The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  German troops maintained order in Ukraine, establishing their authority along the axes of the railway lines.

  The Ukraine did not deliver as much as expected. The new government, the Rada, challenged by the Bolsheviks, could not impose its authority on the country, and was toppled by a counter-revolution at the end of April. Order depended on German and Austrian bayonets. Wilhelm Groener, now a corps commander in Kiev, reported to Ludendorff on 23 March: ‘The administrative structure is in total disorder, completely incompetent and in no way ready for quick results. Austria-Hungary sees the situation in eminently practical terms; it would be in our interests to treat the Ukrainian government as a “cover”, and for us to do the rest ourselves’.43 All told, about 1.5 million soldiers, albeit older and less fit than those in the west, remained on the eastern front in 1918. They ate a great deal of the food that they were trying to procure for their civilian populations. Moreover, the root cause of food shortages in the Habsburg Empire, and a contributory factor in Germany itself, was transport. Food bound for Austria-Hungary had to be shipped across the Black Sea and up the Danube or brought across war-ravaged Galicia. For Germany, bringing grain from the Ukraine, and moving troops to and from an eastern front which refused to be closed down even after Brest-Litovsk was signed, put strains on a railway network already operating way beyond its normal territorial range and cursed with worn-out locomotives, inadequate maintenance and insufficient fuel. The Germans occupied the Donets basin by the end of April, but it produced only 5 million tons of coal in the first half of 1918: they had to send 80,000 tons a month from Germany to keep the trains operational.44 All four Central Powers imported only 113,421 tons of food from Ukraine in 1918: as Czernin acknowledged, ‘the hopes, which the settlement at Brest-Litovsk had universally raised, were not remotely fulfilled.’45

  After the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany acknowledged the nominal independence of the Baltic states, but aimed to exercise indirect control Civil war enabled German troops to intervene in Finland in April 1918 Red Guards are rounded up in Helsinki.

  In Germany the Vienna strikes, especially when they seemed to achieve their objectives with so much ease, inspired the workers to similar demonstrations. On 28 January 100,000 struck in Berlin, and within days 400,000 were out, with support in many major cities across Germany, including Dusseldorf, Kiel, Hamburg and Cologne. One estimate reckoned that about 4 million took to the streets. The leaders were radical shop stewards alienated from the official trade unions, but in most cases their objectives were still not revolutionary. As in Austria-Hungary, the majority Socialists responded to the initiative of the workers rather than prompted it. But in Germany the official reaction was very different. ‘My old friend, the Commandant of Berlin, General Kessel’, Princess Blücher noted, ‘is doing his best to stir up the troubled waters by stamping with his heavy foot and rattling with his iron fist.’46 The army believed that the workers were encouraging the Russians’ intransigence at the negotiating table. On 31 January a state of siege was declared, and the ringleaders were rounded up and court-martialled. A hundred and fifty of them were imprisoned, and up to 50,000 were put into uniform. In the army they joined prisoners of war released from Russia and units which had been exposed to the two-way flow of fraternisation on the eastern front. Trains which carried them westwards bore slogans like ‘Cannon fodder for Flanders’.

  GERMANY’S 1918 OFFENSIVES

  The soldiers at the front showed little sympathy for those they called the ‘rowdies’. ‘We have to thank these Berlin whelps for lengthening the war by at least half a year’, wrote one.47 So far morale at the front remained distinct from feeling at home. But the army was breaking down the division by drafting all the men it could get. For the first time since February 1916, it was planning a major offensive on the western front. Success on the battlefield would fulfil a domestic objective: like Tannenberg it would give the military popular legitimacy. Many senior army officers were of the view that it was too late, that the German army could mount only limited offensives. General Hoffmann reckoned that Germany should seek a compromise peace without annexations, oth-ers that it should roll up like a hedgehog, and fight a defensive battle on shortened lines. But the collapse of Russia permitted Germany to shift forty-four divisions to the west between 1 November 1917 and 21 March 1918.48 ‘Our overall position’, Ludendorff told a conference of army commanders on 11 November 1917, ‘requires the earliest possible blow, if possible at the end of February, or the beginning of March, before the Americans can throw strong forces into the scales.’49

  The Mediterranean proved a particularly happy hunting ground for U-boats based close by in the Adriatic. The French ship Sontay en route from Marseille to Salonika, sank in five minutes on 16 April 1917. Of the 425 passengers, 380 were rescued

