by Stewart Ross
[Quoted in They Called it Passchendaele, Lyn Macdonald]
On top of this came the dramatic development of 6 April 1917 – the United States of America joined the war on the Allied side. Two factors in particular persuaded Congress to take this momentous step. First, early in the year Germany reintroduced unrestricted submarine warfare, which threatened the shipping of the neutral United States. Second, the British intercepted a German telegram offering part of the southern US to Mexico if it would side with the Central Powers. When this information reached the US government, war with Germany was inevitable.
The Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. British soldiers commonly named it after the small, smashed village they eventually managed to capture – Passchendaele.
Although US naval forces made an immediate difference in the Atlantic, on land the US intervention had no immediate impact. Its army was tiny and inefficient, and it was almost eighteen months before a large modern force could be raised, equipped, trained, and brought to bear on the enemy. In the meantime, the British made one last effort to win the war on their own.
Haig had spent eighteen months planning his Ypres offensive of July 1917. The Germans had spent almost as long preparing to meet it. The result was a titanic struggle akin to that which had taken place at Verdun the previous year. No breakthrough came, although the British did manage to take the high ground that overlooked Ypres, including the village of Passchendaele. However, the 310,000 casualties that it cost hurt the British much as the French had been hurt the previous spring.
US President Woodrow Wilson led his country into the war in April 1917.
THE COLLAPSE OF RUSSIA By unwisely assuming overall command on the Eastern Front in September 1915, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia sealed his own fate. Henceforward all failures—and there were many—would ultimately be laid his feet. By the end of 1916, the country’s railway system had collapsed, and millions of city dwellers faced starvation as a result. The armed forces were in chaos. The czar and his government were thoroughly discredited. Food riots, in March 1917, brought matters to a head. The czar abdicated and was replaced by a Western-style republican government that promised to hold free elections. It did not, however, take Russia out of the war.
In July 1917, at the request of his hard-pressed allies in the west, Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky called for yet another offensive. It lasted nineteen days. The Central Powers launched counterattacks. Along broad stretches of the front, the Russian soldiers simply threw down their arms and fled. A further German offensive in September pushed closer to Petrograd (St. Petersburg).
Kerensky’s unelected Provisional Government staggered on until November, when it was overthrown in a communist coup in Petrograd. The communists, attracting support with their slogan, “Peace! Bread! Land!” rapidly extended their rule to Moscow and other cities. To provide the promised peace, the new leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Foreign Minister Leon Trotsky, signed an armistice with the Germans on December 3, 1917. Negotiations soon followed.
The collapse of Russia on the Eastern Front, 1917–18. The German advance brought vast industrial and agricultural wealth to Germany.
THE TREATY OF BREST-LITOVSK
Russia surrendered the following to the Central Powers:
Territory
Ukraine, Finland, Baltic Provinces (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), the Caucasus, Belorussia (White Russia), Poland.
Population
33 percent
Railway network
53 percent
Arable land
25 percent
Coal fields
70 percent
Total industry
40 percent
Trotsky and Stalin, key members of the communist Bolshevik party, address crowds of supporters in Moscow, October 1917.
Trotsky hoped the communist revolution would spread from Russia to Germany and other countries, so he put off reaching an agreement with the Germans. They responded by advancing rapidly toward Petrograd. This forced Trotsky’s hand. On March 3, 1918, Russia formally made peace, surrendering vast territories to the Germans, including the Ukraine, Finland, Poland, and much of its own industrial capacity. Germany was now free to concentrate all its resources on the Western Front in an attempt to win the war before U.S. power could turn the war in favor of the Allies.
Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s liberal premier who alienated his countrymen by continuing the war with Germany. This allowed communists to gain popularity and power.
CHAPTER 4
VICTORY AND DEFEAT
General Erich von Ludendorff, who masterminded Germany’s final offensive in the spring of 1918. He is pictured here after the war, in around 1924.
Germany’s spring offensives, 1918. A series of dramatic offensives in early 1918 recaptured in weeks territory that Germany had lost over the previous years.
The final German offensives that would win or lose the war were masterminded by General Erich von Ludendorff. For this first attack, and the one about which he was most optimistic, he chose his ground carefully. His target was the lightly held British front on the old Somme battlefield, perhaps the weakest point in the enemy line. By mid-March 1918, he had transferred thousands of troops from the Eastern Front, assembling three German armies (sixty-three divisions or some 630,000 men) to face twenty-six divisions of the British Third and Fifth Armies.
The German assault began in thick fog on March 21. First came a 6,000-gun bombardment, many firing blistering mustard gas shells, then an advance all along the line. Overwhelmed, the British fell back. For a time, it looked as if the two British armies might be split apart, leaving the Germans free to sweep into the heart of France. To deal with the crisis, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch was appointed supreme commander of all Allied forces on the Western Front. Coordinating the resistance, he rushed French reinforcements to the front. Finally, having fallen back almost 50 miles (80 km) in places (the greatest movement of the trench war), the Allied line held fast. On April 5, Ludendorff called the operation off.
