Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The First World War occupies a special place in this scheme. The term “total war” was the product of this great conflict. French leaders first used the term la guerre intégrale in 1917 to announce their government’s intention to abandon all restraint in mobilizing French society for war. Their announcement signaled less a radical departure than the ruthless intensification of efforts that had begun in 1914 – in all the belligerent lands. In all events, as a characterization of institutions and practices that marked the second half of this struggle, the term “total war” was no less valid for developments in Imperial Germany.

  In this light, 1916 was a pivotal year. The land battles of 1916 were the most monstrous ever fought. New military leaders came to power in Germany, and they indeed aspired to achieve the total mobilization of society’s resources and energies. The measures that they inaugurated to achieve this end brought the brutal reorganization of the economy – in Germany and the European lands it occupied – for the purposes of making war. Then, at the close of the year, the German leadership steered towards a course of military action that expanded the scope of war to include all the world’s major powers.

  The land campaigns of 1916

  The German victories in the east in 1915 failed to shake Falkenhayn’s belief that the war could be won only in the west. The year’s experiences on both the eastern and western fronts had also confirmed his belief, however, that the war would not end in a great battle of annihilation. While he remained convinced that Britain represented the country’s most implacable foe, he reasoned that endurance and attrition – or what the Germans called Ermattung – held the key and that the struggle would end only when the British leadership had concluded that the German army was invincible in the field.

  These calculations lay at the basis of the German commander’s plans for 1916. He was determined to undermine the British resolve with a two-pronged offensive. The one prong, which was aimed at the commercial underpinnings of the British war effort, was to launch unrestricted submarine warfare against all seaborne traffic with that island. He did not share the concerns of the civilian leadership that this course would bring the United States into the war, for he believed that the other prong of his strategy would by then have settled the whole issue. He planned a land attack in the west that would devastate Britain’s weaker partner.

  There was more than a little wishful thinking in Falkenhayn’s calculations. His ideas about the effectiveness of submarine warfare were fanciful enough that the civilians were able, at this stage in the war at least, largely to parry them. His thinking about the land war carried more force, but it was only a little less fanciful. The campaigns of 1915 on both fronts had suggested that overwhelming superiority at the point of attack offered the only hope of success in offensive operations. Despite the massive industrial build-up at home and the broadening conscription of military manpower, the German army on the western front remained in significant respects weaker than its antagonists. The German military leadership raised an additional twenty-two divisions in 1915, but it purchased this result by reducing the number of regiments in each infantry division from four to three and the number of artillery pieces in each battery from six to four. At the end of the year the Germans could deploy 2,350,000 men in the west, in 118 divisions; but these troops confronted 145 divisions, which comprised 3,470,000 enemy soldiers.

  Falkenhayn was undeterred by these numbers. He had devised an offensive strategy that was appropriate, he believed, to a theater in which the defense was indomitable.2 The object was quickly to seize a point in the French line. This point was to be of such strategic or political significance that the French leadership would be compelled to recapture it – in circumstances that afforded all the advantages of the defense to the Germans. The result, Falkenhayn reasoned, would be losses so hideous that the exhausted French would sue for peace, leaving the British isolated and in an untenable position.

  By the force of this logic at least, Verdun was an ideal place to attack. It was one of the chain of fortresses that the French had built up in the late nineteenth century in order to deter another German invasion like the one of 1870. Because the original citadel was the handiwork of Vauban, Louis XIV’s great military architect, the fortress had a patriotic aura that transcended its strategic significance. In early 1916, however, it appeared vulnerable. After the fall of Liège had thrown doubt on the invincibility of all such great fortresses, the French had stripped Verdun of most of its artillery for use in more active sectors of the front. Falkenhayn thus calculated that a swift strike would succeed here and that the public outcry in France would demand the recapture of the fortress. Despite the lessons of the Allied failures in 1915, he planned to saturate the sector with an artillery bombardment so intense that, as he explained, “not even a mouse could survive.”3 Accordingly, German foot soldiers would have only to occupy the remains of the fortress. By February 1916 the Germans had thus assembled a force of 140,000 men and nearly 600 pieces of heavy artillery along an eight-mile sector opposite the fortress, which consisted of a system of forts on both sides of the river Meuse (see Map 7). French forces in the sector numbered about half the German; and they had but forty-three pieces of heavy artillery.

