The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The success at Cambrai was the product of the short bombardment as much as of the massed use of tanks. These were the principles carried forward into 1918. In the last year of the war bombardments were short, but their effects were greater than those of the long bombardments of 1916 and early 1917. First, second and third lines of defence could be isolated from each other by curtains of fire, which moved forward or back according to plan, matching the type of shell to the nature of the target. Confronted with mortal danger, and cut off from resupply or relief, the defenders had to respond in the most unnatural way of all: ‘In absolute darkness we simply lay and trembled from sheer nervous tension’. Industrialised war enforced passivity, as one of Pershing’s officers, Hervey Allen, found out: ‘There is a faraway moan that grows to a scream, then a roar like a train, followed by a ground-shaking smash and a diabolical red light.... Everybody simply shakes and crawls . . . A hunching of the shoulders and then another comes, and the thought - How long, how long? There is nothing to do. Whether you get through or not is just sheer chance and nothing more.’20

  Accuracy of fire meant less wasted effort, but quantity still had a part to play. More guns were available, especially heavy ones. In 1918 France’s holdings of field artillery, 5,000 guns, were comparable with those of 1914, but those of heavy artillery had risen from 300 to 5,700. Britain manufactured 3,226 guns in 1915 but 10,680 in 1918. Therefore as many shells could be fired in a short period as could be fired in a longer period two years previously. Shell production was now always ahead of shell consumption. Pétain focused on mobility to create concentrations of fire, but in the British case abundance meant that the guns did not necessarily have to be moved to create a local concentration, so attacks could be launched in rapid succession at different points of the line with minimum delay. At the end of the war, the French artillery constituted 37 per cent of the army, as opposed to 18 per cent in May 1915, and the Royal Artillery mustered half a million men, and constituted a quarter of the British army. Germany’s artillery strength was greater than both Britain’s and France’s combined at the beginning of 1918, but by November was comparable with Britain’s alone. Deliveries of new field guns fell from 3,000 per month in 1917 to 2,000 in February 1918 and 1,200 in September. Having had 7,130 guns at the front in February 1917, Germany had only 6,172 a year later. Lack of men and horses to provide gun crews was a more important reason for this decline than falling productivity, although this too had its impact: from July 1918 the monthly output of shells was half that of 1917. In a war in which 70 per cent of all casualties were attributed to artillery it was a fatal weakness.

  THE ENTENTE’S VICTORIES

  ‘The Boche holds firm,’ wrote Charles Mangin, commander of the Soissons counterattack, to his wife on 28 July 1918.21 That was not how it seemed on the German side of the line. Opposite him, Crown Prince Wilhelm said the whole position had changed. His fellow army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht, concluded on 20 July that ‘we stand at the turning point of the war: what I expected first for the autumn, the necessity to go over to the defensive, is already on us, and in addition all the gains which we made in the spring - such as they were - have been lost again’. But Ludendorff refused to confront realities, defying the advice of his senior commanders that they pull back or even negotiate, and ignoring the evidence of the collapsing morale of his troops. ‘Poor provisions, heavy losses and the deepening influenza have deeply depressed the spirits of the men in the III Infantry Division’, Rupprecht wrote on 3 August. Postal censors told him that letters home complained of the mounting numbers of Americans and of British aerial domination, and - even more importantly - called for peace in ways which linked front and rear; war, they said, was the product of capitalism, and ‘at home, they must strike and strike hard, and cause a revolution, and then peace must come’.22

