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War
전쟁(戰爭)
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| The World Wars |
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2 WORLD WAR I
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As the German strength on the Western
Front was being steadily increased by the transfer of divisions from the Eastern
Front (where they were no longer needed since Russia had withdrawn from the
war), the Allies' main problem was how to withstand an imminent German offensive
pending the arrival of massive reinforcements from the United States. Eventually
Pétain persuaded the reluctant Haig that the British with 60 divisions
should extend their sector of the front from 100 to 125 miles as compared with
the 325 miles to be held by the French with approximately 100 divisions. Haig
thus devoted 46 of his divisions to the front from the Channel to Gouzeaucourt
(southwest of German-held Cambrai) and 14 to the remaining third of the front
from Gouzeaucourt past German-held Saint-Quentin to the Oise River. |
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On the German side, between Nov. 1,
1917, and March 21, 1918, the German divisions on the Western Front were
increased from 146 to 192, the troops being drawn from Russia, Galicia, and
Italy. By these means the German armies in the west were reinforced by a total
of about 570,000 men. Ludendorff's interest was to strike from his temporary
position of strength--before the arrival of the major U.S. contingents--and at
the same time to ensure that his German offensive should not fail for the same
reasons as the Allies' offensives of the past three years. Accordingly he formed
an offensive strategy based on taking the tactical line of least resistance. The
main German attacks would begin with brief but extremely intense artillery
bombardments using a high proportion of poison gas and smoke shells. These would
incapacitate the Allies' forward trenches and machine-gun emplacements and would
obscure their observation posts. Then a second and lighter artillery barrage
would begin to creep forward over the Allied trenches at a walking pace (in
order to keep the enemy under fire), with the masses of German assault infantry
advancing as closely as possible behind it. The key to the new tactics was that
the assault infantry would bypass machine-gun nests and other points of strong
resistance instead of waiting, as had been the previous practice on both sides,
for reinforcements to mop up the obstructions before continuing the advance. The
Germans would instead continue to advance in the direction of the least enemy
resistance. The mobility of the German advance would thus be assured, and its
deep infiltration would result in large amounts of territory being taken. |
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Such tactics demanded exceptionally fit
and disciplined troops and a high level of training. Ludendorff accordingly drew
the best troops from all the Western Front forces at his disposal and formed
them into elite shock divisions. The troops were systematically trained in the
new tactics, and every effort was also made to conceal the actual areas at which
the German main attacks would be made. |
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Ludendorff's main attack was to be on
the weakest sector of the Allies' front, the 47 miles between Arras and La Fère
(on the Oise). Two German armies, the 17th and the 2nd, were to break through
the front between Arras and Saint-Quentin, north of the Somme, and then wheel
right so as to force most of the British back toward the Channel, while the 18th
Army, between the Somme and the Oise, protected the left flank of the advance
against counterattack from the south. Code-named " Michael," this
offensive was to be supplemented by three other attacks: "St. George
I" against the British on the Lys River south of Armentières;
"St. George II" against the British again between Armentières
and Ypres; and "Blücher" against the French in Champagne.
It was finally decided to use 62 divisions in the main attack,
"Michael." |
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Preceded by an artillery bombardment
using 6,000 guns, "Michael" was launched on March 21, 1918, and was
helped by an early morning fog that hid the German advance from the Allied
observation posts. The attack, which is known as the Second
Battle of the Somme or the Battle of Saint-Quentin, took the British
altogether by surprise, but it did not develop as Ludendorff had foreseen. While
the 18th Army under von Hutier achieved a complete breakthrough south of the
Somme, the major attack to the north was held up, mainly by the British
concentration of strength at Arras. For a whole week Ludendorff, in violation of
his new tactical emphasis, vainly persisted in trying to carry out his original
plan instead of exploiting the unexpected success of the 18th Army, though the
latter had advanced more than 40 miles westward and had reached Montdidier by
March 27. At last, however, the main effort of the Germans was converted into a
drive toward Amiens, which began in force on March 30. By that time the Allies
had recovered from their initial dismay, and French reserves were coming up to
the British line. The German drive was halted east of Amiens and so too was a
renewed attack on April 4. Ludendorff then suspended his Somme offensive. This
offensive had yielded the largest territorial gains of any operation on the
Western Front since the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. |
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The Allies' cause at least derived one
overdue benefit from the collapse of one-third of the British front: at Haig's
own suggestion, Foch was on March 26 appointed to coordinate the Allies'
military operations; and on April 14 he was named commander in chief of the
Allied armies. Previously, Haig had resisted the idea of a generalissimo. |
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On April 9 the Germans began "St.
