Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The war therefore continued, against the interests of the Empire and the will of the mass of its peoples. The Poles were irredeemably alienated by the Habsburg readiness to sacrifice the Chełm region to their Ukrainian rivals for a fantasy ‘bread peace’. The Czechs had given up on the Empire’s ability to reform itself. The strikes of January 1918 had demonstrated the deep desire for peace across all Emperor Karl’s lands. Multi-ethnic society had already fragmented, and racial hatred divided its peoples. The army too was crumbling. Bolshevik ideals and, still more, the deep disgruntlement of ex-prisoners were undermining discipline, and the exodus of deserters had not been stemmed. The shifting of military bases, so that troops were stationed in areas foreign to them, cynically exploited the bitter animosities between the Empire’s peoples to ensure temporarily that civilians and soldiers would not, as in Russia, unite in revolution.78 Nonetheless, the end was coming, but its form and its horror were now no longer in the hands of the Habsburg Monarchy. These would depend on events further west, and on the Germans.

  13

  Collapse

  LAST CHANCE

  At the beginning of 1918, a Central Powers’ victory still appeared to many contemporaries to be attainable. Colonel Albrecht von Thaer, a General Staff officer close to Ludendorff, summarized the reasons for optimism as he looked into the New Year. ‘Since the start of the war,’ he mused, ‘our situation was really never so good. The military colossus Russia is totally finished and pleads for peace; the same with Romania. Serbia and Montenegro have simply gone. Italy is still supported only with difficulty by England and France and we stand in its best province. England and France are still ready for battle but already much exhausted (above all the French) and the English are very much under pressure from the U-boats.’ The sole trump card in the Western Allies’ hands was the United States, and Thaer seriously doubted the ability of this primarily maritime power to swing the balance on the crucial Western Front.1 Nonetheless he disregarded the German army’s own very serious problems. The force had passed the peak of its strength and in the previous year had shown signs of weariness and indiscipline. Above all, as the OHL was painfully aware, time was against it. Across the Atlantic, a mighty American army was in training and the U-boats’ record gave little cause for hope that it might be stopped from crossing the ocean. The war had to be won before the Americans arrived in Europe. ‘All that mattered,’ Ludendorff recalled, ‘was to get together enough troops for an attack in the West.’2

  The stakes could not have been higher. After the failure of German and Austro-Hungarian leaders to push through half-hearted political reforms or make peace in 1917, the regimes’ legitimacy now rested solely on their ability to win a quick and total victory. The defeat of Russia had bought them a little breathing space. To many Germans, fighting on now appeared to offer a real chance of a rapid and happy conclusion.3 In Austria-Hungary, peoples watched and waited for what events in the west would bring. Yet although the German army could now transfer units from the defunct Eastern Front and build a numerical superiority in the west, forcing a military decision there would be difficult. Not only were the British and French formidable opponents but it was hard to know how to defeat them. The Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann voiced the problem most perceptively in a speech to the Reichstag Steering Committee in January 1918. ‘Suppose,’ he argued, ‘we were to take Calais and Paris . . . suppose such a breakthrough was completely successful, would that mean peace?’ On past experience, he doubted it very much. ‘We have overrun entire states, we have chased hostile governments from the land and yet we still have no peace.’4 Finding a solution to this conundrum was the pivotal task of the OHL. Failure would collapse the last prop supporting the Central Powers, making inevitable not only defeat but also revolution.

