A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Not until November 6, under nightmarish conditions, did fresh Canadian troops finally drive the Germans off a large enough portion of Passchendaele Ridge for Haig to claim victory. The price had been almost exactly what Currie had predicted: nearly sixteen thousand men. A final attack four days later allowed the Canadians to consolidate their new positions and brought the Third Battle of Ypres to an end. In three months and one week the forces of the Entente had advanced all of four and a half miles, taking ground that Haig described as a splendid starting point for further fighting in 1918 but that less ecstatic generals dismissed as worthless. The British, Canadians, Anzacs, and French between them had taken a quarter of a million casualties, the Germans nearly as many. The Germans had used—and in many cases used up—118 divisions. The British, whose divisions were considerably larger than their German counterparts at this point, had used forty-three, the French six. Both sides were exhausted, the BEF nearly as broken as the French army had been after the Chemin des Dames.

  Haig, however, was not satisfied. On November 20, near Cambrai east of the old Arras battlefield, he sent nineteen divisions and the largest force of tanks yet assembled into an attack on a thinly defended section of the Hindenburg Line. Like Caporetto, this was a tremendous success for the attackers from the start, but unlike Caporetto the success was short-lived and soon reversed. Of the 216 new Mark IV tanks used in the initial assault, seventy-one broke down mechanically, sixty-five were destroyed by enemy fire, and forty-three bogged down. Some of them, however, bulled their way through the forward defenses, terrifying the Germans and putting them to flight. But Haig had intended Cambrai as a mere demonstration, a year-ending morale-booster. No follow-through had been planned, and none was attempted. The British found themselves with enemies on three sides—always the curse that followed success on a narrow front—and on November 30 a counterattack by twenty German divisions recovered almost all the lost ground.

  Not invincible

  Burnt skeleton of a British tank, in German hands.

  A German lieutenant at Cambrai left a record of how he and his comrades learned to cope with Haig’s tanks. “When the first tanks passed the first line, we thought we would be compelled to retreat towards Berlin,” he wrote. “I remember one tank, by the name of Hyena, which advanced very far and suddenly stopped about 1,000 yards from my little dugout. Some of the boys soon discovered they could stop the tanks by throwing a hand grenade into the manhole on the top. Once this was known, the boys realized that there was a blind spot—that the machine guns couldn’t reach every point around the tank, and these points were very important in the defense.

  “I was shocked and felt very sorry for those fellows in the tanks, because there was no escape for them. Once a man was on top of the tank it was doomed to failure, and the poor fellows were not able to escape. The fuel would start to burn and after an hour and a half or two hours we saw only burning tanks in front and behind us. Then the approaching troops behind the tanks still had to overcome the machine guns of our infantry. These were still effective because the British artillery had to stop shooting as the tanks were advancing, and naturally some of our machine gun nests were still in full action.

  “Anyhow, the attack came to a standstill and we waited for several regiments of cavalry to sweep up and drive us towards Berlin. But this didn’t happen, much to our surprise. When new troops were pulled together near this break-in of the British tanks, the situation settled down, we were formed anew, and afterwards we could clearly see the spot where the British tanks had driven into the German lines. Then after a few days we made a counterattack. It didn’t succeed on the first or the second day, but on the third day we were finally successful.”

  Yet another British offensive had been for nothing. It had not, however, been without meaning. Generals on both sides saw that the new tanks, if properly used, could have produced very different results—that Cambrai was a sign of things to come.

  And so ended 1917. On the Western Front, the year had taken the lives of two hundred and twenty-six thousand British, one hundred and thirty-six thousand French, and one hundred and twenty-one thousand German soldiers. And still the stalemate continued.

  Between them, Arras, the Nivelle offensive, Third Ypres, and Cambrai had rendered the French and the British incapable of mounting a major offensive at the end of the approaching winter.

  At the same time they had destroyed the Germans’ confidence in their defensive system.

  These two facts would shape the year ahead. They would put the conflict on the road to its end at last.

  Doughboys: American soldiers embark for France.

  Chapter 31

  Going for Broke

  “We make a hole, and the rest will take care of itself.”

  —ERICH LUDENDORFF

  The Europe that settled in for the war’s fourth winter was beginning to give evidence of being a dying civilization. Russia, often hailed before the war as the European nation with the most brilliant future, was in ruins. Tsar Nicholas and his wife and children were prisoners, Kerensky’s potentially democratic government was gone, and Lenin and his Bolsheviks were taking control of the wreckage. The people were sunk in destitution, without security or stability, millions of them so sick of the war as to be unwilling to participate in it. Lenin, accordingly, was almost desperately eager to give them peace.

