Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Public employees also managed the secular rites of patriotism in localities throughout the land. City fathers and other local notables – such as prominent businessmen, professors, and leading officials in local bureaus of state and federal agencies – presided over patriotic festivals, which convened regularly in public halls or (in the summer) in the open air. These were elaborate affairs, staged amid the heavy national symbolism of flags and depictions of monarchs and war heroes. The liturgy featured patriotic speeches punctuated with presentations of music, poetry, and drama (all of which were remarkable for the absence of British, French, or Russian pieces). The function of these festivals was demonstrative. They were scripted to create – both in Germany and the enemy lands – the impression of a people united in its resolution to fight to the end. During the first eighteen months of the war they could play to residual enthusiasm for the war, which was reflected in the broad appeal of these events across the social spectrum. As the burdens of war accumulated, the festivals became more focal in the mobilization of patriotism, and the techniques they employed became more refined. The events also became more parochial. They appealed increasingly to people who looked socially like the conveners, while the sentiments invoked in the rituals began to ring artificial. The interpretive claims of the patriots strained to accommodate a war that refused to end in its second year.

  The campaigns of 1915

  Erich von Falkenhayn (see Plate 2) had been war minister at the outbreak of the war; in the fall of 1914 he moved into Moltke’s position as chief of the General Staff, which had now taken on the title of Supreme Command of the Army (OHL). In his role as operational head of the Germany army, Falkenhayn oversaw the last desperate German efforts to turn the Allied flank in Flanders. His nerves were stronger than his predecessor’s; and he needed all his composure to deal with the staggering dilemmas that now descended upon the German military leadership, as well as the rivalries that these dilemmas spawned.

  Plate 2 Erich von Falkenhayn (© SOTK2011/Alamy)

  The failure of Schlieffen’s grand design represented a strategic catastrophe. German armies were already at war on two fronts. The country’s commitments to its own allies among the Central Powers – primarily to Austria–Hungary, but also to Turkey and, after October 1915, to Bulgaria – threatened fighting on several additional fronts in southern and eastern Europe. The combined military and economic resources now arrayed against Germany far exceeded anything this country could hope to mobilize; and Germany’s disadvantage promised only to grow with the continuation of the war. The question that haunted German strategic planning for the war’s second year was accordingly no longer how to win a spectacular military victory but, rather, how to bring the conflict to an acceptable end.

  Falkenhayn embodied the predicament.19 Late in 1914 he confessed his belief to the chancellor that Germany could not win the war militarily. This confession was based on a sober assessment of the new realities of industrial war. The conclusions that Falkenhayn drew from these military calculations were tortuous and politically misconceived, however; and, in the end, they offered no resolution to the strategic problem. “If we do not lose the war,” he was heard to utter at this juncture, “we will have won it.”20 Germany could not, he believed, win on both fronts. A military decision on the eastern front was in all events impossible, for he was convinced – with the experience of Napoleon as a guide – that the vast open spaces and resources of Russia made this land unconquerable. He reasoned accordingly that the western front represented the war’s pivotal theater. Here Germany faced its most dangerous and determined foe, which he thought to be Britain. This conclusion, which reflected current popular passions as much as it did military calculation, then defined the priorities towards which Falkenhayn’s decisions stumbled during the next year. To persuade Britain of German invincibility, he envisaged a massive German offensive in the west, coupled with submarine warfare against British commerce. The success of these ventures depended in turn, Falkenhayn thought, on a separate peace in the east. This goal he hoped to achieve by means of a diplomatic offensive in conjunction with a limited offensive on the eastern front, which would inflict what might be called a “moderate defeat” on the Russian army. The German war effort in 1915 was to be apportioned accordingly. While German peace feelers ventured quietly towards Russia, the German position in the west was to be built up as a basis for decisive offensive operations.