  Nobody on the allied side had yet realised that victory was possible this side of Christmas. In London the war cabinet was making preparations for 1919. In France Foch convened a conference of the national army commanders on 24 July. He appreciated that the opportunity to take the initiative had now arrived; morally, materially and numerically the allies were in the ascendant on the western front. But even he, ebullient spokesman of the offensive that he was, rejected a single decisive blow. Instead he envisaged a series of limited attacks. Their aims would be to free the principal railway lines radiating out from Paris, to regain the economic heartlands of France and above all to improve the armies’ lines of communication for the next, more mobile, phase of operations. ‘These movements should be executed with such rapidity as to inflict upon the enemy a succession of blows. This condition necessarily limits their extent . . . These actions must succeed each other at brief intervals, so as to embarrass the enemy in the utilization of his reserves and not allow him sufficient time to fill up his units.’23 Here was a concept of operations which harnessed the Entente’s superior resources to the constraints of trench war. Attacks would go no deeper into the enemy’s positions than the reach of the artillery supporting them. By rapidly switching the axis of the advance, Foch would pull the enemy first in one direction and then in another. Most important of all, it was a framework to which Pershing, Pétain and Haig were prepared to subscribe. The first recognised that the inexperience of his army required him to go gently; the other two needed to husband their forces after the battering of the first half of 1918. Foch was being realistic: he himself had only a skeleton staff, and his powers extended little further than any consensus he could forge. Individual blows, coordinated in time and space, allowed each national army to do its own thing.

  Haig had drawn up a plan for a limited offensive at Amiens, a direct consequence of his precipitate withdrawal in March. The German line here lacked deep defensive positions. Orchestrated by Rawlinson, who had been recalled to the command of the 4th Army, and supported by the French to the south, the attack maximised firepower and method. Each gun was allocated twenty-five yards of trench, and thanks in part to allied aerial superiority (1,800 British and French aircraft were assembled) 95 per cent of German batteries were located in advance. On the Somme British battalions had numbered 1,000 men and were equipped with four Lewis light machine-guns and one or two light trench mortars. At Amiens they numbered 500 men but had thirty Lewis guns, eight mortars and - if in the first line - were accompanied by six tanks.24 In all over 400 tanks took part in the attack on 8 August; by the 9th only 145 were fit for action. Mechanical problems were their principal defect, but the Germans also learnt to overcome what Ludendorff called ‘tank fright’. Stiffer anti-tank defences contributed to such high losses that never again in the war did more than 150 tanks go into action at any one time.

  Ludendorff dubbed 8 August ‘the black day of the German army’. Of 27,000 German casualties, fully 12,000 had surrendered, an unprecedentedly high proportion. But the German army did not cease fighting thereafter. Front-line resistance continued until the armistice; the problems of desertion and disobedience were more in its rear, on the lines of communication and at home. The significance of Amiens lay as much in its shock effect on Luden-dorff, who at last woke up to what others had been saying for weeks. But when the Kaiser summoned his principal political and military leaders to a council at Spa on 13 and 14 August, Ludendorff failed to present a realistic appraisal of the military situation. Instead he blamed the feeling at home. Over the next six weeks his mood showed alarming swings, as he oscillated between unfounded optimism and the search for scapegoats other than himself. A psychologist told him he needed to rest and to sing German folk songs on waking in the morning. At Spa, Wilhelm thought it sensible to seek an intermediary in order to open peace negotiations. But his foreign minister, Paul von Hintze, still made such an approach conditional on the next German victory, and could not resolve definitively to abandon Germany’s claims to Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine. A week later, Hintze told the party leaders that the army believed that ‘there was no reason to doubt ultimate victory. We shall be vanquish
ed only when we doubt that we shall win’.25

  Soldiers of the Devonshire Regiment, part of the British 62nd Division serving in the French sector, capture a German in the Bois de Reims during the battle of Tardenois in late July 1918.