  Map 7 The Battle of Verdun, 1916

  The battle began on February 21 with eight hours of German artillery fire.4 German infantry thereupon advanced against light French resistance on the right bank of the river. Four days later Fort Douaumont, the anchor of the entire system, fell to the Germans. If the first days of the battle vindicated the German hopes, the loss of Douaumont, which many observers had once thought to be the strongest fort in the world, prompted the French to react just as Falkenhayn had anticipated. The call went out for a vast French build-up in the Verdun sector. By the end of the month large reinforcements had slowed the German advance; and by the end of the campaign, nine months later, two-thirds of the entire French army had seen action in this part of the front. Because they had not achieved their goals when the French defenses stiffened, the Germans, who now had to reinforce the sector massively themselves, found the dynamics of battle shifting to their great disadvantage, as they had to press the attack. As the German offensive broadened in the next weeks onto both sides of the river, the battle became the quintessential battle of attrition – the western front in microcosm. The two sides exchanged roles repeatedly in the furious rituals of attack and counterattack. These purchased meters of empty land – sanitized in battle of every living thing – with millions of tons of material and tens of thousands of human lives. By early July, when the Germans achieved their furthest advance, each of the armies had expended about 250,000 casualties, the French a little more, the Germans a little fewer.

  The crisis came in the early summer of 1916, when the Germans were reminded of their many strategic commitments elsewhere. On June 4, to the desperate pleas of their French allies, the Russians launched their most successful operation of the war. The so-called Brusilov Offensive was directed against Austrian positions in the southern sector of the eastern front (see Map 8). It resulted in dramatic gains along a 200-mile front, where the dispirited Austrian defenses collapsed. As Russian troops pushed 100 miles westward into Hungary, the Austrian army lost 350,000 soldiers, most of them to desertion. Falkenhayn responded to this challenge as the French had hoped. As the Austrian command removed troops from the Italian front, the Germans dispatched most of their strategic reserve, about 200,000 men, to salvage their beleaguered ally. Corruption, ill planning, and an absence of operational coordination among the Russian armies then saved the Germans, whose strategic position would have been desperate had a sustained Russian offensive followed against German positions to the north. Duress in the east nonetheless sapped the force of the German effort at Verdun.

  Map 8 The Brusilov Offensive, 1916

  So did events to the west of this fortress. The Anglo-French offensive at the river Somme stands out in the annals of this war.5 The nearly 60,000 British soldiers who fell casualty
before the German trenches on July 1, 1916, the first day of the infantry attack, were tribute to the most mindless defiance of the new realities of combat. By the end of the year, when the campaign limped to an end, the Allied casualties had grown to ten times this figure in the conquest of a patch of barren landscape. The British misadventures have overshadowed the dreadful costs that this action inflicted upon the Germans. The Battle of the Somme was the model contest of matériel, the Materialschlacht. It opened in a hail of 1,500,000 artillery shells, which fell around the clock on German positions for a full week. In enduring this and subsequent barrages, in defending their positions against repeated Allied infantry assaults, and in their own repeated counterattacks, the Germans themselves expended more than 150,000 artillery shells a day; and they lost close to 500,000 men.

