The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Panic spread down the command chain, as well as up. The Germans did not get as far on the first day as they hoped. But British corps commanders, unable to see what was happening, overreacted. ‘As soon as telegraphic & telephone communications with Brigades ceased to exist, Divisional Headquarters in many cases became paralysed,’ one staff officer recalled. ‘They had become so welded to a set piece type of warfare, that, when open warfare occurred, they failed to appreciate the situation, and were unable to function independent of a fixed headquarters.’60 Gough’s own orders created confusion as to whether the second line was to be held or not. The result was that the Germans’ gains on the second and third days were amplified as the British fell back. On the 23rd even the cautious Crown Prince Rupprecht was prompted to conclude that ‘The progress of our offensive is so quick, that one cannot follow it with a pen’.61

  Territorially the attacks of late March 1918 produced the most significant advances in the west since 1914. They reached almost forty miles, and threatened the vital railway junction of Amiens. But they followed the line of least enemy resistance. Consequently, the German advances were greatest to the south, where they had less strategic effect. To the north, the British 3rd Army (under General Sir Julian Byng) held its positions around the crucial Vimy Ridge. If the aim was to swing north, this was not where the Germans were going. Moreover, the Germans could not keep up with their own success. Deprived of horses, they lacked cavalry to exploit and transport to bring up artillery and supplies. German units in the front line were not relieved, but were expected to sustain the momentum of the advance. The best were killed, and those who survived stopped to plunder and loot: ‘we are already in the English rest areas’, Rudolph Binding wrote as his unit approached Albert on 27 March, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’.62

  German field artillery in action in the March 1918 offensive

  The ‘Michael’ offensive was formally closed down on 5 April. Ludendorff launched four more. On 9 April, in ’Georgette‘, he struck in Flanders, a far more sensible location if his strategic purpose was to roll the British up against the Channel ports. But by the same token the British defences here were better prepared and more dogged. When ’Georgette’ was closed down, the greatest advance was twelve miles. Ludendorff now switched his attention to the Aisne and the French. Pétain had always feared he would, and so had urged the French to thin out their first defensive line and adopt defence in depth. But his army commanders could not bring themselves wantonly to lose more French territory, and the defences proved brittle when hit by the Germans in Operation ‘Blücher’ on 27 May 1918. Some unfortunate British divisions, taken out of the line to the north in the hope of a rest on a quiet sector, found themselves once again in the teeth of a German attack. The Chemin des Dames offensive buckled the French 7th Army, and reached Château-Thierry on the Marne, fifty-six miles from Paris. What was conceived of as a limited offensive to push the French away from the British now assumed its own importance. Paris itself came under fire from Germany artillery, and the panic in the civil population reproduced that of 1914. Ludendorff therefore renewed the attack against the French on 9 June, between Noyon and Montdidier, in Operation ’Gneisenau‘. Gains were limited, and the French, supported by the Americans, counterattacked at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Ludendorff’s last offensive, in Champagne on 15 July, hit French units which had now mastered the defensive battle, and got nowhere.

  In mid-July 1918 the German Empire stood at its greatest ever extent. It had pushed on Paris in the west; in the east it held the Ukraine; the Baltic states were under its control; in the Caucasus, the Russian collapse had reopened the route to Baku; and in Italy its Austrian ally had attacked on the Piave in June. For some civilians at home the army seemed poised to deliver the victory that would resolve all their domestic problems. But this time the soldiers knew that they had shot their bolt. The effort to mount the offensives had withdrawn too many troops from other fronts, threatening them with destabilisation. The attacks themselves had created great salients on the western front without achieving a breakthrough. On 20 March, the German army in the west held a front of 390 km; by 25 June 1918 that front extended 510 km. In the interim the army had lost over 800,000 men, with a disproportionate share borne by crack troops.63 During the summer the first wave of the influenza epidemic that was to ravage Europe in 1918-19 hit the German army in the west. At home munitions production was throttled back for lack of men to use its output in the field. The German historian Gerhard Ritter, who was then a young officer serving at the front, called the offensives ‘a crushing disappointment. Once again war’s end had receded into the distant future, once again hecatombs had done no more than haplessly lengthen the front; and how could what had not been achieved in the first great blow, struck with every resource, full surprise, and tremendous artillery barrages, now be won with far weaker forces, consisting largely of decimated and exhausted divisions?’64