One of many thousands of British soldiers killed during the German offensives of 1918. This man died covering the retreat of his comrades.
Having failed to break through on the Somme, Ludendorff turned his attention to the line further north. Here he had located another weakly defended British sector, this time south of Ypres on the Lys River. Launching another gigantic attack, the Germans came extremely close to breaking through. Indeed, if Ludendorff had been less cautious in following up early progress, the Lys Offensive (April 9–29) might have led to a German victory.
Abandoning the Lys offensive, Ludendorff turned his attention to the French on the Aisne River (May 27–June 2) and in the Oise Valley (Noyon-Montdidier, June 9–13). As before, neither offensive made the anticipated progress. Despite suffering enormous casualties, the Allied line remained intact. Ludendorff’s time was running out.
French Marshal Ferdinand Foch was given overall command of the Allies on the Western Front in 1918.
ALLIED ADVANCE Ludendorff next planned a huge summer offensive for the Flanders region, where the line was held by the British and Belgians. To tie down the French and prevent them from sending reinforcements north, on July 15, 1918, he launched an attack along the Marne River. Here, on the site of the first major battle of the war, three German armies advanced on either side of the famous Champagne city of Reims (see page 29).
Blinded by an attack with poison gas during the Second Battle of the Marne (July 1918), two French soldiers are led to a field hospital by their comrades.
A familiar pattern emerged. The Germans made some progress but were halted when the Allies managed to bring up reinforcements. On this occasion, however, the fighting did not stop there. To the Germans’ surprise, on July 18, Foch ordered a counterattack. Backed by 350 tanks, the French drove the Germans back over the ground they had captured and beyond. Ludendorff urgently brought up reinforcements of his own and stopped the Allied advance by early August. Nevertheless, an at
tack had become a serious defeat, and plans for a further German offensive were canceled.
CROSSING THE OLD BATTLEFIELD
In the autumn of 1918, Major P. H. Pilditch cycled across the Somme battlefield searching for the grave of a friend killed in 1914:
“On the way back we spent some time in the old No Man’s Land of four years’ duration … It was a morbid but intensely interesting occupation tracing the various battles among the hundreds of skulls, bones and remains scattered thickly about. The progress of our successive attacks could be clearly seen from the types of equipment on the skeletons, soft caps denoting 1914 and early 1915, then respirators, then steel helmets marking attacks in 1916…. There were many of these poor remains all along the German wire.”
—Quoted in The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War, edited by Malcolm Brown
It was now the turn of the Allies to go on the offensive. Putting into effect Haig’s plan, Foch’s first goal was to eliminate the salients in the Allied line that had been created by the Ludendorff offensives. By August 5, 1918, the Aisne salient had been recovered. Then, on August 8, the Allies launched a large-scale attack to recapture the lost Somme battlefield east of Amiens. On a remarkable first day—the “black day of the German army”—British, French, and Canadian troops advanced almost 10 miles (16 km). They took six thousand prisoners and captured 100 guns. In some places the Germans, for the first time in the war, fled in disarray before the overwhelming onslaught of tanks, aircraft, artillery, and infantry.
“Salient busting”: the forceful term used to describe the Allied campaigns that pushed back the Germans and reduced the salients (bulges) in the front line on the Western Front, in July–September 1918.
Some of the many thousands of German soldiers captured by the Allies during August 1918.
The Allies pressed forward until early September, by which time the Germans had abandoned all the ground gained earlier and withdrawn to the Hindenburg Line. Thousands more prisoners had been taken and many more guns seized. As summer turned to autumn, the outlook for the German Army was looking bleaker by the day.
Enter the United States—the St. Mihiel battlefield where U.S. forces made their first major contribution to the Allied victory.
U.S. CASUALTIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Cantigny
1,600
Belleau Wood
8,800
Marne
40,000
St. Mihiel
7,000
Meuse-Argonne
117,000
Total in all theaters 281,000
U.S. 18th Infantry Machine Gun Battalion troops move toward the front line near St. Mihiel, September 13, 1918.
IMPACT OF THE UNITED STATES Having entered the war in April 1917, General John Pershing, the commander of the U.S. forces in France (the American Expeditionary Force, AEF) began to build a U.S. Army. By the end of the war, there were some two million U.S. troops in France, where they were trained and equipped. First to see action was the U.S. First Division, which on May 28, 1918, successfully captured the village of Cantigny during the German Aisne River offensive. A week later, the Second Division withstood a German attack and captured Belleau Wood near Château-Thierry. By the time of the Marne attack and counterattack (see pages 44–45), the U.S. had more than a quarter of a million men in the field. The U.S. First Army, however, was not fully ready for independent action until the end of the month.