  That was about as far as strategic logic went. German hopes for 1917 had been pinned on the U-boat offensive. Holtzendorff had calculated that, if Germany could sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month for five months, Britain would have to make peace. The navy delivered: it sank 860,334 tons in April, and exceeded its target in May and June. Given that it had only about thirty submarines on station at any one time, that was a remarkable achievement: before the war it was thought 222 would be needed for an effective blockade of Britain.50 But when Erzberger attacked the chancellor in July, he did so on the basis that the U-boat offensive had failed. British countermeasures were only part of the reason. By grouping merchantmen in convoys the Royal Navy made the best use of its destroyers, the bulk of which had hitherto been committed to escorting the Grand Fleet; this was also where the contribution of the United States Navy came in. Destroyers, unlike most merchant vessels, carried wirelesses, and thus ensured that the most up-to-date signals intelligence from Room 40 was available in routing convoys away from U-boats. However, the essential point was that Holtzendorff had miscalculated. He had assumed that neutral tonnage would be frightened off the seas. It was not. Freight rates and London’s control of the insurance market saw to that. Instead, less was imported into border neutrals for re-export to the Central Powers. In this respect the Germans shot themselves in the foot: the U-boat campaign tightened the allied blockade. Moreover, Britain’s own food supplies were more elastic than Holtzendorff had imagined. Britain imported about 64 per cent of its food in 1914, but it had spare pasture which it could bring into cultivation. Output was promoted rather than retarded, especially since rationing, when it was eventually introduced, was exercised at the point of sale, not at the point of production. Wheat yields rose 40 per cent between 1914 and 1918, and those of most other foodstuffs were at least constant.51 Imports emphasised commodities like grain which were more efficient than livestock in the ratio of weight to calorific value. Mortality rates among the working class declined, as diets became healthier and rationing guaranteed a minimum subsistence for the underprivileged.52 By the time Britain moved to full-scale rationing, in 1918, the worst of the danger to its trade was over, and the benefits were largely psychological. With a minimal black market, state controls on food supply promoted social solidarity - rather than, as in Germany, undermining it. ‘Look well at the loaf on your breakfast table and treat it as if it were real gold,’ declared Kennedy Jones, director-general of food economy, in a speech in Edinburgh in May 1917, ‘because the British loaf is going to beat the German.’53

  The German supreme command at Spa, in Belgium, June 1918 The Kaiser is flanked by Hindenburg to the left and Ludendorff to the right

  By June 1917 the German navy was ordering new submarines for 1919, effectively acknowledging that Holtzendorff’s assumptions had already been proven wrong. However, the total number of vessels available at any one time fell thereafter. It was symptomatic of the army’s approach to the direction of the war that neither materials nor men were released for an even bigger construction programme. Germany did not have the resources or the planning mechanisms to enable it to mount a major effort by land and sea simultaneously. In 1916 the land
offensive in the west had not been accompanied by a U-boat campaign; in 1917, the year of the U-boat, there was no major offensive in France; and in 1918 the land option was pursued to the detriment of the naval. In January 1918 Hindenburg told the Kaiser that ‘We have to defeat the Western Powers in order to secure the political and economic position in the world that we need’.54 But even if the Germans got to Paris and Calais, as some optimists hoped, their victory would not knock out either Britain or the United States. Czernin believed that Britain might be persuaded to negotiate before the American presence was felt, so that it retained the upper hand in world politics, but that in turn implied a German readiness to compromise on Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine. Neither Hindenburg nor Ludendorff would do so, especially when they and others were increasingly thinking in terms of the ‘Second Punic War’. If the current world war did not secure the full package of German war aims, it would have to be followed by another. In that case it would be even more important to conclude this one with gains which would enable the next to be fought to a victorious conclusion.

  Planning at the operational level in the winter of 1917-18 was as confused as at that of overall strategy. If the aim was to knock out France, Verdun was still the sector that could be treated in isolation. But the battle of 1916 carried its own lesson: the French army would not easily give in. The British army was seen as a softer nut, less adroit and less committed to holding ground which was not its own. Therefore, the Army Group commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria favoured an attack in Flanders, directed due west, and designed to cut off the British in the Ypres salient. But the boggy ground militated against an attack early in the year, and so the balance swung to objectives further south. The sector chosen, from Arras south to St Quentin, covered the old Somme battlefield, whose devastated terrain would slow the German advance just at the point where it might hope to achieve breakthrough. Moreover, the main thrust of the attack, mounted by the 2nd and 17th Armies, would have to go first to the south-west, to clear the salient at Cambrai, and then re-orientate itself in mid-battle to go north-west towards Arras and Vimy. To their south, the 18th Army, originally given the task of protecting their left flank, had the limits on its objectives removed and so was encouraged to push south if it could. There was a distinct possibility that the Germans’ effort would dissipate itself in divergent directions. Germany had sufficient resources for one major offensive, but seemed to be committing itself to a series of indecisive engagements. Crown Prince Rupprecht was not happy. This was the first offensive in the west that Hindenburg and Ludendorff had mounted, and he believed that they underestimated the difficulties. When, on 21 January 1918, he pointed out that the attack did ‘not lead in any favourable operational direction’, Ludendorff replied: ‘In Russia we have always set ourselves a close objective and then seen how things develop’. Rupprecht responded with two observations: first, that tactical success could not be an end in itself but had to have an operational foundation, and, second, that fighting the Russians was not the same thing as taking on the British or French.55

  German infantry enter a French village in 1918. The officer on the right is adjusting his map case, and looking to his bugler, still necessary for communications in the field. Unlike many German units, this one has sufficient transport.