  Ludendorff had already begun to ponder a western offensive in October 1917. The U-boats had not fulfilled the navy’s promises and although the two most important army group commanders on the Western Front, German Crown Prince Wilhelm and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, doubted that the German army could win a decisive operational victory, the training of a large American army overseas meant that inactivity was not an option. As the OHL’s Chief of Operations, Major Wetzell, had stressed on 23 October, an offensive would have to be launched if the Germans were not to be crushed by sheer weight of numbers.5 With the Russian army’s collapse, the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s armistice at the end of the year, troops could be transferred westwards and the possibility of securing a decisive victory in the west gained in plausibility. German commanders debated the merits of attacking the British or French and drew up detailed operational plans for offensives at different parts of the line. For the Chief of Staff of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group on the Western Front, Colonel Count von der Schulenburg, an assault on the French offered the best prospect of victory. The Germans were aware of the demoralization and mutinies that had wracked the Republic’s army the previous summer. The French home front was also in a parlous state: inflation was higher than in the Reich and worker militancy rising.6 Schulenburg doubted that France could survive another severe military defeat. However, for Ludendorff and other military commanders, the British appeared the more vulnerable. Their force was regarded as tactically clumsier than its ally. An intelligence assessment drawn up at the start of 1918 rated British units’ level of training as inadequate for mobile warfare and observed that after their setbacks in 1917 much of the troops’ confidence was gone: ‘There is a great deal of war weariness.’7

  Ludendorff chose the right enemy, but not wholly for the correct reasons. The British would indeed make disastrous tactical errors in the spring of 1918 and their command structure, hard-wired for static warfare, did break down in the rapidly changing environment produced by mobile war. However, the Germans underestimated the rank and file’s toughness, which did much to compensate for the failure of leadership and tactical skill.8 The real vulnerability of the British Expeditionary Force was logistical. All armies on the Western Front required extensive railway systems to keep them supplied, but the network behind British lines was barely adequate. It possessed two choke points, the forward marshalling and switching yards in the French towns of Hazebrouck and Amiens. Through each passed around half of the supplies dispatched from Britain: Hazebrouck, situated around 30 kilometres behind the line in the north, channelled materials that came through the ports of Boulogne, Dunkirk and Calais. Amiens, 60 kilometres behind the British southern sector’s front, helped distribute goods from Rouen, Le Havre and Dieppe, and also handled 80 per cent of north–south traffic along the line. Any German advance would have had to be deep, but the reward for capturing these key rail nodes would have been immense. The loss of Amiens would have cut two of three double-tracked railways over the Somme, leaving the British a transport capacity of only ninety trains per day, fewer than half the total needed to sustain the heaviest fighting. Were Hazebrouck to fall too, the British position on the continent would be untenable. Their commanders were painfully aware of this danger. General Sir Henry Rawlinson, the co-planner of the 1916 Somme Offensive and commander of Fourth Army from July 1918, warned that Amiens was ‘the only [place] in which the enemy can hope to gain such a success as to force the Allies to discuss terms of peace’.9

  The OHL never recognized this potentially fatal vulnerability. Ludendorff’s strategy focused on psychology rather than on territory. He refused to designate any final ground objectives. To subordinates who urged him to do so, and thereby clarify what the offensive was supposed to achieve, he retorted that ‘In Russia we always merely set an intermediate objective, and then discovered where to go next.’10 This was revealing: Russia had collapsed not in 1915, when it had lost large swathes of territory and prize towns like Warsaw and Łódź, but in 1917 through a crisis of morale. Ludendorff’s intention was to break the British army’s cohesion and will. The unwieldy enemy would be incapable of coping with the fast pace of mobile operations and would be torn apart by the cons
tant pressure of the attack. What was important to Ludendorff was thus the initial breakthrough to restore movement rather than where the troops were headed. For this reason, the operation was constructed entirely around tactical needs. After considering many plans, the First Quartermaster General opted to attack south of the British line, on a front of 80 kilometres on either side of the Somme. The ground was firm here in the early spring, unlike further north in waterlogged Flanders, and the British had only recently taken over the lines on the left bank of the river, which the former French garrison had left weakly fortified. Manpower shortages had forced the BEF’s High Command to make hard compromises. While the armies protecting the Channel ports were strong, the British Fifth Army guarding the south of the area that Ludendorff had designated for the attack had only twelve infantry and three cavalry divisions to cover 68 kilometres. Each division’s front was a third longer than the norm for other British armies. The sector was ripe for a breakthrough, yet there was a catch: the British were weak here precisely because there were no key objectives to defend. Ludendorff might hope to tear them from the French, but his troops would be advancing into the desolation left by the Somme battle of 1916 and their own withdrawal in early 1917.11