The transatlantic alliance—U.S. General John Pershing (right), the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, with the Allied commander in chief, Marshal Foch of France.
The full impact of U.S. intervention was finally felt in September, during the Allied salient-busting operations. The U.S. First Army was given the task of reducing the St. Mihiel salient southeast of Verdun. Attacking on September 12, with 600 aircraft in support, the United States caught Germany in the process of withdrawing and cleared most of the salient in a single day. The message to their Allies and foe alike was obvious—the Americans were now a force to be reckoned with.
From St. Mihiel, Pershing moved north of Verdun to work with the French in the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive that lasted to the end of the war (see pages 48-49). After good progress when the attack began, the Americans became bogged down in October and suffered heavy casualties. With more troops ready for battle each day, the AEF was now divided into two armies. By the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, they were once again making rapid progress and even beat the French in the “race to Sedan.” As many had predicted in 1917, once the United States managed to mobilize its manpower, all hopes of a German victory disappeared.
CHAPTER 5
THE END OF THE WAR
Armistice at last: Joyful Parisians celebrate the end of hostilities on the streets of the French capital on November 11, 1918.
Having removed the dangerous salients from their line, on September 26 the Allies began their final onslaught. Foch’s master plan involved three offensives: a small Belgian attack forward of Ypres, larger forces of French and Americans in a pincer movement on the River Meuse swinging north of Verdun, and the British and French, in the largest attack, driving towards Cambrai and St. Quentin.
THE FINISH OF THE WAR
British soldier James Bird wrote home describing the day the war stopped:
“The Saturday afternoon was very exciting, the band of the Canadians played in the square, and during the afternoon two of our planes did all sorts of tricks and stunts, flying very low, this simply made the inhabitants go mad with delight …
[Monday.] This was the day of the finish of the war. I walked into Mons in the afternoon, we were mobbed and nearly lost all our buttons. It was indeed a great day for Britain, as well as France. It made one feel glad to be alive, and to think that after four years hard fighting we had at last reached the place where our troops were in 1914…”
—Quoted in The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War, edited by Malcolm Brown
The German High Seas Fleet surrenders to the British at Scapa Flow, Orkney, Scotland, on November 21, 1918.
The southern Franco-American offensive was the first to begin. With overwhelming force, including air superiority and large contingents of tanks, the Allies drove Germany steadily back, capturing Sedan on November 6. The armistice was signed as they got ready to move south over the German border to Metz. At the other end of the line the Belgians (with some support from other nations) advanced equally rapidly to Ostend and on toward Antwerp. To their south, the British, supported by French and U.S. divisions, took Cambrai, forced Germany to abandon the Hindenburg Line on October 4, and were pushing on towards Charleroi when hostilities ceased.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been virtually running Germany since early 1918. When their armies were pushed back so dramatically in the autumn, Ludendorff put out feelers for a ceasefire. The terms were unacceptable—Germany was asked to surrender all land occupied since 1870, dismantle its armed forces, surrender much of its martial equipment, and set aside its treaties with Russia and Romania.
As the war dragged on, Germany’s allies began to desert. Bulgaria signed an armistice on September 29. Mounting starvation and discontent in Germany led to strikes and riots. When the German navy mutinied, revolution (as in Russia) became a real possibility. Accepting the inevitable, on October 26, Ludendorff resigned and fled to Sweden. Hindenburg remained at his post, but Turkey signed an armistice on October 30, as did Austria-Hungary on November 3. Finally, at 11 A.M. on November 11, Germany too accepted the Allies’ terms, and the guns finally fell silent.
The final Allied advance, autumn 1918. After the war, the Germans took pride in the fact that no foreign soldier had set foot on their soil.
MAKING PEACE A series of long-negotiated treaties turned the various short-term armistices into what was hoped would be lasting peace. The Treaty of St. Germain organized the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, creating the separate states of Austria, Hungary, and Czecho
slovakia (the Balkan peoples had already established themselves as Yugoslavia). As with the other treaties, it also limited the military capacity of the former Central Powers. At Neuilly (November 27, 1919) Bulgaria’s frontiers were established. The terms of Hungary’s surrender were sealed at Trianon on June 4, 1920. The Treaty of Trianon (August 10, 1920) broke up the Ottoman Empire, leaving the much smaller state of Turkey.
By far the most important treaty was that dealing with Germany. Signed at Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919, it was an extremely harsh document that the Germans had no option but to accept. This was not what some peacemakers had envisioned in 1918. For example, in his Fourteen Points (January 1918), U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had set out a reasonable and moderate set of peace aims. At Versailles, these were overridden by the demands of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and, to a lesser extent, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Both were driven by public opinion at home demanding vengeance after four and one-half years of slaughter.