Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Ludendorff’s last offensive failed to win the war for Germany. It also fatally undermined the capacities of his armies to defend themselves in the positions to which they had advanced – at a time when Allied forces had at last achieved the advantage that had eluded Ludendorff.

  The end

  In August 1917, in the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea, some 400 unhappy sailors defied their officers, left their warships, and spent several hours milling about the town’s taverns. Then, the same evening, they returned to their ships. Their action constituted the famous German “naval mutiny,” the most serious case of organized indiscipline in the German armed forces during the war. In response, the navy’s leadership ordered the imprisonment of 75 of the sailors and the execution of two of these. The savage reaction was out of all proportion to the severity of the sailors’ disobedience, which grew out of practical grievances specific to the German navy during this conflict – the frustration and boredom of the sailors, who had seen little action and were compensated with poor rations and the arrogance of their officers. But the reaction of the naval leadership to the episode reflected broader concerns.20 Anti-war literature had been found in Kiel, another major naval base, and the navy’s leaders believed that several of the mutineers had ties to the USPD. Anxieties were mounting in Berlin about the integrity of the country’s fighting forces. However gratifying it was from a strategic perspective, the dissolution of the Russian army in 1917 offered disquieting lessons about the vulnerability of unhappy warriors to political subversion in the name of peace. The founding of the USPD and the great industrial strikes of the spring of 1917 boded the spread of the same corrosive forces in Germany.

  No such mutiny occurred in the German army. Here conditions were more resistant to organized indiscipline. There was no German analogue to the French army mutinies of 1917. While military courts stood watch, discipline appeared to hold in the German trenches, where the common experience of combat bound men and junior officers, as it deflected resentments rearward, towards the home front and the Etappe, where soldiers enjoyed the safety of staff or administrative service. The army’s leadership was nonetheless vigilant for signs of incipient unrest or resistance, particularly after the collapse of the Russian armies. The intensification of “patriotic instruction” in the German army was a response to growing turmoil on the home front, and it was calculated to provide inoculation against the spread of the so-called “Russian spirit” of defeatism and revolution among the troops.

  A number of episodes suggested that concerns about this spirit were well founded, for it provided a political idiom in which to channel the myriad mundane frustrations that accumulated in the ranks during the last years of the conflict. Complaints about officers’ privileges turned towards the unequal distribution of power both in the army and at home.21 Officers noted with alarm the circulation of USPD pamphlets and flyers among German units on the eastern front in the fall of 1917, as well as isolated instances of fraternization between Russian and German troops at the end of the year. A more alarming sign was the disappearance of significant numbers of soldiers (as many as 10 percent, according to some estimates) in the winter of 1917–18, during their redeployment from the eastern to the western front.22 The army’s own practice of punishing the leaders of industrial strikes with service at the front seemed almost calculated to fan unrest here, particularly after the great munitions strikes of January 1918 yielded a rich harvest of discontent. Strikers sent to the front represented “less a reinforcement of the troops,” complained a staff officer in the spring of 1918, “than a poison.”23

  Despite signs of trouble, the discipline and cohesion of German combat forces remained high during the offensives of the spring of 1918. These operations were animated in the belief, spawned by the high command and communicated systematically to the troops, that success would soon bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Peace itself had become the war aim. The failure of the offensive to achieve this object was hence a decisive juncture. It not only placed the German armies in precarious positions, in lightly fortified trenches where they could only with difficulty be supplied over war-torn terrain; it also left them exhausted and demoralized. Frustration and despair thereupon dismantled much of the moral scaffolding on which discipline and cohesion had survived in the ranks.

  Allied counteroffensives began against these vulnerable troops on July 18, 1918 (see Map 12). The French army struck first against the half-fashioned German defenses in the Marne salient. In a week of furious combat, often called the Second Battle of the Marne, the French exploited numerical superiority and their own tactical innovations to push the Germans back across the river.24 Short artillery barrages were now the prelude to French infantry attacks that were spearheaded by formations of tanks. Late in July the Germans were compelled to withdraw, as they had in September 1914, to more secure positions near the Aisne River. Even with the modified tactics, however, the dynamics of combat dealt disproportionate losses to the attackers. The action on the Marne cost the German army 25,000 men; it cost the French nearly four times as many. The mathematics worked entirely to the disadvantage of the Germans, though, for their antagonists could far better afford the blood price. One phase of the campaign drove this point home with particular force. As part of the Allied offensive on the salient, American troops saw their first major action of the war against German positions at the Marne River. Around the town of Chateau-Thierry, in an attack that laid bare their inexperience, the Americans lost 35,000 casualties. But, even as they did so, an additional 150,000 American soldiers arrived in France.

