Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Ludendorff retained the initiative and sought to keep the Allies off balance. An offensive in Flanders codenamed Operation George had been considered as an alternative to Michael, and although the region had been ruled unsuitable for an early attack owing to its waterlogged soil, preparations had continued through January. The First Quartermaster General now ordered that it go ahead. The heavy fighting in March forced its scale to be cut back, and to reflect this its name was changed to Georgette, but even so it remained dangerous. The two German armies ordered to attack, the Fourth and Sixth Armies, had twenty-eight divisions and were supported by 1,199 field guns, 971 heavy guns and forty super-heavy guns. Facing them were just eight British divisions and one tired and demoralized Portuguese division. In contrast to Michael, the operation was targeted at a worthwhile objective, the railway centre of Hazebrouck. When the offensive opened at 4.15 a.m. on 9 April, it at first achieved considerable success. After a heavy bombardment, German storm troops advanced in thick fog and immediately broke the Portuguese division. By the evening, they had gained 10 kilometres. The advance continued over the following days and on 12 April the Germans came within 6 kilometres of Hazebrouck, but could not capture it. Ludendorff bore much of the blame, for, as in March, he dissipated his force’s strength by failing to stick to a single objective. On 12 April, when all effort should have been directed towards Hazebrouck, he ordered troops to take the town of Bailleul.26

  The failure of Operation Georgette was not solely the result of mistakes made by the High Command. The troops were exhausted. Among the thirty-six divisions made available for the attack, twenty-seven had fought in the Michael offensive and the others were trench units.27 Infantry strengths were low: the divisions each had around 6,000 men. Each was also at least 500 horses short, hampering mobility.28 Most ominously, there were clear signs of burgeoning despair in the ranks. By the end of April, the optimism with which troops had started the offensive was gone and in exasperation they were wishing that this ‘wretched war soon ends’.29 Senior commanders recognized the shift in mood. General Hermann von Kuhl, the Chief of Staff of Army Group Crown Prince Rupprecht, worried on 18 April that ‘the troops appear to be finished’.30 Colonel Thaer, whose IX Reserve Corps had taken part in Georgette, was also disturbed. Soldiers’ exaggerated expectations for the outcome of the spring offensive were, he thought, to blame for the depression. ‘They had too much hope that this great blow in March would end the war,’ he observed ruefully. ‘Thereupon, they had once more summoned together all their courage and all their energy. Now the disappointment is here, and it is great. It is the main reason why even attacks well prepared with artillery fizzle out as soon as our infantry goes beyond the heavily bombarded zone.’31

  With the failure of Operation Georgette to break the British, the German offensives passed into their final phase. Ludendorff hoped to attack again decisively in Flanders, but he first needed to draw off the Allied reserves there. To do so, he opted for a diversionary assault on the French army on the Chemin des Dames. The new offensive was the ultimate demonstration of both German tactical virtuosity and strategic bankruptcy. Guns, engineers and specialist units were moved secretly south from Flanders, marching at night to avoid detection from the air. The artillery, its 1,158 batteries almost four times as numerous as those pitched against them, registered without alerting the enemy. When it opened a barrage at 2 a.m. on 27 May, surprise was total. The infantry, men of the Seventh Army, going forward at daybreak quickly overwhelmed all defences and pushed as far as 22 kilometres in a single day; the largest advance of the war on the Western Front.32 There was no way the Germans could win any decisive victory in this region, but Ludendorff again chose to expand the attack. His troops reached the Marne, raising anxious memories of 1914 for the Entente and causing panic in Paris, just 70 kilometres distant. Another offensive in June 1918 pushed out a little way the exposed salient the Germans had created. By now, however, the game was up. Not only were further advances strategically bereft, but at last the Allies also had the measure of their opponents tactically. The Germans’ final offensive in the Champagne on 15 July was betrayed by prisoners and halted only days after its opening by an effective French elastic defence. On 18 July the first of the Allied counter-offensives was launched that over the autumn would push the Germans back almost to their own border. Two French armies of twenty-four divisions, backed by 2,000 guns and 750 tanks, suddenly advanced. Some 17,000 surprised and weary German soldiers had surrendered three days later and at the end of the month their army evacuated the indefensible salient. The tide had turned.

