1918

by Matthias Strohn

  But before Franchet d’Esperey’s multinational army had actually crossed the Hungarian border, the Austro-Hungarian Army had already surrendered – to the Italians. Much as the post-Caporetto Italian Chief of Staff Armando Diaz wanted to avoid his predecessor Cadorna’s mistake of launching costly frontal attacks against the Austrian positions, Italian politics put pressure on him to start an offensive as soon as possible, in order to strengthen Italy’s position at the peace negotiations. The slogan coined by Pétain: ‘Wait for the tanks – and the Americans’, would no longer do for a late-comer to the war eager to prove its status as a great power. Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando stated his wishes in no uncertain terms: ‘Between inaction and defeat, I prefer defeat. Get moving!’29

  The resulting battle of Vittorio Veneto has often been derided as a sham victory, unfairly so. Austro-Hungarian morale may have been weakened by the events of the last few months – and by the materiel shortages of the last few years. But Austrian resistance was far from crumbling for the first few days of the offensive that started on 24 October. Actually, it was the remnant of the British support group that first managed to cross the Piave on 26 October: the Gordon Highlanders, rowed by Venetian gondoliers. Following a plan developed by Colonello Ugo Cavallero, the later Italian Chief of Staff in World War II, the Austrian front was split in two. On the evening of 27 October, the newly appointed Austro-Hungarian Foreign Secretary Count Gyula Andrassy – whose father had negotiated the Dual Alliance with Bismarck in 1879 – was forced to appeal for an armistice without waiting for the Germans to follow suit. Technically, Andrassy’s note constituted a breach of the alliance that was often held against Karl I later on. Even the Austrian Social Democrats, who had long argued in favour of a compromise peace, voiced their objections to ‘Habsburg treachery’.

  What gave Vittorio Veneto its bitter taste was the shambles the Austrians made of the negotiations about the truce. The Empire was disintegrating. Andrassy’s plea for a ceasefire was widely – and rightly – interpreted as a sign that the Empire was no longer able to defend itself, be it against external or internal threats. The Czechs started the ball rolling by proclaiming their independence on 28 October, quickly followed by the South Slavs. Karl I, following the spirit of his Peoples’ Manifesto, did not even resist openly. In fact, on 31 October, he donated the Austro-Hungarian fleet to the emerging South Slav state – the Italians retaliated by sinking the flagship Viribus Unitis the next day. None of the successor states wanted to be burdened with losing the war. All of them – even German-Austrians and Hungarians – took care to distance themselves from the old leadership. They took the easy way out: the monarchy had started the war; the monarchy should also bear the responsibility for ending it.

  Karl I was looking for a new commander-in-chief willing to shoulder the burden of defeat. On 3 November he appointed Hungarian-born Generalfeldmarschall Baron Hermann Kövess von Kövesshaza, but Kövess was away in the Balkans trying to piece together a line of defence against Franchet d’Esperey. Thus, the Austrian delegation that had travelled to Italian headquarters in Padua’s Villa Giusti was frequently left without adequate instructions. On the afternoon of 3 November they signed an armistice that covered the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Army – and was supposed to come into force the next day. The Italians argued that an extra 24 hours were needed to inform all their front-line commands; the Austrians, on the other hand, jumped to the conclusion that the armistice was immediately effective and stopped defending themselves against the advancing Italians. The result was that long columns of retreating Austro-Hungarians were overtaken by Italians in cars and taken prisoner. At the end of the day, the Italians had taken 428,000 POWs, even more than the number the Central Powers had netted after Caporetto. Amidst recriminations of perfidy and treachery, it was often overlooked that the Italian Army – without any overwhelming numerical superiority – had indeed ‘inflicted a decisive defeat in the field on its opponent, something its British and French partners were unable to do in the West’. 30

  Conclusion

  Naturally, neither the Serbs who stormed Mount Magla nor the Scots who crossed the Piave can be said to have ‘won’ the war. By June 1918, when the German offensives in the West had run out of steam, Germany had to all intents and purposes lost the war. The Entente offensives in the West suffered a fate almost similar to Vittorio Veneto – they were all too often discounted as an anti-climax. There was safety in numbers. If Germany produced as much steel as the rest of Europe combined, the United States produced as much steel as the rest of the world combined. The Entente could rely on masses of men and money from the United States; the Germans could rely on nothing but visions of future wealth from their newly won Russian hinterland. What the battles of Dobro Polje and Vittorio Veneto did, was to hasten the end. They acted as a catalyst, thus shortening the war by approximately half a year – no more and no less.