  The thinking of Falkenhayn’s rivals in the German military leadership was burdened with no such subtlety.21 Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the soldiers who had overseen the only German triumphs of 1914, envisaged a more brilliant scenario for 1915. They called for the military annihilation of Germany’s weakest opponent, which they insisted was Russia. In their view, this goal required a massive maneuver of envelopment, which would penetrate deep into the rear of Russian positions in Poland, cut the Russian armies off from their bases, and destroy these forces. Then, with the eastern front secure, the full weight of the German forces could be thrown at the western powers, whose armies would await a fate similar to that of the Russians. In advocating a campaign that was framed in Vernichtung, annihilation by means of strategic envelopment, Hindenburg and Ludendorff could lay claim to Schlieffen’s legacy, even if they adjusted his geographical priorities in line with their own experience in the eastern command.22

  The success of Hindenburg and Ludendorff as commanders of the eastern armies in 1914 lent enormous weight to their views, as it turned them into folk heroes. In the debates that took place at the end of the year over military priorities, these generals also had the support of Bethmann Hollweg, who, like Falkenhayn, hoped for a diplomatic settlement with Russia but who, like the eastern commanders, reasoned that a massive offensive in the east was the best way to achieve this end. But Falkenhayn also had allies. Alfred von Tirpitz and the naval command advocated commercial warfare against Britain. More significantly at this stage in the war, Falkenhayn enjoyed the support of the emperor and his entourage, who (with good reason) feared Hindenburg as a potential rival for popular loyalties. In this atmosphere, the debates over strategic priorities turned into intrigue before the issue could be resolved.

  The decision in favor of the east was due to other circumstances. The war had not gone well for Germany’s principal ally in 1914. In fact, the difficulties that plagued the military alliance of the Central Powers were already in evidence by the year’s end.23 The Austrians had not been privy to the specifics of the Schlieffen Plan, nor were their operations in 1914 coordinated in any meaningful way with the Germans’ designs. The performance of the Austrians in the initial campaigns of the war had done nothing to raise the low regard in which the German military leaders held their ally. The defeat of Serbia obsessed the Austrian commander, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the point of clouding his judgment. In action against Serbian forces, however, Austrian armies had quickly stalled in the fall of 1914.24 More significantly, against the Russians in Galicia, a far more ominous opponent, the Austrians suffered major defeats and territorial losses, which included the great fortresses of Lemberg (Lvov) and Przemysl. The campaign on this eastern front also brought the decimation of the Austrian officer corps and revealed the extent of ethnic disaffection among the troops, particularly among the Czech contingents. Fears for the collapse of the Austrian army were not exaggerated; and they prompted the German command to send reinforcements to the south at the end of the year, as the operational subordination of the Austrians to the German command grew apace with their diplomatic dependence on their German ally. In the German leadership, however, anxiety over Austria’s survival bred sympathy for the entreaties of the Austrian commander, who now pleaded that dramatic military success in the eastern theater would revitalize his army. This course of action promised finally to impress the governments of Italy and Romania, which were both leaning towards intervention on the side of the Entente (as the alliance of Britain, France, and Russia was known).

  Falkenhayn thus agreed, albeit
with skepticism and reluctance, to major offensive operations in the east. Four new reserve corps, which had been recruited in the fall of 1914, were committed to this theater, along with an additional corps from the western front and large stocks of artillery and machine guns. By early 1915 German forces in the east had grown to more than 600,000, which were now deployed in three armies. The offensive began in two sectors of the long eastern front (see Map 5). Late in January combined German and Austrian forces launched an attack to the south, into Galicia, which dislodged the Russians from the passes of the Carpathian Mountains before it stalled. To the north, the Germans advanced some forty miles into Russian Poland from lines in East Prussia, before this attack stalled, too.

  Map 5 The eastern front, 1915

  In the aftermath of this action, whose territorial gains hardly validated the enormous losses that the Austrians sustained to desertion and the winter, dissension and intrigue returned to German headquarters. The issue now was the scope and goal of the next attack on the Russian positions. With the support of the Austrian commander, Ludendorff and Hindenburg argued in favor of a grand new Cannae, a massive flanking attack whose northern arm would sweep north and east of Kovno, deep into Poland.