  DEFEAT

  The German army was doomed by the summer. More far-sighted commanders recognized the French counter-offensive on the Marne to be, as General Hermann von Kuhl put it, ‘the turning-point of the war’.33 Another great attack, this time launched by the British on 8 August outside Amiens, confirmed that the Allies now held the initiative. In one of the greatest set-piece battles of the war, ten infantry divisions and 552 tanks supported by 2,060 guns surprised and broke through the German Second Army outside Amiens. The attackers advanced nearly 13 kilometres and took 15,000 German prisoners and 450 guns. For the rest of August and the first half of September hammer blows coordinated by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies on the Western Front, rained down on different parts of the German line. On 26 September a general Allied offensive began along the entire Western Front. By the armistice on 11 November the Allied armies had advanced up to 160 kilometres.34 Germany’s army was a mere shadow of its former self at the war’s end. Casualties since the start of the Allied counter-offensive in mid-July had totalled 800,000 soldiers. Just 750,000 infantrymen were still at the front, what one General Staff officer called ‘a spider’s web of fighters’.35 While elite machine-gunners continued to inflict heavy losses on Allied attackers, German rifle units were universally reported to be depleted, half-trained, exhausted and despondent. Propelled inexorably towards the Reich’s frontier, without hope of relief or reinforcement, these men had no chance of preventing an invasion of their homeland.36

  The startling swing in the strategic situation owed much to the Allied forces’ superior numbers. The German army’s strength had gone into freefall during its offensives. Between March and the end of July it had suffered 977,555 casualties. Some had recovered from their wounds and returned to the front, but a lack of new recruits meant that many of the dead and severely wounded could not be replaced, and the western Field Army had shrunk by 300,000 men.37 In the same period over a million American troops had arrived in Europe. Allied rifle strength exceeded that of the Germans for the first time that year in mid-June. By the start of August, the Allies fielded 1,672,000 infantrymen, 277,000 more than the Kaiser’s army.38 Still worse for the Germans, their enemies also enjoyed a considerable advantage in weaponry. Even at the start of the German offensives, the Allies had possessed 18,500 guns and 4,500 aircraft against the 14,000 and 3,760 of their adversaries. They enjoyed almost a monopoly on armoured vehicles. The French and British fielded hundreds of tanks in their opening attacks during the summer of 1918, whereas the Germans only ever built twenty of their own design, the unwieldy and underpowered A7V, and refurbished another seventy-five captured models.39 Ludendorff blamed the Allied armour for his army’s defeat. But tanks alone were no war-winning weapon. What made the French and British so formidable was their ability to combine these arms into a battle system. The Germans had no answer to the skilful coordination of aircraft, artillery and infantry. Fear of Allied armour prompted German commanders to position their field artillery far forward, but this weakened their counter-bombardment and made the guns vulnerable to being overrun. Their divisions, supposed to contain 6,750 infantrymen, often had fewer than 1,000 by the late autumn, making it impossible to organize a modern defence in depth.40

  Even so, suggestions that the victory of the Allies rested solely on their industrial strength, materiel, logistical skill or martial prowess smack of triumphal
ism. At least as important was the morale of their German opponents: Ludendorff himself conceded that the ‘spirit of the troops’ was decisive in the defeat of the Kaiser’s army.41 The force’s demise in 1918 is best understood as the product of a psychological collapse, which started with the rank and file but rapidly spread to junior officers and ultimately to the OHL itself. The malaise had begun to manifest itself already in the spring. The enthusiasm of German troops at the start of their offensive was predicated solely on a quick victory. As noted, already in April the absence of any such decisive outcome produced crushing disappointment, which combined with exhaustion to have a very adverse impact on the soldiers’ combat motivation. Discipline too was shaky. German soldiers had delayed their advance during Operation Michael by stopping to plunder. The temptations of French wine cellars and British supply depots, well stocked with foodstuffs like white bread and bacon that they had seen little of for four years, were too much for the men to resist.42 Ominously for the army, once the offensive slowed and chances for plundering enemy stores declined, troops turned on their own depots. From April, reports increased of attacks by hungry German soldiers on military supply trains. By May some divisions were equipping these trains with light machine guns. Fatigue, which reached unbearable levels in some units as they were thrown repeatedly into new attacks, sponsored even more serious military crime. Small-scale mutinies by exhausted troops multiplied during the early summer. In May the men of Infantry Regiment 74 mutinied and threatened to desert when they were ordered back to the front after suffering heavy casualties. The following month, a battalion in Infantry Regiment 419 similarly refused to march up the line. These were not isolated incidents, for on 12 June the commander of Second Army warned that ‘cases of soldiers openly refusing to obey orders are increasing to an alarming extent’.43

