Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  No one was more alive to this connection than Ludendorff himself. He had provided the energy behind the Hindenburg Program, the wholesale readjustments in the organization of war production that began on the home front in the fall of 1916. He had also concluded in the fall of 1916 that the state of production was insufficient to support a major German offensive in the foreseeable future. German armies had withstood the monster battles of 1916, but at a cost of 1,500,000 casualties. The Entente powers had suffered more, but the ratios of strength at the beginning of 1917 nevertheless gave the German high command reason to pause, for they reflected basic inequalities of material and human resources between the two sides (see Table 5). The Hindenburg Program represented a desperate response to these massive disadvantages. It was based on the calculation that Germany could compensate in determination and productive efficiencies for what the country lacked in resources.

  Table 5 Material and human resources, 1917

  * * *

  Central PowersEntente

  Actives and reserves 10,610,000 17,312,000

  Field artillery 14,730 19,465

  Heavy artillery 9,130 11,476

  Machine guns 20,042 67,276

  Airplanes 1,500 3,163

  * * *

  Source: Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, II, 532.

  Implicit in the Hindenburg Program was also a German commitment to defensive warfare in the west in 1917. The emphasis in German military planning shifted accordingly in late 1916 to the consolidation and strengthening of positions already held and to the rebuilding of German armies in anticipation of a great offensive, whose timing slid towards 1918.10 German forces in the field meanwhile adjusted and tightened their defenses all along the western front. In the center, they built a forbidding new set of concrete and steel defenses to the rear of their front lines. The so-called Hindenburg or Siegfried Line stretched like a chain of subterranean colonies seventy miles east of Arras; it comprised three parallel lines, situated far enough apart to escape simultaneous fire from French artillery. In March 1917 the German army staged a general withdrawal to these new positions, leaving the evacuated area sterilized of human beings, animals, crops, and buildings.11

  Adjustments in tactical training accompanied the repositioning. The analogue of the limited strategic withdrawal was a new emphasis on “in-depth” defensive tactics, which featured retreats in the face of superior enemy firepower to more defensible positions. In the hope of relieving the futility of massed infantry assaults, German troops now received instruction in small-group, “storm troop” tactics of infiltration and envelopment, whose object was to probe enemy lines and to direct troop concentrations to weak points.12 Artillery training was also adjusted to stress short, intense bombardment as the prelude to infantry attack, and then the use of rolling barrages to provide close support for the advance of the foot soldiers.13

  Military events on the western front in 1917 demonstrated the wisdom of these adjustments. The campaigns recalled the action of 1915 (see Map 9). The armies of the western powers again took the offensive, but their operations suggested that, despite the availability of armored vehicles, which had first seen action at the Somme in 1916, the British and French were adjusting with more difficulty than the Germans to the tactical imperatives of land warfare. The massive offensives that the western powers launched along the western front began again with protracted artillery bombardments; these were again the prelude to assaults by the foot soldiers, who were again arrayed largely in linear formations. The British initiated the action in April 1917 in the west, near the town of Arras, in a sector that faced the western end of the Hindenburg Line. The shelling of the German positions continued around the clock for eight days. In part because of effective air support and the presence of tanks in the main assault, the British initially made significant gains until the deep German defenses smothered the momentum of the attack. In six weeks of fierce fighting the British lost 142,000 casualties.

  Map 9 The Western front, 1917

  A simultaneous French offensive to the southeast, in the Champagne district, was designed to exploit the Germans’ duress around Arras. The hilly terrain that Robert Nivelle, the commander of the French army, had selected as the site of the attack was laced with rivers, however, and ill suited to offensive action. Much of the artillery bombardment, with which the French occupied the first nine days of the offensive, fell onto empty landscape that the Germans had, unbeknown to the French generals, earlier evacuated. When the French foot soldiers then encountered the German positions, which were anchored in the heights known as the Chemin des Dames, the results were familiar. Seven weeks of French infantry attacks purchased insignificant advances at a price of 250,000 casualties.

  This exercise in futility, which was known as the “Nivelle Offensive,” then produced the gravest crisis that the French army suffered during the war. In the summer of 1917 forty-five French divisions mutinied in the face of orders to continue the attack on German lines. That the crisis did not result in the disintegration of the French army was due to several fortunate circumstances, not least of which was German ignorance of the scope of the unrest. Nivelle was replaced at the head of the French army by Philippe Pétain, the hero of the French defense of Verdun, who contained the crisis with draconian discipline in selected instances, as well as a general program of tactical reform and improvements in the feeding and furloughing of the troops. The crisis nonetheless ensured that the French would undertake no additional offensives in 1917.

  The role of attacker fell accordingly to the British once more. In July 1917 they again assaulted German positions, this time in Flanders, where they hoped to break through to the Channel coast and capture the ports from which German submarines were preying on Allied shipping. In action reminiscent of the Somme, the Battle of Passchendaele, as the British came to call the offensive, continued for five months until it stalled of exhaustion in the mud. The costs were once again out of all proportion to the negligible strategic gains. The British lost 324,000 casualties.

