Ring of Steel

Home > Nonfiction > Ring of Steel > Page 69
Ring of Steel Page 69

by Alexander Watson


  After battle casualties and sickness, mass surrenders rather than desertion or shirking were in fact the major drain on the German army’s manpower during the summer of 1918. Prisoner losses in this final phase of the war were shattering: in four months the Allies captured 385,500 German soldiers, a little more than half of the 712,000 German prisoners taken on the Western Front in the whole four and a half years of fighting.62 Detailed figures for the British army, which took 186,053 prisoners in the months following its first counter-attack at Amiens on 8 August, illustrate the startlingly sudden rise in the propensity of German troops to surrender (Fig. 7). The sudden loss of so many men deeply unnerved commanders. General von Einem, the commander of Third Army, for example, was in despair at his heavy prisoner losses by mid-September. ‘If this continues, the German army will die of exhaustion . . . no war can be won with men who give themselves up.’63 His suspicion that troops were capitulating prematurely was borne out by prisoner interrogations on the British side of the lines. Bemused British intelligence officers reported in early September that prisoners ‘expressed the wish that the whole German Army could be captured so that the war would be brought to a speedy end’. Men of 1 Guards Division ‘not only exhibited every sign of pleasure at being taken prisoner, but actually urged our men to go on attacking, and to capture as many Germans as possible so that the war might quickly end. Each fresh batch of prisoners brought into the Cage was greeted with open delight at our success.’64

  Figure 7. German prisoners captured weekly in the British sector of the Western Front, 31 July 1917–11 November 1918

  Source: [British] War Office (ed.), Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920 (London, 1922), p. 632.

  The huge increase in prisoners owed much to improvements in Allied tactics, which permitted them to break into enemy defences, take units in the flank or even encircle them, leading to mass capitulations. Allied propaganda also may have helped. The British alone had dropped four million leaflets over German lines between May and July 1918, and when the counter-offensives began, between four and five million leaflets were scattered by the Allies every month.65 Some of this material sought to exacerbate the divisions that had grown between much of the German people and its leaders, questioning the sense of ‘struggling for the Kaiser, the Junkers, and the militarists’. Other propaganda played on antagonism between southern and northern Germans. Bavarians were pitied as slaves of Prussia and told that they were bleeding disproportionately for its megalomaniacal ambitions. However, probably more effective than political exhortations were simple appeals to German troops’ stomachs. The US army scattered over a million copies of a ‘prisoner leaflet’ that included a list of the ample rations served in its POW camps.66 This propaganda hit its target. By the late summer of 1918, German soldiers on leave could be heard promising one another that ‘as soon as [the attacks] again began [they] would desert to the enemy; then everything would be over and they would at least get something to eat.’67

  Most important in enabling mass surrenders was, however, the conduct of German officers at the front. In the summer of 1918 the army’s psychological crisis had embraced these junior leaders. The offensives of the first half of the year had exhausted them and depleted their numbers: casualties had been proportionately twice as heavy as those of their men.68 Their quality was much reduced. The onset of the Allied offensives broke them: as one recalled, after it became clear that all sacrifices had been in vain, ‘despair ate deep into the officer corps’.69 By September most of the officers in Seventeenth Army believed the war could not last longer than the late autumn or winter.70 Troops noted the change. As a soldier in Sixth Army wrote home, ‘our officers have also had enough. They’re not allowed to say it openly but now and again they let it be known.’71 It was thus perhaps not surprising that officers were well represented in Allied prisoner cages. The British alone captured 4,727 during their counter-offensive. Some were there because they had lacked the will or authority to make their troops resist. Under Allied pressure, units could collapse startlingly suddenly. Reserve Second Lieutenant Mechow, an officer of Infantry Regiment 145, described this well. On 8 October 1918 his unit was attacked. The battalion on its right had been surprised by the British and his own company was suddenly assaulted from behind by French troops. Mechow explained what happened: ‘My men in part still lay in their fox holes, some were already raising their hands, some fled! “Shoot, shoot!”, I yelled and myself grabbed a machine gun. It was all in vain. A chaotic tangle arose; everything mixed up, friend and enemy. Where should I shoot? Ever more and more enemies arrive; there is no point any more, the mass overwhelms us. The men give up, no one fights any longer.’72