  In Falkenhayn’s view, however, the demands that this plan made on Germany’s limited military resources were as objectionable as was its likely impact on the Russians’ interest in a negotiated peace. In hopes of forestalling the broader ambitions of his eastern command, Falkenhayn accordingly agreed to a more modest plan, a smaller-scale envelopment to follow an assault on Russian lines in western Galicia, in a sector marked by the towns of Tarnow and Gorlice.

  The ensuing campaign yielded the most sensational German victories of the entire war.25 In one of the few frontal assaults to bear fruit in this war, a joint German–Austrian force broke through the Russian lines around Gorlice in May. Russian troops thereupon evacuated most of Galicia, when in July two German armies attacked in the north. The Russian retreat now became general; German troops occupied Warsaw in August, and by the end of September all of Russian Poland, as well as Lithuania and Latvia, was in the hands of the Central Powers. It was a breathtaking spectacle. At a cost of more than 750,000 casualties, the Russian armies had fallen back up to 250 miles. The campaign gave the lie to the impression that the First World War lacked strategic mobility; but it also reflected the special circumstances that reigned in this theater. The thin Polish front extended some 600 miles over flat, sandy terrain, so it could not be defended with the sophisticated concentration that became the rule to the west. The most telling feature of the campaign was the vast technical superiority that the Germans enjoyed over the Russians. The Austro-German army that attacked around Gorlice in May was equipped with 1,272 pieces of light artillery and 334 heavy guns; the corresponding figures for the Russians who defended this sector were 675 and four.26 This advantage compensated for the numerical superiority of the Russian armies, which was, however, great enough to sustain even the staggering losses of 1915.

  Ludendorff and Hindenburg were not the only ones who believed that the Germans could now, with sufficient support and strategic audacity, win the war in the east. Falkenhayn disagreed, however. The difficulty, to which he was more alive than his eastern commanders, was that the Germans were also under enormous duress in the west. Here their armies enjoyed no such advantages as in the east, and the more equal balance of forces had already cast combat into the terrible immobility that was the hallmark of the western front. From the English Channel to the Swiss border, the front extended some 450 miles over rolling hills and forests. Much of the front was situated atop firm clay or chalk soil, which accommodated deep, dense labyrinths of trenches. These were home to more than 8 million soldiers on both sides, who were dedicated, trained, and equipped to construct and man the most forbidding defense systems yet devised. In this theater the war thus became a series of great sieges, undertaken first by the one side, then the other. The paradox was that, although this mode of warfare became emblematic of the horrors of combat, it was the most effective way to cope with the new military technologies – in other words, to limit the casualties that industrial weapons inflicted on both soldiers and civilians. The highest casualty rates suffered by the armies of both sides on the western front occurred not during the high era of trench warfare but, instead, during the more mobile campaigns of 1914 and 1918, before the great defensive systems were established or after they had been breached.27

  In 1915, however, the unhappy role of demonstrating the formidability of these defenses fell principally to the French and British armies (see Map 6). The presence of German armies on Belgian and French soil dictated an offensive strategy to the western powers. The Germans launched but one major attack. This action, which took place in April in Flanders, was noteworthy for the Germans’ introduction of poison gas on the western front, but the principal object of the attack was to screen the offensive then being launched on the eastern front against Gorlice. The French, by contrast, attacked German lines repeatedly in the Champagne district, while British and French forces did the same to the west, in the Artois region. Although these offensives reached several high points of intensity in the late winter, spring, and early fall, combat on the western front was already assuming its characteristic guise; and it was difficult to judge when one battle ended and another began. Extended artillery barrages on opposing trenches were the ritual prelude to what was called infantry attack, the headlong dash by masses of unprotected foot soldiers to their slaughter. The architecture of the trench systems proved resilient in the face of shelling, and its capstones, barbed wire and machine guns, consistently defied infantry assault. The mechanics of combat in this style condemned the attackers to casualties that were increasingly difficult to justify. Allied offensive operations near Arras in May and June 1915 opened with a storm of more than 2 million shells on the German lines. The British and French attackers nonetheless suffered 132,000 casualties during their several weeks in front of the German trenches. That the German defenders themselves lost 73,000 casualties in this action disclosed the frightful toll taken by artillery, even when it failed to destroy entrenched defenses.28 The German losses were also due to the reluctance of German commanders to abandon territory in tactical retreats to more secure defense lines.