  Conditions were less terrible elsewhere, but not always a great deal less. Even in France and Great Britain, where access to the riches of the New World had prevented discomfort from deepening into general deprivation, there was weariness with the war and the heartbreak it had brought. There was also weariness, unmeasurable because harshly suppressed, with governments committed to fighting on no matter what the cost. Everyday life had become dark. The “democracies” allowed little in the way of liberty to citizens not fully in favor of the war, information not bent to the purposes of propaganda was difficult to find, and there seemed no reason to expect anything except more of the same, conceivably for years to come.

  For Germany and even more for Austria-Hungary, strangled by a blockade that there was now no hope of breaking, the fate of Russia was a warning of what could lie ahead. Here there was no mere discomfort but widespread malnutrition and the prospect of another winter without heat or light or enough food to sustain health or even life. Here was the despair of watching one’s children starve. Life had become tragic—unlivable, even—in the most elemental terms. The possibility of rebellion against the war and the people responsible for continuing it was becoming real.

  As winter brought with it the usual suspension of major military operations, the general staffs began once again to make their plans for the year ahead. On both sides, this annual ritual was becoming more difficult. The failure of one campaign after another to deliver what the generals promised—the failure of every offensive on the Western Front, from the initial German drive on Paris to Passchendaele—made it hard to believe that the next great scheme could have any chance of success. The armies on both sides were in deplorable condition.

  Although Russia had not surrendered or made peace, the two-front war was at an end. Until American troops could be mustered in sufficient numbers and adequately trained—no such thing was expected for another half-year at best—Britain and France would have to fight the Germans alone. There were the Italians, of course, but in the aftermath of Caporetto little could be expected of them.

  And Italy’s losses seemed almost unimportant compared with those of Britain and France. The latter’s casualties totaled three million by late 1917; they had occurred at an average of forty thousand per month throughout that murderous year, and replacements were hard to find. General Pétain, the commander in chief, forecast that he would need 1.02 million troops on the Western Front in 1918 but would have only 85 percent of that number. (As things worked out, he never had 75 percent.) Under Pétain’s ministrations the army had largely recovered from the mutiny of 1917. It had fought off more than a hundred German
attacks from June through August and had attacked successfully at Verdun and the Chemin des Dames, capturing ground and taking prisoners. However, Prime Minister Clemenceau and his principal military adviser, Ferdinand Foch, had limited regard for Pétain’s achievement. In their opinion his caution was excessive, and his determination to carry the fight to the enemy much too qualified.

  With its larger population, its global empire from which to draw manpower, and “only” two million casualties since the start of the war, Britain should have been in a better position than France. But in fact it was not, at least in the view of its commanders. The problem was not, strictly speaking, a shortage of soldiers. Rather it was Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s refusal to let the commander of the BEF, Douglas Haig, have enough divisions for a repetition of the Somme or Passchendaele. Some four hundred and fifty thousand fit and ready combat troops were being held at home at Lloyd George’s insistence, and only labor units that were neither trained nor armed for battle were allowed to cross the Channel. Haig was so short of replacements that he reduced the number of battalions per brigade from four to three to avoid having to dissolve whole divisions. This gave rise to organizational confusion that would be far from resolved when the British found themselves once again in heavy fighting.

  In terms of the matériel needed to support their populations and troops, however, Britain and France were entirely out of danger. The American cornucopia was disgorging itself across the Atlantic, overwhelming the German U-boats as they tried to stem the flow. Virtually everything needed by the Entente, money included, was being generously provided. British production of ammunition had been increased by nearly 3,000 percent during the two years beginning in March 1915, when Lloyd George became minister of munitions. It underwent a further quadrupling in the nine months after Winston Churchill, exonerated by a commission investigating the Gallipoli disaster, took charge of production. By late 1917 a quarter of a million tons of shells was being shipped across the Channel monthly, and this was less than a third of the tonnage of supplies arriving at BEF bases on the north coast of France. The problem, for the Entente, was management. After three years of war there was still no effective mechanism for coordinating British and French operations.

  In November 1917, shortly after the Battle of Caporetto, the Entente’s leaders had met at Rapallo in Italy and agreed on the creation of a grandly titled Inter-Allied Supreme War Council. This body included the heads of the governments and representatives of their general staffs. The United States, though not involved at first, soon joined. Lloyd George welcomed the council as a counterweight to his own general staff—to Haig and “Wully” Robertson. Lloyd George had regarded Haig as an unfit commander of the BEF since before he became prime minister. He had never stopped wanting to remove Haig, but doing so had remained impossible.