  Still, the Russian dimension of 1918 needs to be held up to scrutiny a little further. A Russian collapse in 1915 or 1916 would almost certainly have resulted in an outcome of the war favourable to the Central Powers. But after the gamble of unrestricted submarine warfare had brought the United States into the war, their victory in the East was no longer enough to stave off military defeat. It did help to mitigate the long-term strategic and geopolitical effects of that defeat, though. There is a lot to be said for the comment of Czechoslovakia’s first Prime Minister, Karel Kramář, who told his French friends that they were kidding themselves if they believed they had won World War I – unless they managed to restore the Tsarist regime. True, immediately following the Armistice, the Western powers had arranged for German forces to stay a little bit longer in the Baltic to prevent a Soviet take-over. A combined German–Latvian–‘White’ Russian force re-conquered Riga in May 1919. However, the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ Russian forces, who enjoyed their high-water mark in August 1919, were only marginally supported by the Western powers. Even worse, the Baltic states that were supposed to serve as their launching-pad were sometimes far more worried about the imperial pretensions of the ‘White’ generals than about Lenin’s revolutionary fervour.31

  From the point of view of the Entente the result was the worst of both worlds: they had neither won the friendship of the Soviet regime nor managed to do away with it. The pre-1914 balance of powers in Europe had rested on a Franco-Russian combination to offset the industrial might of Germany. The Russian Revolution had severed that link for good and no US guarantee was forthcoming to compensate the French for that loss. That is why in many ways the results of the war were inconclusive. Germany had at one and the same time lost the war in the West but won the war in the East. The results of Brest-Litovsk were far from being annulled by Versailles, except for the Ukraine, and that was no thanks to any design on the part of the ‘Big Four’. In the inter-war period, Germany no longer faced the threat of a war on two fronts. It could always play off Poland against Russia, or vice versa. Germany had been defeated. Yet, Russia – as Germany’s closest continental competitor in terms of resources – had suffered losses that were far heavier than Germany’s. After 1918, the Soviet Union continued to be an international pariah.

  Military defeat and the fall of the monarchy, the threat of revolution and the reality of inflation turned the end of World War I into a traumatic experience for the German people. Yet, Germany remained the biggest power in Europe, potentially. Sooner or later, that potential was going to be realized.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE WAR OUTSIDE OF EUROPE

  Dr Rob Johnson

  The prevailing view in the British Army’s General Headquarters, a view which was supported by Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was that the centre of gravity of the war was the German Army, and therefore any allocations of men and material to Africa and the Middle East were a waste of critical resources and a distraction from the main theatre in Europe. The attempt to find an alternative, any alternative, to the attritional struggle
in France and Flanders in 1915 had led to operations against the Ottoman Empire, but these efforts ended in stalemate in Palestine, an aborted campaign at Gallipoli, and a humiliating defeat at Kut in Mesopotamia. The two commissions to investigate these setbacks, which appeared in 1917, seemed to reinforce the idea that the war would only be decided on the Western Front.