  Pressures from the Somme and the eastern front translated back to Verdun, where the German attack stalled in the summer of 1916. In October the French launched a carefully prepared counteroffensive, which retook what little remained of Fort Douaumont, before the German lines rallied in defense. When the campaign expired in general exhaustion at the end of the year, the German positions lay about three miles forward of where they had been in February. The cost of this exchange was about 750,000 casualties, almost a half of them German. In all theaters, German casualties in 1916 totaled nearly 1,500,000 men.6

  The German Supreme Command could take little comfort in the fact that these losses were less than those of their antagonists. The prodigious campaigns of the year not only demonstrated the bankruptcy of Falkenhayn’s plans for a “small” western offensive; they also appeared to confirm the futility of all offensive operations in this theater, given existing technologies. The two sides seemed condemned to an extended ordeal of attrition – a prolonged, massive investment of men and matériel with negligible strategic returns. While this prognosis pleased the generals nowhere, it was particularly disquieting to the Germans, for it meant that they were eventually going to lose the war. The Germans faced a coalition that could, as the Battle of the Somme had already demonstrated, outproduce them in every area that was relevant to combat in this mode – whether munitions, machinery, food, or men.

  By the time the German leadership had digested these unhappy prospects, Falkenhayn was no longer in charge of the German armies. He had banked his fortunes on the success of his western campaign in 1916; and by the summer it was clear that his strategic conception had collapsed beyond hope. The final blow came in August 1916, in another development that the German commander had failed to foresee. The Romanians entered the war on the side of the Entente, opening yet another front on which German troops were required. At the end of the month Falkenhayn fell from power. His mantle fell to the only German military leaders who could boast a record of sustained success.

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff

  The fall of Falkenhayn marked epochal changes in the German prosecution of the war, as well as in the dynamics of German politics. Falkenhayn fell victim to machinations that had begun almost the moment he took over the Supreme Command from Moltke in the fall of 1914, but his departure signaled above all the alarm of the German leadership: the growing fear in Berlin that only a dramatic change of course could prevent the eventual defeat of the Central Powers. The campaigns of 1916 demonstrated that the scale of Germany’s exertions was only going to grow. The plight of Austria–Hungary verged on desperation in the summer of 1916, after the Brusilov Offensive eventuated in almost 1 million losses to the army and stifled an Austrian offensive on the Italian front. In the aftermath of these ruinous operations the German military leadership imposed a joint supreme command on their ally, while German units, along with staff and line officers, were distributed as bracing throughout the Austrian army. Rumors circulated nonetheless of Austria’s imminent defection from the war.

  Romania was the last straw. The new setback deprived Falkenhayn of all his support. Most of the Reichstag demanded a change in the Supreme Command, as did the leadership of both the navy and the army. So did Bethmann Hollweg, who had reasons of his own. Falkenhayn’s strategy, he believed, offered no prospect for military victory, while the unpopular general himself was an obstacle to a negotiated peace. Such a peace now beckoned to the chancellor as the most feasible way to end the war. Bethmann accordingly hoped to install popular leaders atop the army, in the calculation that they could make a negotiated, compromise settlement more palatable to the German public. He got his way with the new appointments, but he miscalculated fundamentally in the other respect, for the new Supreme Command was in no way interested in compromise with Germany’s many antagonists.

  Plate 3 The Kaiser (centre) studying maps under the guidance of Paul von Hindenburg (left) and Erich Ludendorff (right) (© Classic Image/Alamy)

  The two soldiers who made up the so-called “third OHL” provided an intriguing contrast. Paul von Hindenburg embodied the Prussian military class.7 He had been born in 1847, the son of an army officer. His own military experience began at the age of eleven, when he was sent to boarding school as a cadet. Then, at the age of eighteen, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Prussian army, where he spent the rest of his active career. He fought with distinction in the war of 1870. He then made his way up the ranks to a generalship and the command of an army corps, until he retired in 1911 at the age of sixty-four. His principal traits were his stolidity, a limited intelligence, loyalty to his calling, and a lack of all pretension. The outbreak of war in 1914 prompted his recall to service, now at the head of German forces in the eastern theater. The leading role in the ensuing campaigns, however, fell by calculation to his chief of staff in this theater.