  The most widespread and dramatic indiscipline was perpetrated not by tired troops at the front but by fresh men travelling along its lines of communication. Reinforcements sent from Germany deserted in large numbers. In May 1918 it was common that a fifth of the soldiers who embarked were no longer on the trains when they reached the war zone. No comprehensive figures exist, but if desertion from such transports continued at this rate until the war’s end, it cost the force 180,000 soldiers.44 There were also loud and disruptive protests. Officers and NCOs tasked with maintaining discipline on the transports were assaulted and railway station commandants pelted with stones. In July orders had to be issued to confiscate all live ammunition from drafts leaving home depots for the front, in order to stop them shooting out of their railway wagons. Some had even thrown hand grenades.45 Even where there was no violence, the troops’ mood was sullen and rebellious. The Chief of Staff in the Seventh (Westphalia) Military District described what typically followed whenever troop transports halted at a station:

  The train emptied quickly and about 500 people poured noisily into the waiting room. It soon became routine that in the darkness they raged and shouted. The provocative call [and threat to officers] ‘Light out! Knife out! Let him have it!’ soon became habit. If the signal to re-entrain was given, hardly anyone took any notice. Gradually the practice was developed whereby the train very slowly started up. Only then did the waiting rooms empty more or less quickly, and when everyone had climbed in, the train accelerated.46

  Ludendorff self-servingly blamed the home front for corrupting the army. Recruits of the 1919 class called up from mid-1917 had, he hinted darkly, been turned by the radical left’s ‘secret agitation’.47 Munitions workers drafted in punishment for participating in the January strikes were also singled out by senior officers as ‘poison for the troops’.48 Prisoners of war returned from Russia were another suspect group. Like their Habsburg counterparts, they were thought to have been influenced by the Bolsheviks and were extremely reluctant to return to active service. However, they were less disruptive, simply because their numbers were smaller; a mere 26,000 by mid-May, in contrast to the 380,000 Habsburg ex-prisoners repatriated by the end of April.49 The hunt for malign external influences to explain the Field Army’s demoralization was an exculpatory attempt to preserve intact its reputation, and those of its commanders. A great deal of the surviving evidence in fact shows that much of the bad mood travelled in the other direction, from front to home. Training units were often less concerned about young recruits than about veterans returning to the front after recovering from wounds. These old soldiers were reported increasingly to evince ‘sullenness and apathy’. The atmosphere in the units was also spoilt by the continual stream of bad news from the front in the summer months. New troops preparing for combat could hardly be expected to display anything but foreboding, for across training camps it was widely known by September 1918 ‘that the Front itself no longer believes in success’.50

  The apathy and exhaustion that gripped the rank and file revealed itself most clearly from the start of the Allied offensives. Men had lost the will to resist. On 8 August, ‘the black day of the German army’ in Ludendorff’s words, the First Quartermaster General was not only shocked by the British advance but particularly dismayed at his own soldiers’ conduct:

  I was told of deeds of glorious valour but also of behaviour which, I openly confess, I should not have thought possible in the German Army; whole bodies of our men had surrendered to single troopers, or isolated squadrons. Retiring troops, meeting a fresh division going bravely into action, had shouted out things like ‘Blackleg’, and ‘You’re prolonging the war’, expressions that were to be heard again later. The officers in many places had lost their influence and allowed themselves to be swept along with the rest.51

