons of matériel had to be moved from the coast, along with hundreds of thousands of men. An office was established in Paris under a friend of Pershing’s, the Chicago banker and newly minted Brigadier General Charles G. Dawes (a future vice president of the United States), to manage the purchase of still more matériel—12 million tons by the end of the war, more than was shipped from America. The management of all these supplies had to be improvised on a day-by-day basis, and for a time the whole system teetered on the brink of chaos. Its magnitude is apparent in the details—in what was required, for example, just to provide the AEF with telephone communications. The Americans would install twenty-two thousand miles of phone lines and lease an additional twelve thousand from the French. The War Department, in response to a request from Pershing, found, recruited, and sent several hundred American telephone operators who were fluent in French.

  As May began, however, little of the American presence was visible to the people of Britain or even France. In London, Lloyd George’s government was under pressure to send more men to the continent and, at the same time, to demonstrate to a restive public that it was not ignoring opportunities for bringing the war to an end. It responded in two ways. It broadened conscription, drafting fifty thousand coal miners and men in other occupations that were previously off-limits. On May 15 Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared in the House of Commons that Britain was prepared to enter into negotiations. There was one condition, and it was no surprise to anyone: Germany must declare her willingness to restore Belgium to her prewar autonomy and neutrality. This was an opportunity for the Germans. But the men who might have responded positively—Chancellor Hertling, Foreign Minister Kühlmann—continued to be overshadowed by Ludendorff and his unbending rejection of compromise. Just a week earlier, on May 7, Ludendorff’s domination of German policy had manifested itself in a settlement with Romania. Nearly as shortsightedly greedy as Brest-Litovsk, the Treaty of Bucharest made Romania permanently subject to Berlin. It gave Germany a majority interest in the Romanian oil fields (Vienna was given 24 percent) under a lease of ninety-nine years.

  What Ludendorff planned now was a pair of offensives in rapid sequence: first at the Chemin des Dames line and then, farther west, across the little River Matz between the towns of Montdidier and Noyon less than sixty miles from Paris. The defenders, in both cases, would be Pétain’s troops. The immediate objective was a familiar one: to so threaten the French line (and also Paris) that Foch would be forced to shift his (and Haig’s) northern reserves to the south. The ultimate objective was equally familiar: to set the stage for a death blow in Flanders.

  Preparing for the new attacks would require a month. The artillery needed for Bruchmüller’s fireworks show, and all the necessary ammunition, had to be moved yet again. Many divisions of infantry—tired, disheartened troops—had to be moved as well. The French would have plenty of time to prepare.

  The French had 103 divisions on their home soil. (Others were in other places, such as Italy, Salonika, and the Middle East.) But of this total, forty-five were north of the River Oise. Even if some of these divisions were moved quickly to the southeast, Pétain could have no more than sixty with which to defend everything from the Oise to beyond Verdun. This at a time when Ludendorff had more than two hundred divisions—albeit badly battered divisions—in the west. Verdun, supposedly France’s most sacred citadel after Paris itself, was now almost undefended. Preparations for German initiatives all along Pétain’s line had been obvious for months, but determining where an attack might come had remained impossible. The challenge of responding to these difficulties was one of the greatest faced by Pétain during the war. His difficulties were magnified by the recurrent need to share whole armies with Haig.

  Pétain’s problems were further deepened by opposition, at almost every step, from Foch and other generals. These men continued to believe that the only way to wage war was to attack and attack again almost regardless of the circumstances, and that when the enemy attacked the only acceptable response was to stand in place and die rather than retreat. They saw Pétain’s openness to other tactics, his willingness to learn the lessons of the past year, as weakness bordering on cowardice. When Pétain repeated his order for the implementation of Directive No. 4, which called for an elastic defense-in-depth, he was again ignored. Foch, in his new capacity as supreme commander, explicitly undercut him by issuing, on May 4, an order of his own to the effect that when attacked the French commanders were not to consider even temporary withdrawal.

  The line along the Chemin des Dames was commanded by General Denis Duchesne, a former chief of staff to Foch and one of the new generalissimo’s most ardent disciples. His force, though mainly French, included three British divisions that after being severely mauled in the Michael fighting had been sent to this long-quiet area to recover. Contemptuous of Pétain and his directive, encouraged in his insubordination by Foch’s example, Duchesne crowded his troops into poorly prepared entrenchments up on the front line. His entire array of defensive positions, artillery included, was five miles deep at most. And all of it was north of the River Aisne, so that the defenders would have to fight with water at their backs. The whole arrangement was magnificently bold and ripe for disaster.

  General Hamilton Gordon, commander of Duchesne’s British corps, questioned the French general about his arrangements. “J’ai dit,” Duchesne haughtily replied. I have spoken. The troops were to stay where they were. If attacked, they were to yield nothing.

  Corporal Hitler, seated at left: Winner of two Iron Crosses

  As before Michael, and despite the fact that their preparations filled four weeks with the movement of men and guns, the Germans were almost miraculously successful in maintaining secrecy. More than twenty divisions were assembled opposite Duchesne, and more than three hundred thousand shells were stockpiled for each corps of two or three divisions. And yet as late as May 26, when the British reported signs of imminent trouble, Duchesne was unconcerned. “There is no indication,” he said, “that the enemy has made preparations which would enable him to attack the Chemin des Dames tomorrow.” He then departed for Paris and an assignation with his mistress.

  Hours later, at one A.M. on May 27, four thousand German guns and four thousand mortars began their work of devastation. The barrage fell mainly on the unfortunate British, whose worst fears suddenly became real. At four A.M. fourteen divisions of storm troops with seven more in close support attacked behind a wall-solid creeping barrage. They found the defenders either dead or in shocked disarray. Discovering a gap between the French and the British, they pushed through. By midday they had advanced five miles and (the British and French having failed to destroy the bridges) were across the
Aisne. Corporal Adolf Hitler, armed only with a pistol and operating alone, captured twelve French soldiers during the advance. For this action he was given an Iron Cross First Class, complementing the Iron Cross Second Class he had received almost four years earlier.

  By nightfall the Germans were across a second river, the Vesle, and still moving. Once again, however, their lack of cavalry or armored motor vehicles deprived them of the means to overtake the fleeing French and British. In an effort to compensate, the commander of the German Seventh Army ordered that the advance continue all night—a thing that proved to be physically impossible. By the time exhaustion made a halt imperative, the lead German units had moved forward twelve miles across twenty-five miles of front. It was a spectacular achievement, comparable to what Hutier had done at the start of Michael.

  All was not well, though. On the German left, near the city of Reims where the French defenses were stronger and had been more intelligently arranged, the offensive had failed. This compromised all the gains at the center and on the right, leaving the advancing units with an exposed flank. To support his offensive as it moved south, Ludendorff needed the rail centers of Soissons and Reims, the former at the western end of the entry to the new salient, the latter to the east. German troops would enter Soissons on the second day of the battle but, bizarrely, be ordered out again, apparently because their looting went out of control and their commander feared a collapse of discipline. Ludendorff, upon learning of this, would order them to go back in and stay. Soissons was not enough, however. Until Reims fell, the Germans would be advancing into a kind of sack that, while growing bigger at the bottom, had a dangerously narrow mouth and only one vulnerable lifeline.