George I" with an attack on the extreme northern front between Armentières
and the canal of La Bassée, their aim being to advance across the Lys
River toward Hazebrouck. Such was the initial success of this attack that
"St. George II" was launched the next day, with the capture of Kemmel
Hill (Kemmelberg), southwest of Ypres, as its first objective. Armentières
fell, and Ludendorff came to think for a time that this Battle of the Lys might
be turned into a major effort. The British, however, after being driven back 10
miles, halted the Germans short of Hazebrouck. French reinforcements began to
come up; and, when the Germans had taken Kemmel Hill (April 25), Ludendorff
decided to suspend exploitation of the advance, for fear of a counterstroke
against his front's new bulge. |
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Thus far Ludendorff had fallen short of
strategic results, but he could claim huge tactical successes--the British
casualties alone amounted to more than 300,000. Ten British divisions had to be
broken up temporarily, while the German strength mounted to 208 divisions, of
which 80 were still in reserve. A restoration of the balance, however, was now
in sight. A dozen U.S. divisions had arrived in France, and great efforts were
being made to swell the stream. Furthermore, Pershing,
the U.S. commander, had placed his troops at Foch's disposal for use wherever
required. |
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Ludendorff finally launched " Blücher"
on May 27, on a front extending from Coucy, north of Soissons, eastward toward
Reims. The Germans, with 15 divisions, suddenly attacked the seven French and
British divisions opposing them, swarmed over the ridge of the Chemin des Dames
and across the Aisne River, and, by May 30, were on the Marne, between Château-Thierry
and Dormans. Once again the attack's initial success went far beyond
Ludendorff's expectation or intention; and, when the Germans tried to push
westward against the right flank of the Allies' Compiègne salient, which
was sandwiched between the Germans' Amiens and Champagne bulges, they were
checked by counterattacks, which included one sustained for a fortnight from
June 6 by U.S. divisions at Belleau Wood (Bois de Belleau). An attack from
Noyon, against the left flank of the Compiègne salient, came too late
(June 9). |
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Overtaken by the inordinate fruition of
his own offensives, Ludendorff paused for a month's recuperation. The tactical
success of his own blows had been his undoing; yielding to their influence, he
had pressed each too far and too long, using up his own reserves and causing an
undue interval between blows. He had driven three great wedges into the Allied
lines, but none had penetrated far enough to sever a vital rail artery, and this
strategic failure left the Germans with a front whose several bulges invited
flanking counterstrokes. Moreover, Ludendorff had used up many of his shock
troops in the attacks, and the remaining troops, though strong in numbers, were
relatively lower in quality. The Germans were to end up sustaining a total of
800,000 casualties in their great 1918 offensives. Meanwhile, the Allies were
now receiving U.S. troops at the rate of 300,000 men per month. |
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The next German offensive, which opened
the Second Battle of the Marne, was launched in
Champagne on July 15. It came to nothing: a German thrust from the front east of
Reims toward Châlons-sur-Marne was frustrated by the "elastic
defense" that Pétain had recently
been prescribing but that the local commanders had failed to practice against
the offensive of May 27. A drive from Dormans, on the left flank of the Germans'
huge Soissons-Reims bulge, across the Marne toward Épernay simply made
the Germans' situation more precarious when Foch's long-prepared counterstroke
was launched on July 18. In this great counterstroke one of Foch's armies
assailed the Germans' Champagne bulge from the west, another from the southwest,
one more from the south, and a fourth from the vicinity of Reims. Masses of
light tanks--a weapon on which Ludendorff had placed little reliance, preferring
gas instead in his plans for the year--played a vital part in forcing the
Germans into a hasty retreat. By August 2 the French had pushed the Champagne
front back to a line following the Vesle River from Reims and then along the
Aisne to a point west of Soissons. |
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Having recovered the initiative, the
