Below is a summary of the main military events of 1918. There will probably be further posts exploring the details of the military operations mentioned here, and there will definitely be entries on the social and political fallout. Expect the following updates to cover domestic politics in France, Italy, and Britain with a particular focus on the socialist labor and antiwar movements. I also have a post on industrial/economic mobilization and changing conditions at the homefront(s) in the works. At some point, I will also cover the Russian Civil War, which will likely include a discussion of the Red German exiles (Luxemburg, Zetkin, Mehring) and their interactions with the leaders of the Soviet government. Cheers!
“Blow upon Blow, until Paris Falls and the British Return to their Island”: The War in 1918
All of the Great Powers believed that 1918 must be the last year of the war. After rampant civilian unrest in Italy, Austria, Germany, and parts of France, it was thought that domestic populations could not endure another year of conflict. The Entente planned a joint offensive into Belgium and Northeastern France that would shatter the German lines and allow a favorable peace to be negotiated. Ludendorff, however, wished for nothing less than a “total victory” to vindicate the years of “total war”. Underlying this was not simply German nationalism, but Germany’s increasingly dire fiscal situation, which would require years of either austerity or war reparations to make good. Given the labor unrest in Germany, the former appeared a sure recipe for social revolution.
Three developments at the beginning of the year appeared to favor the Central Powers. Firstly, a peace deal was reached with Russia in early February, freeing German troops from the east. Secondly, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had begun inflicting real damage on merchant shipping and reduced Britain’s capacity to import food and raw materials for its industries. Finally, both Britain and France started to experience a marked uptick in anti-war pacifist protest, a development that would continue apace throughout the remainder of the year.
Fearful of a massive German offensive in the west, the British and French made secret peace overtures. In what was likely a political mistake, neither of the parties involved publicized these, fearing that the concessions they offered would harm civilian morale. In any event, the attempts to make peace were rendered pointless by Ludendorff’s aversion to a negotiated settlement. Harsh conditions, impossible in practice for the Entente to fulfill, were imposed on the beginning of any formal talks. Ludendorff sensed the possibility to win the war and secure German hegemony on the continent.
In military circles, it has long been debated whether an earlier western offensive may have won the war near the beginning of 1918. Some believe that the French Army in particular could not withstand another massive, frontal assault. Others argue that Ludendorff’s strategy likely was necessary to preserve Austria-Hungary’s disintegrating Empire for another year.
Ludendorff’s plan called for the Central Powers to marshal its forces and knock out the members of the Entente one by one with steadily growing offensives. Each victory would secure vital resources that Germany required to continue the war. This new strategy was at least in part one of plunder, but it was also intended to prop up Austria and demoralize the British public.
The first hammer would fall in the southeast, on Romania. Two to three months after the conquest of this grain-rich territory, a German offensive would break through the Italian lines, stream into the Po Valley, and seize the key industrial cities in Romagna and Lombardy, forcing a surrender. Then, a so-called “victory offensive” would assault Entente positions along the Somme river, encircling the Entente armies in Flanders and then capturing Paris. With France knocked out of the war, German soldiers would seize Constantinople before beginning a triumphant march toward British Egypt.
Such, at least, was the plan. The Entente, meanwhile, hoped to harden the Romanian and Italian fronts while marshaling their resources for a war-winning “Final offensive” into Flanders and German-held northeastern France which would end the u-boat threat, liberate Belgium, and threaten Germany proper. It was hoped that the exhaustion of the German Army would allow for the imposition of a favorable peace which would return Alsace-Lorraine, set limits on German naval production, and secure modest war reparations in exchange for a recognition of Germany’s empire in the East.
In March, Ludendorff himself traveled to Galicia to take charge of the Army due to attack south into Moldova and Bessarabia. In the west, August von Mackensen prepared for a renewed assault on Transylvania, while a mixed Bulgarian, Austrian, and German force in Bulgaria led by Hans von Seeckt readied for a feinting maneuver to cross the Danube. The Central Powers had assembled around 1 million men for the invasion.
With superiority in numbers and materiel, the invasion proceeded in a steady, attritional style, careful to avoid the mistakes of 1917. Despite valiant Romanian resistance at the Danube and in Transylvania, the seemingly inevitable advance of Ludendorff’s Galician army forced first a retreat of the western mountaineers and then another retreat from the troops along the southwestern Danube. Within a month and a half, Bucharest was surrounded and the British expeditionary force was desperately attempting to flee from the Black Sea port of Constanta. The debacle of the British evacuation demonstrated the strain that had been placed on the British navy by the u-boat campaign, and had important effects on British domestic politics. In all, around 45,000 of the 125,000-man British force were captured.