  Map 6 The western front, 1915

  For the Central Powers, 1915 was the best year of the war. Despite commitments to several fronts, the Germans had frustrated repeated Allied offensives in the west. To the east, the Germans had achieved a spectacular strategic breakthrough in Poland and bolstered the armies of their Austrian ally. In the southeast, their Turkish allies had thwarted an allied effort to turn the strategic flank with an invasion of the Dardanelles peninsula. In the fall came more good news, when Bulgaria entered the war on the side of Central Powers. Bulgarian troops then joined Austrian and German forces in the final subjugation of Serbia at the end of the year.

  If the developments of 1915 offered some immediate grounds for optimism in Germany, the long-term implications of the war’s second year were less encouraging. The pattern of conflict in 1915 was the same as it had been in the previous year: triumph in the east, stalemate in the west, and no end to the war. The strains on German resources mounted as the conflict broadened. In May 1915, despite desperate German diplomatic attempts to forestall it, the Italians entered the war on the side of the Entente. A series of Italian offensives against Austrian positions in the Tyrol and along the Isonzo River demonstrated the particular formidability of defensive warfare in an Alpine setting.29 Despite their failure, the Italian attacks tied down sixteen Austrian and German divisions. At the end of the year German troops were thus in action in much of Europe: in the Tyrol, Serbia, Poland, and Russia’s Baltic provinces, as well as in Belgium and France.

  Commitment to these many theaters was sure to deplete German resources; and it defined the country’s strategic dilemma throughout the rest of the war. The grand eastern offensive of 1915 halted with th
e exhaustion of German troops. The demands of the western front made it impossible for Falkenhayn to assign sufficient reinforcements to the eastern theater, even had he believed in the possibility of destroying the Russian army. The Russians’ ability to bear enormous losses confirmed the German commander’s belief that the key to winning the war did not lie on the eastern front, however. In 1916 he planned to prove his point in the west. Here he faced a dilemma of a different kind, however, for the dynamics of battle frustrated the kind of offensive action that victory seemed to require. And, by the beginning of 1916, many of Germany’s leaders were questioning the wisdom of Falkenhayn’s thinking, for political as well as military reasons.

  Falkenhayn and Bethmann Hollweg

  Soldiers commanded great respect and power in Imperial Germany. The term “militarism” connotes this problem, which had a long history in Germany.30 Conflicts between the military and civilian leadership had figured large in the wars of national unification in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the great Bismarck had fought for the principle of civilian supremacy in political councils. In the new German empire, which was the product of the soldiers’ triumph, the military enjoyed immense prestige, and Bismarck’s successors were less successful in resisting the claims of the military leadership to political influence. Schlieffen formulated his plan with little heed for its massive political consequences; and the most important German policy-maker during the ultimate stages of the July crisis in 1914 was arguably General von Moltke.

  By virtue of his training and background, General von Falkenhayn also believed in the supremacy of the military, above all in time of war. He was a capable and ambitious soldier. His tolerance for ambiguity was unusually honed for a German officer, and it reflected his extended experience in foreign lands before he was named war minister in 1913. In this role, he had nonetheless made no secret of his disdain for the views of his civilian colleagues in the executive or the politicians in the Reichstag, whom he routinely antagonized with his arrogance. His manner also antagonized his military colleagues, however, so he had few friends anywhere when he took over Moltke’s position in the fall of 1914. His decisions about the 1915 campaign earned him additional enemies. Given the political circumstances in Imperial Germany, the most important of these enemies were themselves soldiers.