  The preparations for the great offensive were unprecedentedly thorough. Over the winter of 1917–18 the Germans transferred forty-eight divisions to the Western Front from other theatres, mainly Russia, raising their strength there to 191 against their enemies’ 178 divisions.12 The Seventeenth, Second and Eighteenth Armies, the forces tasked with executing what was codenamed Operation Michael, together had sixty-seven divisions. The artillery support for the attack was formidable: 6,473 guns and 3,532 trench mortars would lay down the initial bombardment. To serve them, huge munitions dumps were created. The Eighteenth Army alone stockpiled nearly three million shells. Naturally, given the central position of tactics in the offensive’s design, great care was taken over training and the organization of manpower. Resources would not stretch to equipping all divisions equally, so the army was divided. Most divisions were classed as ‘trench divisions’, suitable for position warfare. However, fifty-six elite ‘assault divisions’ were tasked with spearheading the attacks, and were allocated the pick of weaponry, specialist units, horses and the youngest, fittest soldiers. Each of these divisions was taken out of the line and given four weeks of instruction. A new manual, The Attack in Position Warfare, was issued to explain to an army inured to fighting on the defensive how the cooperation between different arms, initiative and delegation promoted fervently for elastic defence since the Somme battle of 1916, could also be applied to offensive action.13

  A great effort was made to surprise and deceive the enemy. The OHL permitted troops to march only at night to the attack sector. An elaborate and successful misinformation campaign was launched to trick the French into believing that the assault would be conducted against them north of Verdun or in the Champagne.14 The Germans also made a start on demoralizing the British. One leaflet scattered across British lines bluntly asked the soldiers ‘What are you fighting for?’ The Tommies, it pointed out, had no interest in shedding blood to recapture ‘foreign places of no earthly use to England’. The Russians, Romanians and Montenegrins had all quit, ‘ingrate Belgians’ expected others to liberate their country for them, and ‘the Frenchies’, claimed the German propagandists, continued solely in order to seize Alsace-Lorraine. Disingenuously, they insisted, ‘all the world knows that the Germans never mean to keep any part of France’. No help could be expected from fickle Americans, who were now claiming that ‘another year or two must pass before the big army they promised . . . can reach France’. At the current pace, it would be ‘six months at least to reach Cambrai . . . eight years to Mons, sixteen years to Brussels, thirty-two years to Antwerp, sixty-four years to Cologne, and 132 years to Berlin. It was, mocked the propagandists, ‘a far longer way to Berlin evidently than to Tipperary’.15

  On the eve of the offensive the morale of German troops was high, yet fragile. After the tough fighting in the autumn of 1917, the Bolshevik revolution and armistice had raised spirits. By January 1918 there was consensus in the ranks that Russia was ‘finished’ and many soldiers began to hope for an end to hostilities. The strikes at home in that month were roundly condemned by most men at the front, who saw them as likely to prolong the war and steel the enemy. Instead, they saw their road home in front of them – leading through the British barbed wire. As the Fifth Army’s postal censor observed, troops were ready ‘to confront the enemy for the last great blow’, but their willingness was highly conditional: the effort would be made ‘if through it the longed for peace will be reached’.16 What would happen if the attacks did not bring peace was barely considered, but in March 1918, on the eve of the offensive, few thought this likely. Troops were impressed with the sight of, in one diarist’s words, ‘[supply] column after column, munitions deliveries day and night, deployment of guns, especially mine throwers, lorries . . . bringing all sorts of material’.17 Better rations for the assault force in the final weeks before the offensive also raised morale. The atmosphere, one officer remembered, was one of ‘firm confidence in a good success’.18