  The Austrians did doubt it. Karl, accompanied by Count Burian, Czernin’s successor as foreign minister, and Arz, attended the Spa conference and said that direct negotiations were needed as soon as possible. The Entente had been cautious about the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, which if united would at least provide a counterweight to Germany in central Europe. In January 1918 Wilson’s tenth point had allowed for the ‘autonomous’ development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary. But his thirteenth provided specifically for an independent Polish state, and, although he had been more cautious about Czechoslovakia, by the summer it, too, had received de facto recognition. With the coalescence of their war aims, the allies were able to coordinate their efforts in propaganda as in other spheres. This was an approach that appealed to the Italian high command. Throughout 1918 Armando Diaz resisted pressure from the Supreme War Council for an Italian offensive, and put his effort into the subversion of the Austro-Hungarian army instead. Ideas were less costly in lives than bullets, and so did not threaten the fragile morale of the Italian army after Caporetto. The Italians were not very successful: in June 1918 the Austro-Hungarian army attacked on the Piave, and the head of the British military mission reported that ’as a whole the enemy troops . . . are fighting with great determination‘.26 The attack failed, but not primarily because of desertion or nationalist sentiment. The men were exhausted, without equipment and, more importantly, food. They had dubbed the attack on the Piave the ’bread offensive‘. The pressures to which they were succumbing came from behind them rather than from in front; as in the German army, grievances at home were merging with grievances in the army. Allied propaganda aimed at the subject nationalities was blamed for strikes and mutinies generated by other causes. In August malaria added to the woes of the Austro-Hungarian army in Italy: two-thirds of its divisions were below half strength. When Hintze told Karl and his advisers on 3 September that Ludendorff was predicting eventual success on the western front, they decided on unilateral action. On 14 September Burian asked for talks on peace terms. The allies rejected him: in a belated bid to save the Dual Monarchy the Austro-Hungarians had at last resolved to abandon the alliance with Germany, but as in 1914 the Entente leaders saw the two as indivisible.

  Haig had been surprised by the scale of his success at Amiens and had had to hold Foch back from pushing the offensive beyond its limits. But both commanders now realised, as Haig told a sceptical Winston Churchill on 21 August, that ‘we ought to do our utmost to get a decision this autumn’.27 The American army was capable of independent operations, as it showed when it pinched out the St Mihiel salient south of Verdun between 12 and 16 September. It got the early success that Pershing had seen as essential to buoy the morale of his young army; it had done so in part because the Germans had taken the decision two days earlier not to hold the salient. But, rather than continue the advance, it was then redeployed, with considerable logistical difficulty, to the west of Verdun, to form the right flank of a joint attack with the French, going north through the Argonne forest. Foch hoped to get into the guts of the German rear areas from below. Beginning on 26 September and continuing through October, the French and American armies punched their way through deep German defences, the Americans’ right flank following the line of the Meuse valley.

  The British attacked on the other side of the enormous salient that made up the German position in France. The 1st and 3rd Armies took over from Rawlinson’s 4th in continuous fighting from late August into September. The battlefield was familiar from two years previously: ‘Then we attacked en masse from the south-east, and fought for yards of ground thickly held by an enemy with no thought of retreat. Now the front in movement was wide and elastic, the fighting was open, and we were attacking positions from the flank.’28 The Germans fell back to the Hindenburg line. Formidable obstacle though it was, it had been built at the end of 1916. It was an indication of the war’s dynamism and the pace of its tactical innovation that its principles were now obsolescent. Made up of six defensive lines, it formed a zone 6,000 yards deep, with concrete emplacements and belts of barbed wire. But the southern part included the St Quentin canal, and did not therefore rest on a reverse slope out of artillery observation, and the whole was linear in design when more recent constructions had been made up of strongpoints, arranged in chequer-board fashion to create converging fields of fire. Unlike Amiens the Hindenburg line was strongly held, and unlike Cambrai it presented no opportunity for surprise. The answer was a 56-hour artillery bombardment, using 1,637 guns on a 10,000-yard front, twice the density of the Somme, and targeting the defences rather than the defenders. In the last twenty-four hours the British fired a record 945,052 shells. The capture of the canal by the 46th Division was one of the great feats of arms of the war, helped by heavy early-morning fog and a creeping barrage which rained down 126 shells for every 500 yards of German trench for eight hours.29 The Hindenburg line was breached on 29 September.