Allies were determined not to lose it, and for their next blow they chose again
the front north and south of the Somme. The British 4th Army, including
Australian and Canadian forces, with 450 tanks, struck the Germans with maximum
surprise on Aug. 8, 1918. Overwhelming the German forward divisions, who had
failed to entrench themselves adequately since their recent occupation of the
"Michael" bulge, the 4th Army advanced steadily for four days, taking
21,000 prisoners and inflicting as many or more casualties at the cost of only
about 20,000 casualties to itself, and halting only when it reached the
desolation of the old battlefields of 1916. Several German divisions simply
collapsed in the face of the offensive, their troops either fleeing or
surrendering. The Battle of Amiens was thus a striking material and moral
success for the Allies. Ludendorff put it differently: "August 8 was the
black day of the German Army in the history of the war . . . It put the decline
of our fighting power beyond all doubt . . . The war must be ended." He
informed Emperor William II and Germany's political chiefs that peace
negotiations should be opened before the situation became worse, as it must. The
conclusions reached at a German Crown Council held at Spa were that "We can
no longer hope to break the war-will of our enemies by military
operations," and "the objects of our strategy must be to paralyse the
enemy's war-will gradually by a strategic defensive." In other words, the
German high command had abandoned hope of victory or even of holding their gains
and hoped only to avoid surrender. |
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Meanwhile, the French had retaken
Montdidier and were thrusting toward Lassigny (between Roye and Noyon); and on
August 17 they began a new drive from the Compiègne salient south of
Noyon. Then, in the fourth week of August, two more British armies went into
action on the Arras-Albert sector of the front, the one advancing directly
eastward on Bapaume, the other operating farther to the north. From then on Foch
delivered a series of hammer blows along the length of the German front,
launching a series of rapid attacks at different points, each broken off as soon
as its initial impetus waned, and all close enough in time to attract German
reserves, which consequently were unavailable to defend against the next Allied
attack along a different part of the front. By the early days of September the
Germans were back where they had been before March 1918--behind the Hindenburg
Line. |
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The Allies' recovery was consummated by
the first feat executed by Pershing's U.S. forces as an independent army
(hitherto the U.S. divisions in France had fought only in support of the major
French or British units): the U.S. 1st Army on September 12 erased the
triangular Saint-Mihiel salient that the Germans had been occupying since 1914
(between Verdun and Nancy). |
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The clear evidence of the Germans'
decline decided Foch to seek victory in the coming autumn of 1918 instead of
postponing the attempt until 1919. All the Allied armies in the west were to
combine in a simultaneous offensive. |
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Something must now be said about the
growth of the national movements, which, under the eventual protection of the
Allies, were to result in the foundation of new states or the resurrection of
long-defunct ones at the end of the war. There were three such movements: that
of the Czechs, with the more backward Slovaks in tow; that of the South Slavs,
or Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes); and that of the Poles. The Czech
country, namely Bohemia and Moravia, belonged in 1914 to the Austrian half of
the Habsburg monarchy, the Slovak to the Hungarian half. The Yugoslavs had
already been represented in 1914 by two independent kingdoms, Serbia and
Montenegro, but they were also predominantly numerous in territories still under
Habsburg rule: Serbs in Bosnia and Hercegovina (an Austro-Hungarian condominium)
and in Dalmatia (an Austrian possession); Croats in Croatia (Hungarian), in
Istria (Austrian), and in Dalmatia; Slovenes in Istria and in Illyria (Austrian
likewise). Poland was divided into three parts: Germany had the north and the
west as provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia; Austria had Galicia (including an
ethnically Ukrainian extension to the east); Russia had the rest. |
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The Czechs had long been restless under