  Despite being engaged in the most desperate fighting on the western front in a campaign which everybody else saw as Germany’s last gasp, Ludendorff was still engaging in Napoleonic fantasies. On 21 May 1918, he wrote to Hans von Seeckt, now chief of staff on the Caucasian front: ‘There is the hope that we will yet succeed in forcing France to the ground this year. But even if we are victorious in France, it is still in no way certain that we can force the English to a peace acceptable to us, if we are not able to threaten their most sensitive spot, in India. Therefore, we must now prepare ourselves as this necessity approaches.’ 65 In June and July he planned operations for the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, largely using Turkish forces as though they were capable of such grandiose objectives and as though they were willing to fulfil Germany’s objectives rather than their own. He had lost all grasp of strategic reality. The Turks were no longer willing to do Germany’s bidding. Hindenburg asked Enver Pasha to withdraw the Ottoman 3rd Army from any points beyond the frontiers set by Brest-Litovsk, and concentrate against the British in Persia and Mesopotomia. Enver refused. He was bent not only on supporting the Muslim peoples of the north Caucasus but also in getting the oil of Baku. So were the Germans, but for themselves. Halil Pasha, the army group commander in the Caucasus, declared at the end of June that, ‘If necessary I would not hold back from waging war on the Germans’.66

  The alliance of the Central Powers was coming apart. The Germans had created a supreme military command in September 1916. On the suggestion of Enver, the Kaiser had been nominated as commander-in-chief, and the German general staff was installed as the supreme command’s advisory body. ‘In other words’, as August von Cramon shrewdly observed, ‘there would be a supreme council of war, but not a supreme command.’67 Moreover, the inadequacies of Germany’s own arrangements were extended to the alliance as a whole: the remit of the ‘supreme war command’ embraced only military matters narrowly defined, and in the circumstances of ’total war’ that was clearly insufficient.

  Enver had proposed the arrangement to obviate the tensions between Germany and Austria-Hungary. But it had not. The biggest alliance pressure on Austria-Hungary was fear. For Czernin, the rumours that it wanted peace forced it to disprove them by showing itself loyal, but in April 1918 the French published the Sixte negotiations of the previous year. Czernin felt that he had been betrayed by Karl, and resigned. In the eyes of the Entente his actions confirmed that the alliance between Austria-Hungary and Germany would be broken only by its complete defeat. At one level the Entente was right. Some Austrians, observing the impending disintegration of the empire, looked to Germany to hold it together - or, more realistically, to incorporate the German element within a greater Germany. The Germans themselves seized the moment to tie the bonds tighter in a meeting of the two emperors on 12 May. The reality, however, was that Austria-Hungary was caught in a situation where nothing added up any more. The army was divided against itself, with the chief of the general staff wanting every available man at the front, while the Ministry of War needed seven divisions at
home to maintain order. General Landwehr, the Austrian food supremo in Vienna, seized Ukrainian grain bound for Germany as it was transported up the Danube. Food might bring domestic order, but the Germans’ quid pro quo for more grain was six divisions for the western front. Vienna agreed to provide three. Austria-Hungary was truly shackled to Germany, but by the same token Germany was itself now too weak to survive without its ally.