Romania held a great bounty of riches for the conquering German army. American agricultural equipment provided a crucial boost to German agriculture, and American artillery helped make up equipment deficits caused by rampant strike action and skirmishes in the west. Germany treated the decision of the Romanian government to flee rather than surrender as a carte blanche to loot and plunder the country, though a more formal arrangement of “reparations” may not have differed very much in its results.
In the aftermath of the success in Romania, both Bulgaria and Turkey lobbied for a German offensive toward Constantinople. Growing pressure from both countries, including threats to leave the war, finally forced the OHL’s hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg had contemplated attacks to retake the straits, especially because of the increasing British aid to White cossacks, but concluded that the dug-in British forces in the area would inflict losses too punitive to make such an offensive strategically worthwhile. The prospect of Bulgaria and Turkey leaving the war changed this calculus.
Nonetheless, the Thrace offensive was never a priority. The OHL would not allow it to divert their timetable for the assault on the Po Valley, and as a result it was the dregs of the German Army which was allocated to the operation. It was set to begin at the same time as the Italian offensive, in late June. The hope was that the concurrent offensives would paralyze the British and delay any diversion of reserves.
By June 21st, around 25% of all German heavy artillery was stationed on the narrow Italian front. The presence of mountains and rivers meant that the Entente soldiers in the area only had to defend a line of around 60 miles. The buildup of the 1.25 million man Austro-German army was impossible to ignore. Delays in troop transportation caused by railway strikes and civil unrest in Austria meant that the offensive did not begin until July. .
Facing the 900,000 German and 350,000 Austrian soldiers were around a million Italian and 250,000 British and French troops, most of them recently arrived. The Italian lines were heavily fortified, but they were also completely outgunned. Growing allied technological superiority in the West (in the form of airplanes, tanks, and artillery) was not present in the Italian front.
On July 3rd, the largest artillery salvo in human history heralded the beginning of the Italian offensive. July 1918 would go down as the deadliest month of the Great War. The momentous battles recalled the mammoth offensives of 1916, but they were now fought with planes, tanks, and even higher concentrations of heavy artillery. New tactics of infiltration and assault had been devised which made warfare more mobile and returned some degree of parity between offense and defense.
Three days after the assault on Italy began, the hard-pressed Entente decided to begin their planned offensive early to take pressure off the beleaguered Italian army. On June 9th, the largest battle of the Western Front began when 1 million French and British troops started the assault in Flanders and Lille.
The Frontlines in mid-1917 and Plan of Attack for the July Offensive
Somewhat ironically, this operation was termed the “July Offensive” even though it was initially slated to proceed in late August. It aimed to surround the city of Lille with a British attack from the north and a French thrust in the south; further north, a joint Franco-British force would launch delaying attacks on a sizable German army concentration in Flanders. After Lille was seized, the French-British armies would march northeast to the Dutch border and pin the remaining German forces in Flanders against the sea.
Over the previous year, Entente landship and aircraft production had ramped up considerably, allowing the Franco-British forces to achieve a technological advantage along many of the sectors in the western front. The extensive use of reconnaissance planes allowed weak spots along the line to be identified, toward which the massed use of landships could be directed. The main weakness of the Entente armies in the west was the stubbornly persistent tactical superiority of the German officer, which had been exacerbated by the death of the majority of the most promising French NCO’s at Verdun.
From its very beginning, the July Offensive was different from those of the past two years. The initial breakthrough of the German trenches in the south was met with vicious counterattacks from the retreating German forces rather than an attempt to simply retrench. When the Germans surrendered Lille on the 15th, they sabotaged the city’s railway lines, causing logistical issues for the advancing Entente armies. As the fighting continued, it sucked in soldiers from the rest of the front; by the 18th, around 40% of all troops on the western front were situated on an axis running from Passcendaele to Lille. Despite the intransigence of the German defense and the horrifying casualties suffered by all the armies, the Entente advance, backed by superior firepower and intelligence, slowly continued toward the Belgian Border from Lille. In terms of the size of the armies, the mobility of the warfare, and the immense losses sustained by each side, the battles recalled those of the first months of the war.
On July 21st, the Italian army finally broke beneath the weight of German artillery fire, and one million Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians began to stream into the Po Valley. The exhausted Italian Army had effectively collapsed; the failure to engage in a more orderly, paced retreat meant that when the breakout came, the morale of the Italian soldier had already collapsed. In Turin, Milan, Umbria and Romagna, strikes and protests broke out; syndicalists occupied factories and wildcat strikes among workers of the main trade union, the CGdL, paralyzed Italian industry. Fearing a social revolution, the Italian government agreed to an armistice later that week.