the Austrian regime, and one of their leading intellectual spokesmen, Tomás
Masaryk (in fact a Slovak), had already envisaged the carving of
Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states out of Austria-Hungary in December 1914. In
1916 he and a fellow émigré, Edvard Benes,
based respectively in London and in Paris, organized a Czechoslovak
National Council. The western Allies committed themselves to the
Czechoslovak idea from 1917 onward, when Russia's imminent defection from the
war made them ready to exploit any means at hand for the disabling of
Austria-Hungary; and Wilson's sympathy was implicit in his successive peace
pronouncements of 1918. |
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For the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary
the Yugoslav Committee, with representatives in
Paris and in London, was founded in April 1915. On July 20, 1917, this committee
and the Serbian government in exile made the joint Corfu
Declaration forecasting a South Slav state to comprise Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes. |
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The Polish nationalist leaders in the
first years of the war were uncertain whether to rely on the Central Powers or
on the Allies for a restoration of Poland's independence. So long as the western
Allies hesitated to encourage Polish nationalism for fear of offending imperial
Russia, the Central Powers seemed to be the most likely sponsors; and Austria at
least allowed Józef Pilsudski, from 1914,
to organize his volunteer Polish legions to serve with Austrian forces against
the Russians. Austria's benevolence, however, was not reflected by Germany; and
when the Two Emperors' Manifesto of Nov. 5,
1916, provided for the constitution of an independent Polish kingdom, it was
clear that this kingdom would consist only of Polish territory conquered from
Russia, not of any German or Austrian territory. When, after the March
Revolution of 1917, the Russian provisional government had recognized Poland's
right to independence, Roman Dmowski's Polish
National Committee, which from 1914 had been functioning in a limited way
under Russian protection, could at last count seriously on the sympathy of the
western Allies. While Pilsudski declined to raise a Polish army to fight
on against the new Russia, a Polish army was formed in France, as well as two
army corps in Belorussia and in the Ukraine, to fight against the Central
Powers. The Bolshevik Revolution and Wilson's Fourteen Points together
consummated the alignment of the Poles on the side of the western powers. |
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The Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) gave Germany a free hand to do what it
liked with Russia's former possessions in eastern Europe. While they pursued
their plan of 1916 for a kingdom of Poland, the Germans took new measures for
the other countries. Lithuania, recognized as independent, was to be a kingdom
under some German prince. Latvia and Estonia were to be merged into a grand
duchy of the Baltikum under the hereditary rule of Prussia. An expeditionary
force of 12,000 men, under General Graf Rüdiger von der Goltz, was sent to
Finland to uphold the Finnish general C.G.E. Mannerheim's nationalist forces
against the Red Guards, whom the Bolsheviks, despite their recognition of
Finland's independence, were now promoting there. And finally, the Ukrainian
nationalist government, which had already been challenged by a Communist one
before its separate peace with the Central Powers (Brest-Litovsk, February 9),
was promptly displaced by a new regime after the advance of German and
Austro-Hungarian troops into its territory. |
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The Romanian
armistice of December 1917 was converted into the Treaty
of Bucharest on May 7, 1918. Under this treaty's terms, southern Dobruja
was ceded to Bulgaria; northern Dobruja was put under the joint administration
of the Central Powers; and the latter obtained virtual control of Romania's oil
fields and communications. Romania, on the other hand, had some consolation from
Bessarabia, whose nationalists, after receiving Romanian assistance against the
Bolsheviks, had voted in March 1918 for their country's conditional union with
Romania. |
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Even Transcaucasia
began to slide into the German camp. The short-lived federal republic was
dissolved by its three members' individual declarations of
independence--Georgia's on May 26, Armenia's and Azerbaijan's on May 28.