  10

  WAR WITHOUT END

  COALITION WARFARE

  The First World War was a coalition war. Its intensity, its scale and its length were all the products of the alliances that sustained it. In 1918 one, that of the Central Powers, began to fall apart, but the other, that of the Entente, achieved a fusion, albeit flawed, which enabled it to wield greater military and economic power than any unit previously seen in the history of the world. In liberalism, however imperfectly expressed and however compromised by the business of waging war, it had a common ideological focus. ‘What we demand in this war’, Woodrow Wilson told the United States Congress on 8 January 1918, ‘is nothing peculiar to ourselves.’1

  Wilson went on to give shape to that ambition, spelling out his Fourteen Points which he believed could deliver a ‘peace without victory’. His aim was to keep Russia in the war, and, in providing a counterpoint to Bolshevism, he was sufficiently anti-imperialist to alarm both Britain and France. Freedom of the seas (his second point) challenged British maritime supremacy, and his fifth called for the recognition of the rights of colonial populations. But the specifics were ambiguous and negotiable. In the event the allies’ responses were muted; the Fourteen Points embraced their fundamental territorial ambitions within Europe, and included the German evacuation of Belgium, the return to France of Alsace-Lorraine, and the settlement of Italy’s frontier with Austria-Hungary on the basis of nationality. Wilson’s key audience was not governments but peoples. Only three days previously Lloyd George had delivered a speech on war aims to the Trades Union Congress in London, which was couched in similar terms and in which he had embraced open diplomacy and the idea of a ‘democratic peace’. ‘The days of the Treaty of Vienna are long past. We can no longer submit the future of European civilisation to the arbitrary decisions of a few negotiators striving to secure by chicanery or persuasion the interests of this or that dynasty or nation. The settlement of the new Europe must be based on such grounds of reason and justice as will give some promise of stability. Therefore it is we feel that government with the consent of the governed must be the basis for any territorial settlement in this war.’2

  Clemenceau may have entertained reservations about some of the things said by his British and American counterparts, but the French left did not. Publicly, he endorsed Lloyd George. Moreover, Wilson’s fourteenth and best known point, the formation of ‘a general association of nations’, had British and French authors too - including Jan Christian Smuts and Lord Robert Cecil; the latter had drafted Lloyd George’s speech. ‘The programme of the world’s peace’, Wilson said, ‘is our programme ... the only possible programme.’ 3 In the popular imagination he had captured the moral high ground for the Entente.

  America’s participation in the alliance, even if as a self-proclaimed associate rather than as a full ally, also brought in other powers to what was evidently a going concern. The states of South America either entered the war or severed relations with Germany. In Asia, China declared war on the Central Powers on 14 August 1917 and offered 300,000 men for service in Europe. In the Balkans, Greece joined the Entente on 2 July 1917. But, after Bulgaria did so in September 1915, no other power in the world sided with Germany.

  The combined populations of the four Central Powers totalled 144 million in 1914; those of the principal Entente powers of 1918 (including their colonies) 690 million.4 However, economic potential and military capability were not the same. Turkey, despite its backwardness, had twice defeated Britain in battle, and its military contribution to the war as a whole was greater than that of the United States. By the same token, the Entente’s comparative strength rested on more than the sum of its resources. First, its principals were to a greater extent equals than were the Central Powers. That did not mean there were not great disparities of wealth between them: by 1918 America had the money, but France still had the biggest army and Britain the biggest navy. Second, the allies had in 1915 begun a process of organic growth which, however fractious, had reached a maturity and breadth by 1918 which ensured that joint military command was the coping-stone of the whole - not, as in the case of the Central Powers, its only foundation. Third, many of the fronts, particularly the principal one in the west, were genuinely shared responsibilities. Germany shored up the western front single-handedly, but then on other fronts could expect its allies to act as virtual mercenaries, providing the cannon fodder for German commanders to use according to German priorities. There were Entente fronts, pre-eminently the Italian, which were largely sustained by the army of one nation, but that army sustained its legitimacy by acting in conformity with its own national objectives.