  Nonetheless, more often than not German officers did maintain authority over their soldiers, and surrenders happened at their behest. Crown Prince Rupprecht, the head of the army group facing the British, confirmed as much when he complained in mid-October that officers and large units had repeatedly surrendered themselves.73 Doubtless the Allies’ rapid advance and encirclements placed many units in hopeless positions, permitting their commanders legitimately to capitulate. Yet jittery and despondent officers also surrendered prematurely. In one of the earliest and most celebrated cases at the Second Battle of the Marne in mid-July, a German major gave himself up and over a hundred troops to twelve Americans who had ambushed them.74 He was far from exceptional. Other officers, certain the war was lost, frightened by the firepower of the Allies, and unwilling to sacrifice their men uselessly, ‘advised’ them, as one put it, ‘to surrender . . . if hard pressed’. Occasionally, the paternalistic concern of commanding officers for their soldiers’ well-being motivated them to take extreme risks to negotiate the laying down of arms. One German officer in the autumn of 1918 displayed remarkable bravery when he crawled across no-man’s-land, entered British trenches, surrendered himself to the surprised garrison and then asked permission to return to fetch his men as they too wished to capitulate. As troops’ letters testified, at the front, unlike in rear-line formations, there was no sharp division between officers and men. British statistics show that the ratio of officers to men among German prisoners was the same as in the whole Field Army, confirmation that soldiers were generally not defying their leaders and giving up without them but were marching into captivity as cohesive units. The participation of officers was crucial in making surrender attractive. A collective surrender organized by an officer was more likely to be recognized by the enemy and provided some security against being killed by one’s captors. It also removed any possibility of being accused by one’s own side of being an Überläufer – a deserter to the enemy. This was important, for punishment for this crime was extremely severe: loss of citizenship, confiscation of property, and death on return to Germany.75

  The entire German Field Army was diagnosed by one contemporary military psychiatrist as suffering in the last months of war from a state of ‘neurasthenic exhaustion’.76 This psychological crisis that had begun with the rank and file in the late spring and gripped combat officers by the summer of 1918, ultimately spread further, right up to the OHL . General Ludendorff was under no less stress than the soldiers he commanded. For two years he had struggled to run the entire German war effort. The failure of the offensives in the first half of 1918 was on his head, for he had insisted upon, personally planned and commanded the operations. They had also brought him personal tragedy. On the third day of Operation Michael his youngest stepson Erich, a fighter pilot, had been shot down over the Western Front. The deep emotional impact that the boy’s death had on this highly strung, arrogant man was hinted at in his decision not to send the body back to Berlin but instead to organize a burial in the grounds of his headquarters. ‘I wanted to keep him here,’ Ludendorff explained to his wife. ‘I go to him often.’77 The general was thus in a poor psychological state to cope with a reversal of everything for which he had striven and sacrificed. The French counter-attack on the Marne in mid-J
uly left him extremely nervous but unwilling to acknowledge the shift in the strategic balance. Only with the British offensive outside Amiens on 8 August did he accept that a catastrophe had taken place. A week after its start, Colonel Thaer found him serious and depressed. Ludendorff had recognized the wider loss of faith within his army: ‘For sure, he now sees that our troops are more or less broken.’78