Treaties of friendship were promptly signed between Georgia and Germany and
between Armenia and Turkey, and Turkish troops advanced into Azerbaijan, where
they occupied Baku on September 15. The western Allies, meanwhile, were hoping
that some new semblance of an Eastern Front could be conjured up if they
supported the various and growing forces in Russia that were opposed to the
peacemaking Bolsheviks. Since the Black Sea and the Baltic were closed to them,
the Allies could land troops only on Russia's Arctic and Pacific shores. Thus,
the Allied "intervention" in Russia on the side of the anti-Bolshevik
("White") forces, long to be execrated by Soviet historians, began
with an Anglo-French landing at Murmansk, in the
far north, on March 9, 1918. The subsequent reinforcement of Murmansk made
possible the occupation of the Murmansk railway as far south as Soroka (now
Belomorsk); and a further landing at Arkhangelsk in the summer raised the total
Allied strength in northern Russia to some 48,000 (including 20,000 Russian
"Whites"). By this time, moreover, there were some 85,000
interventionist troops in Siberia, where a strong Japanese landing at
Vladivostok in April had been followed by British, French, Italian, and U.S.
contingents. A "White" provisional government of Russia was set up at
Omsk, with Admiral A.V. Kolchak as its dominant personality. The
"White" resistance in the south of European Russia, which had been
growing since November 1917, was put under the supreme command of General A.I.
Denikin in April 1918. |
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At Salonika the Allies' politically
ambitious but militarily ineffective commander in chief, General Sarrail, was
replaced at the end of 1917 by General Guillaumat,
who was in turn succeeded in July 1918 by General L.-F.-F. Franchet d'Esperey,
who launched a major offensive in September with six Serbian and two French
divisions against a seven-mile front held by only one Bulgarian division. |
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The initial assault, preceded by heavy
bombardment at night, began in the morning of Sept. 15, 1918, and a five-mile
penetration was achieved by nightfall on September 16. The next day the Serbs
advanced 20 miles forward, while French and Greek forces on their flanks widened
the breach to 25 miles. A British attack, launched on September 18 on the front
between the Vardar and Lake Doiran, prevented the Bulgars from transferring
troops westward against the right flank of the penetration; and by September 19
the Serbian cavalry had reached Kavadarci, at the apex of the Crna-Vardar
triangle. Two days later the whole Bulgarian front west of the Vardar had
collapsed. |
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While Italian forces in the extreme west
advanced on Prilep, the elated Serbs, with the French beside them, pressed on up
the Vardar Valley. The British in the east now made such headway as to take
Strumica, across the old Bulgarian frontier, on September 26. The Bulgars then
sued for an armistice; and on September 29, when a bold French cavalry thrust up
the Vardar from Veles (Titov Veles) took Skopje, key to the whole system of
communications for the Balkan front, Bulgarian delegates signed the Armistice
of Salonika, accepting the Allies' terms unreservedly. |
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The British-Turkish front in Palestine
in the summer of 1918 ran from the Jordan River westward north of Jericho and
Lydda to the Mediterranean just north of Jaffa. North of this front there were
three Turkish "armies" (in fact, barely stronger than divisions): one
to the east of the Jordan, two to the west. These armies depended for their
supplies on the Hejaz Railway, the main line of
which ran from Damascus southward, east of the Jordan, and which was joined at Déraa
(Dar'a) by a branch line serving Palestine. |
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Liman von Sanders,
Falkenhayn's successor as commander of the Turkish forces in Syria-Palestine,
was convinced that the British would make their main effort east of the Jordan.