  The efforts of the Entente powers to relieve the stalemate in the west thus not only failed; they also brought the French armies to the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, events on the eastern front demonstrated what might well have happened in France. The Allied plans called for a Russian offensive in the spring of 1917, to coincide with the British attack at Arras and the French offensive in the Champagne. The leader of the provisional Russian government, Alexander Kerensky, undertook this commitment despite doubts about its political wisdom. Its military feasibility was even more problematic, for indications were rife that the Russian army was on the verge of disintegration. When the so-called “Kerensky Offensive” finally began in July, it recalled the action of the previous year on the eastern front (see Map 10). The Russians again attacked in the south, into Galicia, against positions held primarily by Austrians; and they again made significant initial gains against dispirited resistance. Again, however, the Russian offensive halted as soon as German reinforcements arrived from the north. The ensuing German counterattack in the south and to the north, in the Baltic, not only erased the Russian gains but also signaled the end of the Russian army as a military institution. Discipline collapsed amid retreat; Russian foot soldiers deserted their units in millions and marched east, where many of them joined the urban uprisings that brought the Bolsheviks to power and the war with Germany to an end.

  Map 10 The Kerensky Offensive, 1917

  The Central Powers enjoyed additional good fortune in the fall of 1917. After two years of stalemate warfare in the Alps, the southern front broke. In October German and Austrian armies overran Italian positions along the Isonzo River near the town of Caporetto. The wholesale disintegration of a defeated and dispirited army loomed again, as Italian defenses crumbled along the entire front. Before the lines finally stabilized in exhaustion along the Piave River, 200 miles to the west, the Italians had lost over 600,000 men to capture or desertion; and they had endured territorial losses
on a scale unknown on the western front.

  The Ludendorff Offensive

  The course of events to the south and east buoyed German spirits at the close of the year and raised the prospects for a general end to the war in 1918. Victory in the east appeared to offer the Germans a brief moment of strategic opportunity in the west, which would expire upon the arrival – anticipated in late 1918 – of significant numbers of American troops in Europe. By March 1918, when the eastern peace treaty was signed with the new Soviet government, the Germans had moved 33 divisions, more than 500,000 soldiers, from the east and south to the western front. Against French and British armies that had suffered frightfully in the action of the previous year, Ludendorff planned one last battle. A great offensive would break through the Allied defenses, paralyze their forces, and compel them to sue for peace.

  This grand vision was the product of Ludendorff’s wishful thinking. It bore little relation to the material realities of military power. The German armies had suffered almost as many casualties in 1917 in the western theater as they had during the dreadful year beforehand.14 In spite of the arrival of the reinforcements from the east early in 1918, German active forces in the west numbered – at about 4 million men – only about 80 percent of the Allied armies, which were also better supplied and provisioned. German inferiority reflected basic limits in the country’s demographic resources, as well as the demands of the Hindenburg Program, which claimed close to 1 million male workers of draft age; it was also due to the punitive character of eastern settlement, which required leaving another million soldiers in the east to occupy the areas brought under German control. Throughout the last year of the war, despite efforts to comb warriors ever older and younger out of civilian life, German strategic designs were thus frustrated by a mounting crisis of manpower.

  Other statistics from early 1918 also foretold the fancy of Ludendorff’s plan (see Table 6). It is worth pausing at these figures, for they testified to the industrial forces that in the end decided the issue. That the Germans managed to deploy in the west even three-quarters as many artillery pieces as the Allies did was tribute to the exertions forced by the Hindenburg Program at home. So was the number of German airplanes, and these machines spared the Germans from having to concede immediate supremacy in a dimension of warfare that had – via the airplane’s role in reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and trench raiding – become essential to troop movements on the ground. Conversely, the vast German inferiority in trucks reflected the limits of home-front exertions; and it spoke to massive strategic disadvantages faced by the German army, which continued – to a far greater extent than the armies of the western powers – to rely on horse-drawn wagons for the transport of supplies beyond railheads. To appreciate the weight of this liability in a strategic offensive, the German generals needed only to ponder the failure of the Schlieffen Plan.

  Table 6 Material resources, early 1918

  * * *

  Germany (western forces)Western Allies

  Machine guns (per infantry division) 324 1,084

  Artillery c.14,000 c.18,500

  Airplanes c.3,670 c.4,500

  Trucks 23,000 c.100,000

  Tanks 10 800

  * * *

  Source: Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, III, 230–1, 314.

  Tanks represented a special problem. The ten in the German army had all been captured. The low regard in which the German high command held these machines was not without foundation. The early Allied tanks were slow, short-ranged, prone to break down, and vulnerable to land mines and artillery fire, particularly because the British and French commanders employed them singly or in small groups to support infantry attacks. Nor did the Germans reconsider this judgment of tanks in the light of action in November 1917, when – to the surprise of everyone involved – more concentrated formations of British tanks penetrated the Hindenburg Line near the town of Cambrai. This attack, too, soon dissipated amid confusion and mechanical breakdowns; and the Germans recaptured most of the ground they had lost. Even had they read much significance into this battle, however, the Germans could not have produced tanks in significant numbers, for their industry was already strained to capacity in fashioning other machines of war.