  The sequenced Allied offensives against different parts of the line, the exhaustion of his army’s reserves, and the steady retreat throughout August and September, placed further intense pressure on Ludendorff. To the Kaiser and the Reich’s civilian government, he was bullish. When Wilhelm II, recognizing that ‘the war must be ended’, called a Crown Council on 14 August, Ludendorff assured his Monarch, the Crown Prince, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary that a ‘strategic defensive with periodic offensive action’ offered ‘good prospects for finally crippling the enemy’s will to war’. Until the end of August he persisted in the demand that Germany should retain Belgium in any peace settlement.79 However, his staff were well aware of their leader’s psychological turmoil. He was grappling with the reality that, as he conceded privately to Hindenburg and Wetzell at the start of September, ‘we no longer have any prospect of still winning the war’.80 His staff sought means of helping the defeated general. An officer was appointed to ease his workload and a Berlin psychologist was dispatched to the OHL to provide professional treatment. Dr Hochheimer, the man brought in to heal Ludendorff, found his patient overworked and exhausted. He had become almost a caricature of a Prussian militarist, with uniform, monocle and voice fixed permanently in the shrill tone used to give commands. ‘Ludendorff,’ the doctor wrote on 5 September, ‘is after all the hard years of work and emotional turbulence of the immense responsibility and above all under the impression of the last eight weeks very mentally depressed.’81

  Ludendorff’s psychological treatment lasted through the following four weeks of crisis. Hochheimer ordered a strictly regulated de-stress regime of walks, regulated breathing, singing, massage and more sleep than the one to five hours the general was in the habit of taking. The doctor created a space of security and tranquillity to which Ludendorff could withdraw. Most striking about the psychologist’s account is the general’s submissiveness. Ludendorff clearly embraced the release from responsibility. He followed the doctor’s instructions as if they were military orders and boasted of being his ‘obedient patient’. On one occasion, Hochheimer wrote, the general fell asleep ‘literally under my hands’. The treatment had some success. The doctor considered Ludendorff ‘wonderfully recovered’ by early October and staff officers too noticed improvement.82 Nonetheless, outside the artificial security provided by Hochheimer, the general’s world continued to collapse. The second half of September was a period of acute crisis. In the east, the Allies attacked on 14 September and routed Bulgaria’s army, forcing her within a fortnight to seek an armistice. At the time this news arrived at the OHL, the German army’s leaders were also facing disaster in the west. On 26 September, Foch opened his general offensive to end the war. The strongest position the Germans possessed, the Hindenburg Line, was under furious bombardment. The staff at the OHL had already circumvented Ludendorff to warn the Reich’s Foreign Secretary, Admiral Paul von Hintze, of the desperate situation and to urge him to come to military headquarters. On the evening of 28 September, Ludendorff too surrendered to his fears and informed Hindenburg that an immediate armistice must be sought.83

  The psychological crisis that had started with the German army’s soldiers spread upward in the early summer to its officers and facilitated the Allied advances during the second half of 1918, culminating in the nervous exhaustion of the First Quartermaster General. Ludendorff may not, contrary to his enemies’ suggestions, have suffered a total collapse on the evening of 28 September, but his fateful decision to demand an immediate armistice certainly smacked of blind panic.84 Moreover, it was intimately related to his army’s psychological crisis. Bulgaria’s exit offered a convenient excuse to end the war without accruing personal blame. However, as a frank speech to his confidants at the OHL on 1 October revealed, the general’s haste to close down hostilities was a response to the coming Allied onslaught in the west and the demoralization and poor combat performance of German soldiers. ‘The OHL and the German army are finished,’ he complained to the assembled staff officers. ‘No more reliance could be placed on the troops. Since 8 August, it has rapidly gone downhill. Continually, units have proved themselves so unreliable that they have hurriedly had to be withdrawn from the front.’ He ‘could not operate with divisions which could no longer be trusted’.85

  Ludendorff’s belated admission that ‘final defeat is unavoidably imminent’ confronted Germany’s elite with an existential problem.86 The imperial regime’s legitimacy by this point rested solely on its ability to deliver a quick and total victory. As Foreign Secretary Hintze worriedly told Hindenburg and Ludendorff when the news was broken to him on 29 September, the sudden admission of defeat ‘must give the nation such a shock, that the Reich and dynasty would scarcely be able to survive’. The three men searched for a solution. None believed that the instalment of a dictator to mobilize the masses would work without any prospect of victory. Instead, all agreed, a ‘revolution from above’ must be initiated. President Wilson, the enemy leader most likely to offer lenient terms, would be tempted with the possibility of a peace based on his Fourteen Points. To shore up the thoroughly delegitimized imperial regime and seek a favourable end to hostilities, the ‘broadest possible circles’ would be called to government.87