Allenby, however, was really interested in taking a straight northerly
direction, reckoning that the Palestine branch rail line at 'Afula
and Beisan, some 60 miles behind the Turkish front, could be reached by a
strategic "bound" of his cavalry and that their fall would isolate the
two Turkish armies in the west. |
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Having by ruse and diversion induced the
Turks to reduce their strength in the west, Allenby struck there on Sept. 19,
1918, with a numerical superiority of 10 to one. In this Battle
of Megiddo, a British infantry attack swept the astonished defenders
aside and opened the way for the cavalry, which rode 30 miles north up the
coastal corridor before swinging inland to cut the Turks' northward lines of
retreat. 'Afula, Beisan, and even Nazareth, farther north, were in
British hands the next day. |
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When the Turks east of the Jordan River
began to retreat on September 22, the Arabs had already severed the railway line
and were lying in wait for them; and a British cavalry division from Beisan
was also about to push eastward to intercept their withdrawal. Simultaneously,
two more British divisions and another force of Arabs were racing on toward
Damascus, which fell on October 1. The campaign ended with the capture of Aleppo
and the junction of the Baghdad Railway. In 38 days Allenby's forces had
advanced 350 miles and taken 75,000 prisoners at a cost of less than 5,000
casualties. |
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In Mesopotamia, meanwhile, the British
had taken Kifri, north of the Diyala left-bank tributary of
the Tigris, in January 1918, and Khan al-Baghdadi, up the
Euphrates, in March. Pressing northward from Kifri, they took Kirkuk
in May but soon evacuated it. |
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The British centre in Mesopotamia,
advancing up the Tigris in October, was about to capture Mosul when the
hostilities were suspended. The Ottoman government, seeing eastern Turkey
defenseless and fearing an Allied advance against Istanbul from the west now
that Bulgaria had collapsed, decided to capitulate. On October 30 the Armistice
of Mudros was signed, on a British cruiser off Lemnos. The Turks, by its
terms, were to open the Straits to the Allies; demobilize their forces; allow
the Allies to occupy any strategic point that they might require and to use all
Turkey's ports and railways; and order the surrender of their remaining
garrisons in Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The centuries-old Ottoman Empire
had come to an end. |
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After the stabilization of the Italian
front on the Piave River at the end of 1917, the Austrians made no further move
until the following June. They then tried not only to force the Tonale Pass and
enter northeastern Lombardy but also to make two converging thrusts into central
Venetia, the one southeastward from the Trentino, the other southwestward across
the lower Piave. The whole offensive came to worse than nothing, the attackers
losing 100,000 men. |
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Diaz,
the Italian commander in chief, was meanwhile deliberately abstaining from
positive action until Italy should be ready to strike with success assured. In
the offensive he planned, three of the five armies lining the front from the
Monte Grappa sector to the Adriatic end of the Piave were to drive across the
river toward Vittorio Veneto, so as to cut communications between the two
Austrian armies opposing them. |
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When Germany, in October 1918, was at
last asking for an armistice (see below The
end of the German war ), Italy's time
had obviously come. On October 24, the anniversary of Caporetto, the offensive
opened. An attack in the Monte Grappa sector was repulsed with heavy loss,
though it served to attract the Austrian reserves, and the flooding of the Piave
prevented two of the three central armies from advancing simultaneously with the
third; but the latter, comprising one Italian and one British corps, having
under cover of darkness and fog occupied Papadopoli Island farther downstream,
won a foothold on the left bank of the river on October 27. The Italian reserves
were then brought up to exploit this bridgehead. |
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Mutiny was already breaking out in the
Austrian forces, and on October 28 the Austrian high command ordered a general
retreat. Vittorio Veneto was occupied the next day by the Italians, who were
also pushing on already toward the Tagliamento. On November 3 the Austrians
obtained an armistice (see below). |
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The duality of the Habsburg monarchy had
been underlined from the very beginning of the war. Whereas the Austrian
parliament, or Reichsrat, had been suspended in
March 1914 and was not reconvened for three years, the Hungarian parliament in
Budapest continued its sessions, and the Hungarian government proved itself
constantly less amenable to dictation from the military than had the Austrian.