News of the Italian surrender came as a harsh blow to morale in the west. On the 24th, a document was released showing France and Britain repeatedly turning down German offers of a status quo peace. In truth, the document was doctored by German military intelligence, though based off real telegrams that were exchanged in negotiations earlier that year. The ruse enraged French and British leaders, who quickly denounced it. But it was the final straw for the collapsing morale of the French Army, who began to mutiny on the 30th; by August 3rd, the offensive stalled along the Belgian border as over 150,000 French troops refused to advance into foreign territory. The nationalist press at home denounced the rabble at the front, while the French Socialists began to splinter as syndicalist strikes broke out across the war industries.
The French government faced a very real crisis of legitimacy. Sensing his opportunity, Ludendorff pushed for the planned Somme offensive to proceed as soon as possible. The battered German armies in the west would need reinforcements from Italy, as well as artillery pieces and shells. By the time that the offensive was ready, however, a government of national salvation had already been formed in France by George Clemenceau, the strikes quieted with a mixture of concessions and repression, and the mutineers placated by a shakeup in the high command which placed Philippe Petain as the new Chief of Staff and Robert Nivelle in control of the largest concentration of soldiers in the northeast.
On September 16th, the Second Battle of the Somme began. Ludendorff calculated that the chaos in the government and the mutineers at the front would allow him to achieve a quick victory. The presence of large numbers of troops from the colonies in the Somme sector was also thought to indicate French weakness in the area.
Ludendorff miscalculated. The new government and high command had reassured French troops and French society, and perhaps most importantly, it had been decisively established that the supposed “peace offer” was a German hoax. The ruse had prompted the French and British governments to release documents revealing the full extent of German war aims in the secret peace overtures; rather than demoralizing troops and civilians, this invigorated pro-war sentiment and stirred up anti-German feeling. Moreover, the mutinying troops had never refused to defend French territory; though German counterattacks in late August forced a retreat back toward Lille from the Belgian border, their success derived from the chaos at the front and mistrust between soldiers and officers rather than the collapse of French resistance.
Many historians believe that if Ludendorff took the time to fully marshal his forces, he may have been able to seize the city of Abbeville by the end of the Somme offensive, making the Entente position in Flanders untenable. The men that assaulted Arras, Montdidier, and Albert at the end of 1918 were many of the same that participated in the defense of Lille and the Italian offensive. They were exhausted and undersupplied. Opposite them, they faced a smaller but more determined and better-supplied enemy. The colonial troops fought with the same vigor as their colonial overlords. The initial success of the assault on Arras and Albert concealed a large disparity in casualties. A week after capturing the two initial objectives of the campaign, Ludendorff called off further attacks amidst fears of mutiny in the German Army. The capture of French territory allowed him to spin the offensive as a victory domestically despite the 145,000 German casualties.
The remainder of the year saw continued skirmishes around Lille and Passchendaele. It increasingly looked as if the entire notion of seizing the rest of the ports in Flanders was a pointless one; losses of experienced u-boat crews had crippled the German submarine campaign, and British naval production allowed the convoy system to be extended to more distant waters.
In the east, the Central Powers offensives in Anatolia and Thrace broke down after a few weeks of stubborn British resistance. Turkey appeared willing to make peace, but the conviction of their leaders that Germany would soon win the war in the west meant that they proposed terms which the British would not accept. Something similar went for Bulgaria, which was motivated to continue the war by the belief that the French Army was on its last legs.
In retrospect, the battles of 1918 were less than unambiguous victories for the Central Powers. Despite French mutinies, the July offensive seized a swathe of valuable territory in the northeast and sapped much of the offensive power of the German Army in the west. Compared to Ludendorff’s attack in the Somme, it achieved more of its operational objectives with a more favorable disparity of losses. The loss of Italy deprived the Entente of another front on which to press the Central Powers, but in real terms the Italian Army was frequently a liability, and many of the troops which were tied up in Trentino and Venetia were Austrians who would never have seen action in the west.
At the time, this was not how events were processed. In Germany, the press hailed Ludendorff as the second coming of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Many civilians in Britain and France concluded that the war could simply not be won. In America, the stock market began to cave as financiers feared that Britain would not be able to repay American loans. Hopes spiraled in Germany for an end to the war by the end of the year.
Yet the war continued. Ludendorff showed no willingness to relax his goal of establishing a German condominium over Europe, and in any event the civilian leaders of the Entente no longer believed that negotiation was possible. Clemenceau vowed “to fight on until the grisly work is finished, because there shall be, and cannot be, any compromise with the teutonic plague”. Winston Churchill called for “The full mobilization of all of Britain to preserve the sacred flame of English Liberty”. As 1918 faded imperceptibly into the final year of the war, none of those occupying the commanding heights of bourgeois Europe were prepared for the storm that was to come.
Bình luận
0