  Map 12 The Allied counteroffensive, July–November 1918

  The next blow against the German lines arrived to the west, in the Somme sector. On August 8 British troops attacked badly outnumbered German positions to the south of this river, near Amiens. With the close support of artillery and airplanes, over 400 tanks led the assault. Although the British advance stalled after two days, the action on this sector took on a special notoriety. Ludendorff called August 8 “the black day of the German army.” The significance of the attack lay less in the bare patch of territory that the Germans abandoned than in the number of the troops they lost – or, rather, in the character of the losses. In two days of fighting 20,000 Germans were killed or wounded, while 30,000 were taken prisoner, in the clearest signal to date of the erosion of morale in the German army. Ludendorff’s comment spoke as well, however, to the state of his own morale. The collapse of his indomitable confidence began now to register in erratic failures of judgment, his frantic search for scapegoats, and his orders for counterattacks that stood no hope of success.

  As the Allied attacks gathered momentum on several sectors throughout August and September, the German army began to dissolve. The wholesale surrender of German troops during this action provided one index to the erosion of the will to continue. Another was the number of German troops who otherwise contrived to escape combat in a hopeless cause, whether by refusing orders to attack, disappearing rearwards, or by feigning light injury or sickness. The fact that influenza swept the German trenches in the summer of 1918 provided a degree of credibility to many of these claims of sickness, but the evasive practices of all kinds reached epidemic proportions. In light of estimates that between 750,000 and a million soldiers managed to avoid battle in one way or another, the historian Wilhelm Deist has written of a “covert military strike” in the German army during the last months of the war.25

  By any name, the spectacle had far-reaching implications; and it gave rise to long and bitter controversy. It was soon taken as evidence of massive subversion in the army, the triumph of the “Russian spirit” thanks to the machinations of left-wing agents from home, the Social Democrats and Independent Social Democrats. The plausibility of this claim grew in light of what did not happen. Most front-line units fought on in good order, so the army did not dissolve as the Russian army had a year earlier. The German lines did not break. Instead, the army’s combat for
mations staged a coherent retreat homewards at the war’s end, creating the impression that they had not been beaten in the field. Whatever the appearances, the truth of the matter was, as recent scholarship has confirmed, at once less sinister, less calculated, and – for this very reason – more difficult to accept. In 1918 the cumulative material superiority of Germany’s enemies brought the decision at arms.26 The German army lacked the strength to achieve the extravagant goals that Ludendorff had set for it during the spring offensive. The failure of this offensive laid bare the hopelessness of the army’s situation and left hungry, ill-supplied, and exhausted German troops to confront counteroffensive operations that rested upon a vast advantage in resources of every kind.

  The dynamics that governed the situation in the German army during the last weeks of the war were both complex and paradoxical in their results. The hemorrhage of soldiers was incontestable, but it originated not so much in the front lines as in the rear areas, among reserves and potential reinforcements in the Etappe, which itself became increasingly vulnerable to the advance of the Allied offensive. The same was true of the situation along the German lines of communication homewards and in garrisons and other installations in Germany itself. In these settings, insubordination and other forms of indiscipline became an increasing problem among soldiers who were anxious, hungry, and unhappy during the last weeks of the war. Some of this behavior was revolutionary, at least in the sense that the Independent Socialists understood the term. Unrest had become politicized in some units, but it reflected the common, long-building grievances of common soldiers against their superiors; and it had as its goal the wholesale dismantling of power structures that had supported the war, both at home and in the army. More widespread than these aspirations, however, was the demand for an immediate peace without annexations. This goal, which comported better with the position of the Majority Social Democrats, represented, as Benjamin Ziemann has argued, the “lowest common denominator among all the currents of opinion and views within the army.”27 This generalization applied as well to the front-line troops, of whom about a million and a half remained in combat in the fall of 1918. Here, though, military discipline largely survived in the cohesion of the battle-hardened small group under fire.28 The ordered retreat of these units was a remarkable military feat, although it was also due to the limited range of the Allied tanks and the logistical difficulties that the Allied command faced in supporting a war of movement over difficult terrain.

  Both before and after the armistice the circumstances of the German retreat invited the conclusion that the army was undefeated and, as the corollary to this claim, that it had been undermined by political collapse to the rear. Against this claim two points must be emphasized. First, in every conceivable sense of the word, the German army was defeated in the field. This fact would have become incontrovertible once the campaigns had been transported, as they would have been, onto German soil in 1919. Second, if there were a collapse in the German army in the fall of 1918, it was due far less to subversion than to the failure of German military operations at the front. The collapse to the rear took place in all events within the German army itself.

  By October 1918 German forces were in full retreat. So were their allies. At the end of September the Bulgarians, who had borne the brunt of an Allied attack northward from Macedonia into Serbia, sued for peace. Then, in late October, the southern front collapsed. When Italian armies, reinforced by British and French troops, broke through Austrian lines along the Piave River, the armies of the Habsburg monarchy dissolved into their component ethnic units and withdrew in disarray from the war. By October 1918 the military outcome of the Great War was no longer in doubt. Germany had lost.

  Even so, crucial issues remained to be resolved. These had to do with the specific circumstances of the war’s end, and their resolution had momentous implications for the future arrangement of politics in Germany. During the last six weeks of the conflict the burden of making the fundamental decisions shifted, in Germany and elsewhere, from soldiers to statesmen and political leaders. Much of the agenda emerged in the shadow of late maneuvers by the German military leadership, however.