  Rupprecht was marginalised. The German principle of delegating command forward, which applied at the forward edge of the battlefield, was not applied at the level of higher command. Ludendorff used three armies for the offensive, code-named ‘Michael’, and divided them over two army groups, so that decisions had to work their way up the command chain, not down it. Only he could resolve disputes, and it was clear that his own conceptual grasp was limited. ‘Ludendorff is a man of absolute determination,’ Rupprecht noted, ‘but determination alone is not enough, if it is not combined with clear-headed intelligence.’56

  Ludendorff had decided that in the circumstances of trench warfare tactics were all. If a breakthrough could be effected, then strategy could follow. A sequence of battles in the second half of 1917, the capture of Riga, the breakthrough at Caporetto, and a counterattack at Cambrai, did indeed suggest that the Germans had cracked the conundrums of trench warfare. In January 1918 they promulgated a new manual, the ‘attack in position warfare’. This was not as fresh in its thinking as is sometimes claimed. Its immediate origins lay in the manner in which the Germans had conducted their defensive battles of 1917, on the Chemin des Dames and at Ypres. By adopting defence in depth, with the front line only thinly held and the main position to the rear, the Germans had drawn the enemy attack away from its own artillery support, and been able to stress the counterattack even in defensive battles. They had also delegated command forward, to ensure that the response to any allied gains was immediate, and to enable lost ground to be recaptured before it had been consolidated. But the roots of the tactics of 1918 went even further back: to 1915, and Willy Rohr’s first storm-troops. By 1918 squads or groups of seven to ten storm-troopers were trained to bypass strong points, maintaining the momentum of the advance by seeking soft spots. Supporting formations would mop up.

  The other key to reintegrating fire and movement was the artillery, and here the principal innovator on the German side was a lieutenant-colonel who had retired before the war’s outbreak and had still not been formally restored to the active list, Georg Bruchmüller. The bombardment on 21 March 1918 lasted only five hours, its aim being to stun and suppress, not to destroy and - above all - not to forfeit surprise. Its principal target was less the defensive positions of the enemy’s infantry than his artillery batteries. Once armies had learnt countermeasures, gas was not a big killer in the First World War. However, gas shells meant that it could be used with precision. Bruchmüller fired tear-gas shells at the same time as phosgene, forcing enemy gun crews to take off their gas masks, to relieve the irritation to their eyes, and so expose their lungs. The sophisticated use of artillery meant that the battle, which had become linear because of the trenches, was also fought in depth. Effective counter-battery work enabled the German infantry to assemble without itself coming under fire. At 9.40 a.m. storm-troopers clambered out of their trenches, and crossed no man’s land in groups rather than waves, staying close to the rolling barrage that preceded them.

  Ludendorff’s problem at the tactical level was less in the theory and more in the practice. He reckoned standards had sunk so low that the army was little better than a militia. In the winter of 1917-18 a total of fifty-six divisions were brought out of the line for training in the attack. But the real emphasis was laid less on the skills of the unit and more on the morale of the individual. The advent of new technology to the battlefield, the battle of matériel, had increased the strains to which the soldier was exposed. In seeking to motivate him the Germans returned to the principles of 1914: ‘the troops must have dash if an assault is to be successful’.57 The army was divided into mobile, attack and trench divisions, the first of these being given better rations and expected to lead the attack. Morale, which had slumped in late October 1917, did rise in the lead-up to the offensives in the west. ‘Everywhere men are working feverishly’, one soldier wrote home on 21 March, ‘and the picture on the roads is as excited as in the first months of the war.’58 But the enthusiasm was conditional: it assumed that the offensive would end the war. Going forward seemed to be the shortest and quickest way home.

  The principal blow struck the British 5th Army, under General Sir Hubert Gough, astride the Somme. This was the most thinly defended of all British sectors of the line. It had been occupied only after the German retreat to the Hindenburg line a year before, and much of it had been held by the French until only a few weeks previously. Its defensive positions, although marked out, had not been fully prepared. Both Haig and Pétain knew that an attack was imminent but had not been able to decide where the main blow would fall. The fact that the Germans took so long to make up their minds helped the deception, as did raids and artillery preparations along the l
ength of the front. But the biggest surprise was tactical. The British had underestimated the impact of the initial German assault. The latter was helped by the weather. Low-lying fog enabled the storm-troopers to get between the machine-gun nests in the British forward line. ‘We honestly could not see each other, it was that thick with the German guns and the fog’, recalled Corporal Ted Gale. British casualties on the first day were 38,512, of whom as many as 21,000 were captured. Gale was one of them: ‘Jerry had broken through on right and left of us. This was a mopping-up party coming. They’d never attempted a frontal attack.’59