The Slav minorities, however, showed little sign of anti-Habsburg feeling before
Russia's March Revolution of 1917. In May 1917, however, the Reichsrat was
reconvened, and just before the opening session the Czech intelligentsia sent a
manifesto to its deputies calling for "a democratic Europe . . . of
autonomous states." The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the
Wilsonian peace pronouncements from January 1918 onward encouraged socialism, on
the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, or alternatively a combination of
both tendencies, among all peoples of the Habsburg monarchy. |
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Early in September 1918 the
Austro-Hungarian government proposed in a circular note to the other powers that
a conference be held on neutral territory for a general peace. This proposal was
quashed by the United States on the ground that the U.S. position had already
been enunciated by the Wilsonian pronouncements (the Fourteen Points, etc.). But
when Austria-Hungary, after the collapse of Bulgaria, appealed on October 4 for
an armistice based on those very pronouncements, the answer on October 18 was
that the U.S. government was now committed to the Czechoslovaks and to the
Yugoslavs, who might not be satisfied with the "autonomy" postulated
heretofore. The emperor Charles had, in fact, granted autonomy to the peoples of
the Austrian Empire (as distinct from the Hungarian Kingdom) on October 16, but
this concession was ignored internationally and served only to facilitate the
process of disruption within the monarchy: Czechoslovaks in Prague and South
Slavs in Zagreb had already set up organs ready to take power. |
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The last scenes of Austria-Hungary's
dissolution were performed very rapidly. On October 24 (when the Italians
launched their very timely offensive), a Hungarian National Council prescribing
peace and severance from Austria was set up in Budapest. On October 27 a note
accepting the U.S. note of October 18 was sent from Vienna to Washington--to
remain unacknowledged. On October 28 the Czechoslovak committee in Prague passed
a "law" for an independent state, while a similar Polish committee was
formed in Kraków for the incorporation of Galicia and Austrian Silesia
into a unified Poland. On October 29, while the Austrian high command was asking
the Italians for an armistice, the Croats in Zagreb declared Slavonia, Croatia,
and Dalmatia to be independent, pending the formation of a national state of
Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. On October 30 the German members of the Reichsrat
in Vienna proclaimed an independent state of German Austria. |
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The solicited armistice between the
Allies and Austria-Hungary was signed at the Villa Giusti, near Padua,
on Nov. 3, 1918, to become effective on November 4. Under its provisions,
Austria-Hungary's forces were required to evacuate not only all territory
occupied since August 1914 but also South Tirol, Tarvisio, the Isonzo Valley,
Gorizia, Trieste, Istria, western Carniola, and Dalmatia. All German forces
should be expelled from Austria-Hungary within 15 days or interned, and the
Allies were to have free use of Austria-Hungary's internal communications and to
take possession of most of its warships. |
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Count Mihály Károlyi,
chairman of the Budapest National Council, had been appointed prime minister of
Hungary by his king, the Austrian emperor Charles, on October 31 but had
promptly started to dissociate his country from Austria--partly in the vain hope
of obtaining a separate Hungarian armistice. Charles, the last Habsburg to rule
in Austria-Hungary, renounced the right to
participate in Austrian affairs of government on November 11, in Hungarian
affairs on November 13. |
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It was eventually agreed among the
Allied commanders that Pershing's American
troops should advance across the difficult terrain of the Argonne Forest, so
that the combined Allied offensive would consist of converging attacks against
the whole German position west of a line drawn from Ypres to Verdun. Thus, the
Americans from the front northwest of Verdun and the French from eastern
Champagne, the former on the west bank of the Meuse, the latter west of the
Argonne Forest, were to launch attacks on September 26, with Mézières
as their objective, in order to threaten not only the Germans' supply line along
the Mézières-Sedan-Montmédy railway and the natural line of
retreat across Lorraine but also the hinge of the Antwerp-Meuse defensive line
that the Germans were now preparing. The British were to attack the Hindenburg
Line between Cambrai and Saint-Quentin on September 27 and to try to reach the
key rail junction of Maubeuge, so as to threaten the Germans' line of retreat
through the Liège gap. The Belgians, with Allied support, were to begin a
drive from Ypres toward Ghent on September 28. (see also Charleville-Mézières) |
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The Americans took Vauquois and
Montfaucon in the first two days of their offensive but were soon slowed down,
and on October 14, when their attack was suspended, they had only reached
Grandpré, less than halfway to Mézières. The French advance
meanwhile was halted on the Aisne. The British, though they had broken through
the German defenses by October 5 and thenceforward had open country in front of
them, could not pursue the Germans fast enough to endanger their withdrawal.