  These grave disadvantages notwithstanding, Ludendorff and his advisors began at the end of 1917 to plan the ultimate offensive in the west, the great campaign to which the Hindenburg Program had been geared from its inception. To call the result of their deliberations a “military absurdity” is perhaps an exaggeration, but the plan did in truth, like the Hindenburg Program itself, disdain material constraints; and it foresaw a remarkable scenario.15 Its premise was that a breakthrough in a sector where the Germans enjoyed local superiority would occasion the collapse of the Allied armies. Tactical success would generate a strategic decision. The disintegration of Russian and Italian forces the previous year figured in Ludendorff’s reasoning, but his thinking reflected more clearly the burdens of the western stalemate, which was rooted in tactical obstacles to offensive operations. Ludendorff’s plan also bore a curious resemblance to Schlieffen’s, for both soldiers foresaw the wholesale collapse of enemy forces in the wake of a single apocalyptic operation. Schlieffen was open to the charge that he had paid insufficient attention to tactical difficulties that attended his extravagant vision. Ludendorff’s problem lay elsewhere. As he had been throughout the war, he was again preoccupied with the tactics of breakthrough – to the extent that the term “strategy” seems foreign to his thinking, which harbored no coherent concept of how to exploit local success more broadly. As one of his commanders noted, Ludendorff reduced strategy in this fashion to a question of “We’ll see what happens then.”16 This approach had at least the virtue of concealing a deeper problem: whether the Germans any longer commanded the resources to exploit tactical success on a strategic scale at all.

  The so-called “Ludendorff Offensive” occupied the entire spring of 1918 (see Map 11).17 In four consecutive assaults, the German armies revisited many of the most terrible sites of this war, but their experience made clear that they lacked the strength and mobility to fulfill the goals that their leader had set for them. The pattern of action was common to all phases of the offensive. German attacks exploited local superiority, surprise, and tactical finesse to bring significant initial gains, before exhaustion, inadequate supplies, Allied reserves, and the difficulties of operating in this war-disfigured terrain frustrated hopes of the great breakthrough. “Operation Michael,” the first and most hopeful of these assaults, commenced on March 21 at the junction of the British and French armies along the river Somme. German advances of up to fifty miles along a sector of eighty miles were the greatest achieved by either side since 1914, but the momentum collapsed after three weeks of desperate fighting, as the Allied armies in the sector, reinforced and now under the unified command of the French marshal, Ferdinand Foch, assembled defenses that the Germans found impenetrable. The second German blow, “Operation Georgette,” struck at British lines in Flanders, south of Ypres. It was originally planned as a complement to the attack in the Somme sector, but the demands of the first operation retarded preparations for the second. The delay robbed the two operations of their articulation and permitted the timely reinforcement of British defenses in Flanders, where the German offensive dissipated after less than a week.

  Map 11 The Ludendorff Offensive, 1918

  The breakdown of the first two assaults failed to deter Ludendorff. Instead, his restless attentions turned towards French positions to the east, where he reassembled his tired forces in May for another blow. “Operation Blücher” began on May 27 and swept quickly forward over the Chemin des Dames towards the river Marne, which German troops saw on May 30 for the first time since September 1914. And here again the German offensive stalled. A final attack towards the east, called “Operation Marneschutz–Reims,” for which Ludendorff mobilized every available unit, carried German troops at great cost a short distance across the Marne,
but it quickly broke down in the face of French artillery and armored counterattack.

  During the spring of 1918 the Allied cause appeared to be in jeopardy, as the Germans advanced again within three days’ march of Paris. To the informed eye, however, the German offensive represented instead a last, desperate gamble. The material resources on which it was based conformed in no way to either the fears of the Allies or the objectives of its own command. It could not purchase the breakthrough. The fatal failing of the campaign was thus, given the strategic context of this war, to have brought only “ordinary victories.”18

  When, in mid-July, the attack stalled, the Germans’ position was weaker than it had been in March, despite the dramatic territorial gains that their offensive had registered in the meantime. Tactical success harbored negative strategic consequences. The extent of the German lines grew by eighty miles between March and July, as German positions forfeited the compact integrity that had made them so formidable in defense in 1917. The irregular protrusions, or “salients,” that now described the German lines were more than aesthetic flaws; they were vulnerable to two-pronged counterattack. The German situation was made all the more perilous by the huge losses that the offensive had extracted in men and equipment. German casualties in the spring numbered almost 500,000 men.19 The units that remained in place after multiple deployments were decimated, exhausted, dispirited, and in no position to resume offensive action. Particularly high were the losses of horses, junior officers, and so-called “mobile divisions,” the units that had spearheaded the offensives and were known for their discipline and initiative.