  The offensive’s preliminary bombardment opened at 4.20 a.m. on 21 March. For five hours the German guns threw 1,160,000 shells into the positions of the British Fifth and Third Armies, battering the front line and suppressing the opposing artillery with gas. At 9.40 a.m. the infantry of thirty-two German divisions charged forward in thick fog, following a creeping barrage that kept down the heads of any British troops still capable of resistance. While in the north the defenders resisted hard, the southern sector of the front quickly crumbled. The Fifth Army had organized its positions in what it believed to be a German-style elastic defence scheme. Outposts in a lightly held Forward Zone were supposed to inflict casualties and hold off attackers, winning time to man a strongly fortified Battle Zone in the rear, out of the range of any opening bombardment. However, on 21 March dense fog allowed German assault troops to infiltrate and surround the forward positions. The British had not gathered sufficient reserves and held what they had too far back, so with no hope of relief, positions that had been expected to hold for two days soon surrendered. On this first day alone the Germans took 21,000 men as prisoners, and inflicted 7,512 killed and 10,000 wounded. The three attacking armies overran 255 square kilometres of ground, forced the British from their Forward Zone and, in its weakly fortified south, also pushed the Fifth Army out of most of its Battle Zone.19

  Nonetheless, the offensive had not gone as planned. Seventeenth Army, the northernmost of the German forces, was supposed to provide the main weight for the attack, punching towards Arras and Albert, and then with its neighbour, Second Army, separating British from French forces and rolling the former up in the direction of the Channel. It had committed sixteen of its eighteen divisions yet had advanced only four to five kilometres into well-defended territory and was stuck in front of the British Third Army’s Battle Zone. The Eighteenth Army, whose task was to guard the assault forces’ left flank on the Somme River, had attacked the weakest point and advanced the furthest. Ludendorff opted to build on its success and dispatched reinforcements. This was a fateful decision. At first, it appeared fully vindicated by the spectacular advances over the following days. By 23 March the Kaiser, who had been plunged into depression by the stoppages in the north, was exuberant. ‘The battle is won,’ he gloated, ‘the English have been utterly defeated.’20 In the ranks too the men were euphoric, boasting proudly to friends and family of having helped ‘thrash Tommy’s hide’.21 When the offensive was closed down on 5 April, the troops of Eighteenth Army had advanced 60 kilometres from their jump-off points – an achievement greater than any seen in the west since 1914. The British Fifth Army had been shattered. Some 90,000 Allied troops had surrendered, among them 75,000 British, and 1,300 artillery pieces had been captured.22

  Impressive though these figures were, they had only a marginal be
aring on the strategic situation. The British replaced most of their losses: already by the end of Operation Michael, over 100,000 drafts had been sent across the Channel to refill the BEF’s depleted ranks.23 Critically, Ludendorff’s earlier dismissal of calls to define a strategic objective cost the army, for it permitted damaging indecision and misguided opportunism. On 23 March as the Kaiser was toasting victory, Ludendorff dissipated his force’s strength by ordering his three armies to attack north-west, west and south-west in an overambitious attempt to separate the French and British, destroy the British and eliminate the French reserves. He repeated the error on 26 March with an order for two new attacks further north. Amiens could have fallen had the Germans recognized its significance early and concentrated troops on it. When the city was belatedly designated an objective on this day, their advance guard came within just 11 kilometres, but French reinforcements and fierce British resistance thwarted attempts to seize it. The Germans thus won nothing of value from Operation Michael. British resistance had been supported by promptly dispatched French reinforcements and had not been broken. The 3,100 square kilometres overrun were worthless: the Seventeenth, Second and Eighteenth Armies sat in a wasteland with their supply lines grossly overextended.24 Their casualties had been horrendous, totalling nearly 240,000 irreplaceable men killed, missing or wounded. Losses had been especially heavy among experienced officers and in the elite assault divisions. In some attacking units two-thirds of the infantry had been wiped out.25