  For three days the entire western front had been under coordinated allied attack. To the north of the Hindenburg line the Canadians in the 1st Army, supported by the 3rd Army on their right, had crossed the Canal du Nord, and above them two more British armies and - for the first time since 1914 - the Belgians were pushing into Flanders. Paul von Hintze, briefed on the realities of the military situation by Ludendorff’s subordinates, realised that defeat was likely to precipitate a revolution. To avert it, he proposed a ‘revolution from above’. Germany’s government should be reformed on more democratic lines as a preliminary to any peace negotiations. This might achieve two objectives: it would preserve the monarchy and it might channel the opprobrium for defeat on to the left and not the right.

  These careful calculations needed time to be put into effect. They were wrong-footed by Ludendorff. On the night of 28 September his nerve cracked: he fell to the floor and according to some accounts foamed at the mouth. At a crown council convened at Spa on the following morning, he demanded an immediate armistice on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. He had suddenly changed his assessment of the military situation, and as a result had at last usurped the political process. Georg von Hertling, who reached the meeting too late to play an active part, resigned the chancellorship. His successor, Max von Baden, arrived in Berlin to take up office at 4 a.m. on 1 October, and promptly made it clear that his whole policy depended on holding out for some while longer. He protested that Ludendorff was inverting the logical sequence: ‘a request for an armistice makes any peace initiative impossible’.30 Germany was in danger of forfeiting its long-term powers of negotiation because the army insisted it needed a short-term breathing space.

  The advance east of Arras: Canadians pass through a burning street in Cambrai, 9 October 1918 Dominion forces spearheaded many of the British attacks of the last hundred days of the war.

  None the less, Ludendorff’s erratic behaviour was not in any immediate sense the product of the situation on the western front. ‘Deep but partial break-ins; on the whole the front still holds’, one of his staff officers wrote in his diary on 28 September. ‘I believe that we are still parrying the assault this time.’31 The crisis was triggered by the news that Bulgaria had sought and been granted an armistice. In some respects the First World War ended where it began, in the Balkans. But the impact of Bulgaria’s decision makes another more substantial point: that in the First World War no front stood in total isolation from another.

  The Salonika front had been locked in stalemate for much of 1916 and 1917. For the French and British troops there it may have been a side-show, a theatre of war which exposed them to boredom, extremes of weather, and disease - above all malaria: British non-battle casualties in Macedonia exceeded battle casualties by twenty to one. But for their allies this was where the Third Balk
an War now had its focus. The Serb army, evacuated from Albania via Corfu, represented the nation in exile and carried its hopes for a greater Serbia. To their left, at Valona on the Adriatic coast, were the Italians, harbouring ambitions of conquest in Dalmatia and so set to rival Serbia. To their right were the Greeks, who had failed to support Serbia in 1914 but who had been dragooned into joining the Entente in June 1917. King Constantine’s pragmatic neutrality in 1915 had been undermined by his prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos. Venizelos argued that joining the Entente would open the door to a greater Greece, and in 1916 secured the Entente’s recognition for a provisional government in Thessalonica. In 1917, with a disregard for neutrality which accorded ill with their defence of Belgium, the British blockaded Greece and the French landed at Piraeus; Constantine abdicated.

  The mountainous front that faced this multi-national force was naturally strong, but very hard to supply. Moreover, the occupants, the Bulgarians, had lost their reasons for fighting. Their war aims had been gained with the conquests of Serbia in 1915 and Romania in 1916. They were now fighting to meet German objectives, but the Germans showed them little generosity. They were not included in the deal cut at Brest-Litovsk. They hoped that the Treaty of Bucharest would give them all Dobrudja and its grain. It did not. The north was put under joint German-Austrian-Bulgarian administration. While the Bulgarians starved, the German troops in Bulgaria bought up supplies for transport to Germany. The withdrawal of German divisions for the western front prompted warnings that the Central Powers’ position in the Balkans was now dangerously exposed. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were powerless to respond: they had not got the men and they refused to compromise on Dobrudja. On 17 September they simply signalled that ‘it must be accepted that the decision of the whole war’ rested on the western front.32