  Nevertheless, in 1917, the British forces in the Middle East seized both Baghdad and Jerusalem. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, used these victories to argue that General Sir Douglas Haig had wasted the lives of thousands of men in fruitless offensives on the Western Front. He believed that the future of the war, and the security of national interests, lay not in Flanders but east of Suez. With his characteristic eloquence, he answered his critics who argued that Africa and the Middle East were mere ‘sideshows’:

  The British Empire owes a great deal to ‘side-shows’. During the Seven Years’ War, which was also a great European War – for practically all the nations now engaged … were then interlocked in a great struggle – the events which are best remembered by every Englishman are not the great battles on the Continent of Europe, but Plassey and the Heights of Abraham; and I have no doubt that, when the history of 1917 comes to be written, and comes to be read ages hence, these events in Mesopotamia and Palestine will hold a much more conspicuous place in the minds and memories of the people than many an event which looms much larger for the moment in our sight.1

  The division of opinion between government and the army on this issue of priorities would be easy to exaggerate. Robertson had, in fact, given his consent to limited operations in the Middle East, but he was consistent in his judgement that these campaigns must not interfere with the main effort in France. Lloyd George, for his part, was prepared to set aside the rhetoric on his Middle Eastern objectives and gave, for example, consent to the Third Ypres offensive. But the Prime Minister also tried to use the need for close cooperation with the French to subordinate Haig, and then Robertson, with the idea of a Supreme War Council and a supreme command under Maréchal Ferdinand Foch. By early 1918, the differences of opinion had become more acute.

  The arguments about the strategic direction of the war were not just based on personalities and priorities: the operational situation in the winter of 1917–18 was a bleak one for the Allies. British shipping losses from U-boat attacks had not yet recovered; Russia had been knocked out of the war by revolution; the French Army was still not able to take the offensive after a series of soldiers’ strikes; there was stalemate at Salonika; the Italians were routed at Caporetto; and the Americans were not yet present in great strength in Europe. At home, the public were growing weary of the conflict. On the Western Front, British soldiers expressed their anger at the duration of the war, the filthy conditions, casualties, and tyrannical discipline. Captain J. H. Dible, RAMC, believed, ‘we are living on a [powder] magazine’. Private Archie Surfleet, East Yorkshire Regiment, noted, ‘There is nothing but unrest and uncertainty and everyone here is absolutely fed up to the teeth.’2

  Yet the British capture of Jerusalem had a particularly encouraging effect for Britain and represented, as Lloyd George put it, ‘a Christmas present for the nation’.3 There was also optimism about the coming infusion of American manpower into the conflict. Furthermore, Romania and Greece formally joined the Allies, the Italians broke through in Albania linking the Allied fronts, and, in Africa, most of the German forces in the colonies had been neutralized. Only in East Africa did German resistance continue. On the other hand, there were growing anxieties in that winter of 1917–18 about the prospect of German divisions being released from the Eastern Front, but the government believed that this was a war that was about more than the precarious operational situation on the Western Front. It was, for them, a distinctly global war and the meridian of the struggle ran through Suez and across the oceans, for it concerned Britain’s relationship with the Dominions, the Empire, and its share of the world’s commerce. After the war, Basil Liddell Hart attributed Allied success to the long-term naval blockade of Germany but praised the ‘indirect strategy’ pursued by Britain in the Middle East, asserting its utility over the costly and unsuccessful direct strategies which had characterized most of the war. Deflecting the obvious point that the main fronts of Europe had absorbed the bulk of the reserves and prevented their release to the other front, Liddell Hart argued that an opportunity had been missed to exploit the other fronts: ‘If the British had used at the outset even a fair proportion of the forces they ultimately expended in driblets, it is clear from the evidence of the opposing commanders that success would probably have crowned the undertaking.’4

  Strategy and operations in East Africa, 1918

  Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German military commander of East Africa, had defeated two Indian expeditionary forces (Forces C and D) in 1914 and threatened British colonial control in Uganda and Kenya.5 Obliged, therefore, to conduct a strategic defence of their possessions in the region, the British subsequently established a cordon around German East Africa. With reinforcements, Lieutenant General Jan Smuts, the local British commander, could move over to the offensive, but he knew that the Germans would seek to avoid fixed positions and engagements and use the great depth that eastern Africa offered to manoeuvre and escape the closing jaws of his enveloping forces. Smuts therefore flooded the region with troops from Britain, South Africa, India, and the West Indies, and attempted to coordinate a series of thrusts from every point of the compass that would leave nowhere for the Germans to go.6 Much to the frustration of the Allies, the terrain and climate added considerable friction to this endeavour, and it was relatively easy to conceal the smaller German contingents and their African partners as they sought to raid and delay Smuts’ forces.