  Plenty of evidence supports Ludendorff’s recollection. British military intelligence officers who interrogated prisoners after the Amiens attack found a ‘marked depreciation’ in the enemy’s morale, commenting that ‘the belief is prevalent among officers and men that Germany cannot now win the war’.52 The command of 41 Division, a formation at the centre of the defeat that had been routed and lost 1,700 prisoners to the British, also blamed its men for fighting badly. Thick fog, highly effective air cover and the deployment en masse of tanks had indeed all made the assault formidable, but, the formation commander complained, ‘many of the division’s soldiers did not fulfil their duty’. The formation had been splintered by the surprise attack, and some soldiers had ceased to resist and sought safety in the rear. The worst were those who ‘threw away their weapons in order to get away quicker and so as not to be able to be led back into the fight’.53

  The poor combat motivation of German troops was key to allowing the unprecedented Allied advances during the summer and autumn of 1918. However, the relationship was reciprocal, for morale in the Kaiser’s army plunged further with every enemy success. The cohesion of German units was placed under strain by both fierce Allied attacks and the army’s own retreat. Some infantry regiments disintegrated on the battlefield. Already after the first French-led counter-offensive in mid-July, disgruntled German artillerymen were complaining bitterly that their protective infantry had collapsed, leaving ‘stragglers, shirkers, etc.’ who ‘swarmed immediately behind our front line’. The army responded by setting up an extensive network of patrols and straggler collection points to the rear of its battle positions.54 With the outlook hopeless, increasing numbers of troops tried to shirk front-line duty altogether. At the beginning of August, Ludendorff criticized the increase in soldiers going absent without leave since the start of heavy fighting.55 Other men and even officers used more subtle methods to escape service at the front. Some feigned sickness: one staff doctor claimed that four-fifths of the officer patients in a reserve hospital he inspected at the end of September were fit for front-line service.56 The summer influenza, which temporarily robbed the army of half a million soldiers, offered a pretext for some to head for the rear. Others found ingenious methods to dupe suspicious battalion doctors. Kits designed to produce leg boils were doing a brisk trade among soldiers as early as May 1918. For the thrifty but
desperate, the inhalation of a small amount of gas could provide a yearned-for relief from front-line service.57

  Nonetheless, until the German government issued a ‘peace note’ on 3 October, the discipline of the Field Army largely held. The early summer mutinies by exhausted troops stopped once the Allied offensives began. Desertion and shirking were on the increase, but remained within manageable limits; the claim, put about by conservative officers in the war’s aftermath and sometimes still repeated today, that up to a million deserters and shirkers had undermined the force was a lie intended to shift blame for defeat onto the rank and file.58 Desertion statistics for the entire army do not survive, but detailed studies of divisions refute any notion of a mass exodus. In the 11 Bavarian Division, a formation containing 10,852 soldiers at the start of May 1918, cases of suspected absence without leave or desertion tripled in the second half of 1918 compared with the previous six months, yet still totalled just seventy-one men. Its sister 2 Bavarian Division registered similar numbers, while 4 Bavarian Division, with over 200 suspected cases of desertion or absence between July and December 1918, suffered greater yet still not crippling problems.59 Records from straggler collection posts tell much the same story. The posts were kept busy during the retreat, but only in the last three weeks of war were they overwhelmed with tens of thousands of displaced or deserting soldiers. The number of absconders arrested on leave trains had actually dropped by late September.60 There are simple reasons to explain why soldiers generally did not desert at the front, whereas the crime was much more common along the lines of communication. Desertion from a poorly policed transport still in Germany was far easier than absconding from a combat unit, evading the patrols and paper checks behind the lines, and struggling homeward through foreign territory. To desert at the front might mean abandoning trusted comrades and officers. The punishments were also much more severe, although right to the end of the war, army courts rarely used the death penalty. Years in a civilian prison or assignment to a military prisoner company for dangerous work in the line were generally the harshest sentences dispensed.61