  The Supreme War Council proved to have value, but principally in improving administration. It was effective in coordinating the various national transportation systems, and in allocating matériel and, to a limited extent, manpower. It even, before the end of 1917, satisfied Lloyd George’s highest aspirations for it by rejecting Haig’s proposal of another offensive in Flanders. At its second meeting, in December at Versailles, the council decided that there should be no great offensives anywhere in 1918. Where the active direction of military operations was concerned, however, the council was useless. Neither Haig nor Pétain wanted to surrender control to an international authority, and neither cooperated with efforts to get them to do so. Early in 1918 King George V underscored Haig’s untouchability—the strength of his support in high places—by promoting him to field marshal. At almost the same time, ironically, South African General Jan Smuts was on the continent on Lloyd George’s behalf, secretly trying to identify a replacement for Haig. Both Herbert Plumer and Henry Rawlinson were regarded as possibilities.

  The Central Powers had no comparable problems of coordination; Germany no longer had allies substantial enough to require much coordination with. Turkey, in her northern theaters, had been saved by Russia’s collapse. But she was exhausted and overextended. To the south she was in increasing peril from British forces pushing eastward out of Egypt and a British-supported Arab revolt. Falkenhayn was in the Middle East now, as was Otto Liman von Sanders, the onetime commander at Gallipoli. Their assignment was to help the Turks, but they had neither the troops nor the matériel to make a decisive difference. Bulgaria was safe enough, for the time being, but unable to do more than help in the Balkans. It was unsettled by domestic opposition to the regime that had taken it to war on the side of the Central Powers.

  That left Austria-Hungary, now little more than an empty shell. In 1917 Vienna conscripted into its tattered armies the hundred and sixty thousand eligible men—boys, really—born in 1900. That left it with no remaining sources of manpower except for whatever wounded veterans and repatriated prisoners of war (four hundred thousand of these would be recovered from Russia early in 1918) could be returned to combat duty. The Austrians were dangerously short of coal, iron, oil, guns, ammunition, and food for men and animals. The horses needed to move artillery were dying by the tens of thousands because there was no fodder. The 1917 potato harvest, one of the few substantial sources of new food, would be exhausted by spring. Monthly rifle production was plummeting from one hundred and thirteen thousand in March 1917 to nine thousand the following February. Production of heavy shells, which exceeded four hundred thousand per month in the autumn of 1917, would be down to a third of that less than a year later. Bandages were being made of paper because there was no cotton. Paper underwear was being issued to the troops. For soldiers and civilians alike, life had become a degrading struggle for survival.

  In November the Austro-Hungarian general staff, in reviewing its options, was forced to the conclusion that its armies would be incapable of mounting offensive operations in 1918. It still had forty-four divisions on the now-quiet Russian front and thirty-seven in Italy, but these were so depleted of men and equipment, typically including between five and eight thousand troops each, as to be barely worthy of being called divisions. Desertion was epidemic, those troops who did not desert were displaying an increasing inclination to revolt (this was especially true of returning prisoners of war), and in rural areas life was reverting to a kind of Dark Ages barbarism. Deserters formed themselves into bandit gangs and preyed on local populations.

  Conrad had been displaced as chief of staff but commanded an army on the Italian front. And evidently he had learned nothing in three years of mounting grand campaigns beyond the capabilities of his forces. He began hatching plans for an offensive southward out of the Tyrolean Alps onto the plains northwest of Venice—yet another scheme for punishing the despised Italians, made more attractive this time by the hope of capturing as much territory as possible before the hoped-for German victory. Soon Conrad was peddling his ideas in Vienna. His superiors did their best to ignore him.

  All of which left Germany on her own. Even so, the situation seemed far from hopeless. In spite of another year of heavy casualties, in spite too of shortages of many essentials, the end of the war in the east was making it possible to bring Berlin’s military might fully to bear on the Western Front. And if the German armies were no longer what they had been two or three years earlier, they were no more badly damaged than those of Britain and France. If they were wretchedly ill equipped in comparison with their enemies—even Germany’s front-line troops could be given small rations of meat only three or four times weekly, and their trucks and wagons had no rubber tires—in other ways they enjoyed significant advantages.

  High on the list of such advantages was the strength of the German defenses in Belgium and France. At all points except where the difficulties of the terrain made enemy attack improbable, these defenses had been improved beyond recognition since 1914. They were massive, sophisticated, ten-mile-deep systems of interconnected and mutually supportive machine-gun pillboxes, moatlike traps for infantry and tanks, and artillery-proof bu
nkers, all of it guarded by shoals of barbed and razor wire. Hundreds of thousands of laborers, many of them prisoners of war and civilians from captured territory, had been engaged in building this system since the start of the stalemate. The result was a barricade that, once reinforced with troops from the east, promised to be all but impregnable.