  Indeed that was the Entente’s recurring problem with Italy: it timed its offensives to suit its own needs, not those of achieving unity of effect in space and time. The collapse at Caporetto created the opportunity both to integrate Italy’s efforts with those on other fronts and to complete the integration of the Entente by the establishment of a Supreme War Council. In July 1917 Robertson and Foch, as their countries’ chiefs of staff, had met Generals Cadorna and Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, to discuss the acceleration of the American military commitment to Europe in the light of Russia’s collapse. They had broached the idea of amalgamating the Americans with more experienced British and French units. But Pershing’s orders told him that ‘the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved’. This was not just a matter of national pride or public opinion, it was also one of policy: an independent army would enable America to retain a free hand at the peace negotiations. Dogmatic and rigid, a teetotaller, ‘Black Jack’ Pershing had lost his wife and three daughters in a fire in 1915; although he consoled himself with a mistress while in France, his men were banned access to brothels. He adhered to the principle of independence with similar vehemence. However, there was one major obstacle to its fulfilment: the lack of a sizeable body of proven American commanders and trained staff officers. The British experience had shown that it might be possible to improvise a mass army in comparatively short order, but that, as Haig’s director of military intelligence put it, ’It will be a very difficult job for them [the Americans] to get a serviceable staff going even in a year’s time‘.5 The allies’ military representatives had therefore concluded that some form of inter-allied organisation would be required to facilitate this process.

  The prime ministers of Britain and France, together with Robertson and Foch, met at Rapallo between 5 and 7 November 1917 to coordinate their response to Italy’s plea for help. The Italians, according to their prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, ‘were treated like servants’.6 The problem was Cadorna, who not only failed to attend but also submitted such inflated and inaccurate calculations of the German and Austro-Hungarian forces opposing him as to confirm the doubts about his competence. Foch and Robertson were being asked to commit eleven French and British divisions to a command structure in which they had no faith. Both Foch and Pétain were adamant that the six French divisions should remain at the disposal of France, and should be handled in conjunction with those on the French front: in other words, that the line from the Somme to the Piave should be a unit.

  The French divisions in Italy were placed under Foch as chief of the general staff, not Pétain as France’s commander-in-chief: another step in the principle of dividing and ruling the military. Of the representatives at Rapallo, Foch was the only one whose motives in promoting the idea of a Supreme War Council smacked of altruism, and even he - having been tarred in 1916 with the brush o
f Joffre and of the Somme battle - had a career to resurrect. His prime minister, still Painlevé for a few days more, saw the creation of a Supreme War Council as an interim step towards the promotion of Foch as allied commander-in-chief, but felt that he could not say so to the British: that was understandable after the Nivelle affair. Besides, Painlevé and Pétain thought the principal benefit in the creation of joint command would be that the British would take over more of the line from the battered French army. The French therefore proposed that Foch, being chief of the general staff, should also be their permanent military representative on the Supreme War Council. The corollary of such an arrangement would have been that Robertson would similarly exercise both functions for Britain. This was totally unacceptable to Lloyd George, who saw the Supreme War Council as an opportunity not only to subordinate Haig but also to break the axis between him and Robertson. He persuaded the French that Foch should not hold both appointments simultaneously and asked Henry Wilson, then languishing in a job at home, to be Britain’s military representative on the Supreme War Council. Wilson, like his chum Foch, found his career reviving because of his usefulness to civilians as an alternative source of professional military advice.

  The key issue facing the new body was the creation of a strategic reserve, not least in anticipation of a German offensive in the west in 1918. Robertson argued that British reserves should be under his control as it was his job as chief of staff to know their capabilities, and Haig and Pétain both said that they could not spare any divisions to create a reserve. Robertson resigned over the issue, and Wilson succeeded him, with Rawlinson moving into the Versailles post. Rawlinson backed Haig, and when the German offensive was unleashed between St Quentin and Arras on 21 March 1918 the Supreme War Council was no more than an advisory body, with no troops under its command and no ability to help General Gough’s 5th Army.