  REVOLUTION

  The Central Powers’ defeat took place on the Western Front, but the populations and politicians at home determined its consequences. The misery of civilians and their knowledge of what was taking place on the battlefield provided a crucial backdrop for state collapse. Austria-Hungary, not only Germany, was vulnerable to the irretrievable reverses a thousand kilometres away on the Western Front, because by 1918 Habsburg domestic politics were tied inextricably to the international balance. Both the Central Powers’ regimes recognized that defeat made reform unstoppable, and both attempted to manage it by instituting revolutions from above. The failure of these last desperate efforts to stave off total collapse hastened the end of the fighting, which ceased on the Italian Front on 4 November and on the Western Front on 11 November 1918. Yet even before these armistices had been signed, the post-war world had started to take shape. Centuries-old dynasties had fallen. Revolution had taken hold in parts of central Europe and the old continent of empires was giving way to one of imperfect nation states.

  The dramatic changes of 1918 cannot be explained without first confronting the despair felt by people across central Europe. The eighteen-year-old Upper Silesian Ruth Höfner described this movingly. ‘This war, oh, this war! If only it would come to an end!’ she cried in her diary at the beginning of April 1918:

  Four whole years we’ve had war. Some people will say we’ve got used to it. I have also perhaps sometimes so spoken; but no, it is not true! We who once knew peace will never get used to it. We, who in war turned from children to adults, will get used to hunger and poor clothing but never to the sorrow of war, which destroys any budding happiness like frost with the first tender flowers on a spring night. She is everywhere, this lingering sorrow. Go where you will . . . God in heaven, when will it end!88

  The despair Ruth felt, although she expressed it unusually beautifully, was familiar to people across central Europe. The majority lived in a state of advanced misery by the spring of 1918 and conditions would worsen, for the summer of 1918 saw both a drop in food supply to the levels of the ‘turnip winter’ and the onset of an influenza pandemic that would kill at least 20 million worldwide. Society was bereaved, exhausted and yearned for peace.89

  The peoples of the Central Powers were aware that the shape of the peace – and, by this point more important to many, its imminence – would be decided by the great battl
es in the west. The progress of their armies was followed closely. The claim, often made, that civilians were unaware of how dire Germany’s plight was by the summer and autumn, is a myth. After four years of war, the populations were skilled at reading between the lines of official dispatches. They were attuned to when reports stopped discussing advances and could recognize a retreat in a heroic withdrawal. The imperial government did not make the setbacks difficult to spot. Richard von Kühlmann, Hintze’s predecessor as Foreign Secretary, conceded in the Reichstag in late June that ‘an absolute end [to the war] through pure military decisions alone without any diplomatic negotiations could scarcely be expected’.90 From August, the press belatedly started preparing the German public for retreat in the west.91 Most importantly, soldiers were far from reticent about the disasters at the front over the summer and autumn. Contrary to Ludendorff’s bitter accusation that the home front was demoralizing the army, very much the reverse was the truth. Civilian officials were distressed that men on leave were telling the population ‘horror stories’ about the front. Rumours of men going over en masse to the enemy were circulated.92 Troops were also frank in letters to their families about the desperate conditions at the front. The letters of Private First Class Fritz Schlamp, serving in 21st Bavarian Pioneer Company, offer a good illustration. He told his father in mid-September that he and his comrades were sure that the war would be over that year. ‘We win the battles and England wins the war. I believe we can be glad if we get what we had and don’t have to pay anything.’ A friend taken prisoner had ‘at least saved his neck’. As the end approached, Schlamp attempted to thwart the censor and give an explicit warning. At the bottom of an innocuous note thanking his parents for cigarettes, he wrote an odd-looking series of numbers; a simple code to get across a secret message: ‘The situation is bad. Everyone is running away. If there is no armistice, make as much cash liquid as possible.’93

 

‹ Prev