  Smuts responded by pushing columns into the interior of East Africa on multiple axes. This was still designed to prevent the Germans from being able to use depth to their advantage, but it was also to throw them off balance. While Smuts advanced from the north, paralleled by Major General van Deventer’s force, the Nyasaland and Rhodesian Field Force came up from the south, the Belgians drove in from the Congo in the west, and the Portuguese were encouraged to close the southern border. Smuts’ operations drove Lettow-Vorbeck away from the northern highlands and prevented any threat of raids on the Uganda Railway. As the columns pressed in on the German territory, a third of Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces were cornered in the south-east of the colony and forced to surrender on 28 November 1917. Confusion and communications problems amongst the Portuguese nevertheless allowed Lettow-Vorbeck himself and the remainder of his command to escape into Portuguese East Africa. Regardless of the losses amongst their African porters, the Germans kept moving, and escaped the cordon.

  For the next ten months, Lettow-Vorbeck attempted to stay ahead of his pursuers in Portuguese East Africa. He avoided British landings at Porto Amelia in December 1917 and a thrust eastwards from Fort Johnston on Lake Nyasa designed to catch him there in May 1918. He fled south towards the coast, and was pursued first north-eastwards in July, then back north-westwards into the interior. The Germans abandoned the Portuguese colony on 28 September 1918, and moved back into German East Africa at Nagawira. In November, they marched into Northern Rhodesia at Fife, before being chased to Abercorn to the south of Lake Tanganyika. There was a brief skirmish on 12 November with the lead element of the King’s African Rifles. Lettow-Vorbeck, when learning of the Armistice in Europe, surrendered on 25 November 1918.

  Although some writers have chosen to praise Lettow-Vorbeck for his guerrilla war and ability to tie down Allied forces, up to 70,000 at any one time, he really achieved very little. Isolated, forced into a protracted flight, and increasingly irrelevant to the outcome of the war, there was little of real virtue in his operations. At the end of the war, there were just 175 European and 3,000 African forces left from an original strength of 10,000. Worse, Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign had also led to the deaths of over 250,000 African civilians.7 If strategy
is, to some extent, a balance of cost and benefit, Lettow-Vorbeck’s apparent achievements seem even more diminished.8

  After the war, Germany was considered to have forfeited the European prestige of a civilizing power that would make the possession of colonies acceptable. Consequently, it was stripped of its African and Pacific territories. Smuts, by contrast, had prevented the Central Powers threatening the Allied control of Africa, and especially Sudan, Egypt, and the strategically vital Suez Canal. If any commander was deserving of praise in the East African theatre, then it was surely Smuts and not Lettow-Vorbeck.

  Strategy and operations in the Middle East, 1918

  At the outbreak of war, Britain had moved an Indian Army expeditionary force to the head of the Gulf to secure the oil refineries in southern Persia, since oil was already emerging as critical to the functioning of the Royal Navy and Britain’s war economy. But it was not just a concern to acquire reserves of oil that drove the British into Mesopotamia; it was the far older, pre-war anxieties of regional and Great Power influence that they needed to forestall during the war and after.9 The ‘Great Game’, the rivalry for influence in order to create security zones for imperial possessions, had dominated British thinking about the region in the late 19th century. Concerns about German and Ottoman schemes against British interests in Persia, the Gulf, and India also drove the strategy of 1914–18. The subsequent appearance of the Bolshevik threat in 1918 ensured continuity in this policy priority.10 Sir Henry Wilson, who succeeded Robertson as Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the final year of the war, believed that the Bolshevik threat and Britain’s control of the Middle East far outweighed any other consideration. He wrote: ‘Europe should be left to stew in its own juice’ while ‘from the left bank of the Don to India is our preserve’. As the war drew to a close, Wilson noted in his diary: ‘All the Cabinet agreed. Our real danger now is not the Boches but Bolshevism.’11