  This was Erich Ludendorff.8 In significant respects, this soldier represented the polar opposite of his nominal superior, as well as the symbol of a new dynamic in the German military profession. Ludendorff was not noble. Eighteen years younger than Hindenburg, he had joined the army in 1882. His advancement through the ranks and within the General Staff exposed him to the army’s reigning social prejudices against middle-class officers. These prejudices he defied with his talent, as well as with the ferocious energy and willpower that made him a striking temperamental contrast to Hindenburg. He was also known for his broad knowledge of military engineering and technology – fields of technical learning that were disdained in the aristocratic ethos of the officer corps.

  Under Moltke, Ludendorff became head of the operations section in the General Staff, and in this capacity he was the driving force behind the expansion of the German army in the years immediately prior to the war. This effort aroused the apprehensions of most of the army’s leaders, who feared the dilution of the officer corps with non-aristocrats and the dilution of the troops with Socialists. Ludendorff heeded only the technical imperatives of warfare, however, and he overpowered these objections, arguing that the Schlieffen Plan made no sense without a vast increase in force. His role in reducing the Liège fortresses in the opening days of the war then established his military reputation. He was immediately appointed chief of staff to Hindenburg in the eastern theater.

  From the start they complemented one another well – so well that it became common to speak of them as Siamese twins, or in the singular (as in “Hindenburg–Ludendorff has arrived”).9 Ludendorff provided the impulse, energy, and operational imagination, but he would have been far less effective but for the stabilizing force of his senior colleague. Ludendorff also benefited from Hindenburg’s immense popularity and the authority that it brought to the team in their dealings with military and civilian rivals. Ludendorff’s rise was, in sum, inconceivable without Hindenburg.

  After the Battle of Tannenberg, Hindenburg quickly became a semi-divine presence in Germany. He had the aura of a hero – an image that he himself carefully cultivated.10 He was a massive, grandfatherly figure – the symbol of determination and military success bathed in stern benevolence. The mobilization of morale in Germany was wedded to this figure, who became the focus of popular adulation. Par
ents named their children after him. By the end of 1914 a “Hindenburg cult” had taken root. Its rituals played out most spectacularly in Berlin, where a huge wooden statue of the commander was erected, then plated with metal nails purchased by townspeople with contributions to the Red Cross. Whether on statuettes, posters, postcards, or advertisements, “Our Hindenburg” was soon an omnipresent image, a symbol of charismatic authority, and a source of growing concern to the emperor and his entourage.

  It was thus a measure of the distress in the German leadership that the emperor finally agreed in August 1916 to call Hindenburg and Ludendorff in from the east, for, if William feared a rival in Hindenburg, he found Ludendorff a loathsome personality. To popular jubilation, which extended into the ranks of the SPD, Hindenburg became officially the head of the Supreme Command, while Ludendorff moved in as his chief of staff, although he took the title of first quartermaster. The dynamic of their relationship persisted. With the symbolic sanction of Hindenburg, Ludendorff became the dominant factor in the German military effort for the rest of the war; and Ludendorff’s priorities became a compelling force in the evolution of politics and society on the home front.

  These priorities deserve some comment. Ludendorff was a pure soldier. He regarded war as the foundation of human affairs. In an age of social Darwinism, he was by no means alone in this view, but he pursued its implications with a relentlessness that was unusual among German soldiers, most of whom were more bound by the conventions of their profession. In the twentieth century, Ludendorff believed, war had become an all-encompassing endeavor, and its claims on belligerent societies were absolute. Years before he popularized the idea of total war in a famous book, he himself embodied it.11 War demanded the ruthless mobilization of a nation’s entire resources, for it knew no distinction between the home and fighting fronts: the civilian producers of weapons were no less essential to the war effort than were the soldiers who fired them. Ludendorff’s convictions disdained the social traditions of German militarism, which had served the privileged exclusivity of an aristocratic military class as much as they had the prosecution of war. In Ludendorff’s thinking, organization for war respected no social or political convention; the sole determinant of power and status was military proficiency. This proposition led finally to the conclusion that all politics was subordinate to military affairs, hence that government should be guided by soldiers, the experts in matters of war. The general’s claims thus did not halt at the authority of the civilian chancellor – or the emperor. Military dictatorship was, he believed, the political hallmark of the modern age.