  It is not certain when Ludendorff finally admitted to himself that the plight of his armies was hopeless. He kept this conclusion a secret in any case from the emperor and the civilian leadership until September 29, when he precipitously announced to them that the war was lost and that the government had to negotiate an immediate armistice. This shocking news set into motion processes that not only brought the military action to an end but also transformed the face of German politics.

  Ludendorff had concluded that the most attractive avenue to an armistice led through the American president, Woodrow Wilson, whose “fourteen points” had given an idealistic ring to public statements of American war aims and suggested the possibility of a lenient peace. On October 3, 1918, the first of several German notes thus ventured out to explore peace terms in Washington. In these circumstances, however, far-reaching constitutional changes also became unavoidable in Germany. The impending defeat of the German armies robbed the proponents of German authoritarianism of their last prop. Moreover, it was clear to all that democratic reform at home would encourage the likelihood of leniency from Wilson, the champion of a “world safe for democracy.”29

  Accordingly, at the insistence of both the OHL and his civilian advisors, William II announced a series of constitutional changes in his roles as emperor and king of Prussia. These changes presented the democratic reformers in Germany with virtually everything they wanted. Hertling ceded the chancellorship to the liberal prince Max of Baden, whose new government rested on the support of a parliamentary majority of Catholics, Progressives, and the MSPD. An imperial proclamation then inscribed responsible cabinet government into the federal constitution and placed foreign and military policy in the purview of parliamentary control; a royal proclamation democratized the Prussian suffrage. Simultaneous negotiations between the trade unions and leading employers’ associations formalized the gains made by organized labor during the war, including the eight-hour day, the legal right to bargain collectively, and the establishment of arbitration committees in the larger industries. Finally, on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice was signed, William II, the symbol supreme of German militarism, abdicated the imperial and royal thrones at the insistence of his own military advisors.

  The perverse irony of these developments would be worth savoring were it not for their fatal long-term consequences. Constitutional reform in Germany was the by-product of a military decision to seek an end to the war. The father of German democracy was, to this extent, Erich Ludendorff. In the desperation of the war’s last weeks, he and his political allies were determined to save as much of the old order as possible – by conceding as much as necessary to their opponents, whose first order of business was now to bring an unsuccessful war to an end. “They shall now conclude the peace that must be concluded,” Ludendorff announced on October 1. “Let them drink the soup they have prepared for us.”30 In these calculations, Ludendorff and his friends succeeded to a remarkable degree. Their “revolution from above” resolved basic constitutional issues to the satisfaction of most of the Majority Social Democrats, before social turmoil at the end of the war presented the specter of a German revolution on the Russian model of the previous year. When, on the eve of the armistice, the leaders of the MSPD took over the reins of power and confronted this danger, they were resolved above all to preserve the constitutional gains with which they had now been presented. In the name of stability, they resisted more thoroughgoing changes in the social infrastructure of German politics, which the Independent Social Democrats were advocating: the socialization of industry, the purge of civilian bureaucracies, and the replacement of the chain of military command with something more democratic. As a consequence, men whose political loyalties were affixed to the old regime survived in positions of political and social power to exacerbate the ordeal of the new repu
blican system.

  Ludendorff himself was not one of these survivors. At the end of October he was forced to resign; then, shortly after the armistice, he fled into temporary exile in Sweden. But his legacy lived on.

  First impressions of peace

  Late in July 1916, as battle raged at Verdun, on the Somme, and on the eastern front, an “Earnest appeal from the front” appeared in newspapers throughout Germany. “Are Germans on the home front still the people they were at the war’s beginning,” read the inquiry: “or have everyday concerns again taken over? German People! Do not jeopardize the great cause, the lives and future of every German, with your petty discontents.”31 By the middle of the war this motif was already a common marker of the growing tensions between the home and fighting fronts; and it continued to surface regularly among the troops, especially in the wake of the strikes in April 1917 and January 1918. During the summer of 1918, several weeks before he shared his bleak prognosis about the war with the civilians, Ludendorff himself invoked the motif when he complained to his staff that the German offensive had stalled because the home front had withheld adequate supplies and reserves.

  This reasoning appealed powerfully to the German military leadership on the eve of its defeat; and, in the circumstances in which the impending conclusion of the war became more widely known, the same reasoning found broad popular resonance, particularly on the political right. Ludendorff’s actions during the final stages of the conflict were designed to shape the final representation of the war (and the first impression of peace). He was well equipped to do so, for the army’s monopoly of information survived almost to the end. News of the initial successes of the Ludendorff Offensive had encouraged the belief on the home front that a victorious end to the war was near. The official reports from the front continued to speak the language of optimism until late September. Then the tone shifted suddenly and radically. Ludendorff’s insistence at just this moment that power be served up to the civilians grew out of the same attempt to steer popular thinking about impending defeat. In the scenario that he scripted for them, the new leaders’ most pressing and immediate responsibility was to sue for peace. To the civilians, not the soldiers, thus fell the unenviable role of presiding over the precipitous termination of the war, an eventuality for which the German public at home was utterly unprepared.