Nevertheless, the piercing of the Hindenburg Line unnerved the German supreme
command. The Belgians were in possession of all the heights around Ypres by
September 30. |
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Georg von Hertling,
who had taken the place of Michaelis as Germany's chancellor in November 1917
but had proved no more capable than he of restraining Ludendorff and Hindenburg,
tendered his resignation on Sept. 29, 1918, the day of the Bulgarian armistice
and of the major development of the British attack on the Western Front. Pending
the appointment of a new chancellor, Ludendorff and Hindenburg obtained the
Emperor's consent to an immediate peace move. On October 1 they even disclosed
their despondency to a meeting of the leaders of all the national political
parties, thus undermining the German home front by a sudden revelation of facts
long hidden from the public and its civilian leaders. This new and bleak honesty
about Germany's deteriorating military situation gave an immense impetus to the
native German forces of pacifism and internal discord. On October 3 the new
chancellor was appointed: he was Prince Maximilian of
Baden, internationally known for his moderation and honorability. Though
Max demanded a few days' interval lest Germany's overture for peace should
appear too obviously an admission of imminent collapse, the military leaders
insisted on an immediate move. A German note to Wilson, requesting an armistice
and negotiations on the basis of Wilson's own pronouncements, was sent off in
the night of October 3-4. |
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The U.S. answer of October 8 required
Germany's preliminary assent (1) to negotiations on the sole question of the
means of putting Wilson's principles into practice and (2) to the withdrawal of
German forces from Allied soil. The German government's note of October 12
accepted these requirements and suggested a mixed commission to arrange the
postulated evacuation. On October 14, however, the U.S. government sent a second
note, which coupled allusions to Germany's "illegal and inhuman"
methods of warfare with demands that the conditions of the armistice and of the
evacuation be determined unilaterally by its own and the Allies' military
advisers and that the "arbitrary power" of the German regime be
removed in order that the forthcoming negotiations could be conducted with a
government representative of the German people. |
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By this time the German supreme command
had become more cheerful, even optimistic, as it saw that the piercing of the
Hindenburg Line had not been followed by an actual Allied breakthrough. More
encouragement came from reports of a slackening in the force of the Allies'
attacks, largely because they had advanced too far ahead of their supply lines.
Ludendorff still wanted an armistice, but only to give his troops a rest as a
prelude to further resistance and to ensure a secure withdrawal to a shortened
defensive line on the frontier. By October 17 he even felt that his troops could
do without a rest. It was less that the situation had changed than that his
impression of it had been revised; it had never been quite so bad as he had
pictured it on September 29. But his dismal first impression had now spread
throughout German political circles and the public. Though they had endured
increasing privations and were half-starved due to the Allied blockade by
mid-1918, the German people had retained their morale surprisingly well as long
as they believed Germany had a prospect of achieving victory on the Western
Front. When this hope collapsed in October 1918, many, and perhaps even most,
Germans wished only that the war would end, though it might mean their nation
would have to accept unfavourable peace terms. German public opinion, having
been more suddenly disillusioned, was now far more radically defeatist than the
supreme command. |
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A third German note to the United
States, sent on October 20, agreed to the unilateral settlement of conditions
for the armistice and for the evacuation, in the express belief that Wilson
would allow no affront to Germany's honour. The answering U.S. note of October
23 conceded Wilson's readiness to propose an armistice to the Allies but added
that the terms must be such as to make Germany incapable of renewing
hostilities. Ludendorff saw this, militarily, as a demand for unconditional
surrender and would therefore have continued resistance. But the situation had
passed beyond his control, and on October 26 he was made to resign by the
Emperor, on Prince Max's advice. On October 27 Germany acknowledged the U.S.
note. |
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Wilson now began to persuade the Allies
to agree to an armistice and negotiations according to the U.S.-German
correspondence. They agreed, with two reservations: they would not subscribe to
the second of the Fourteen Points (on the freedom of the seas); and they wanted
"compensation . . . for damage done to the civilian population . . . and
their property by the aggression of Germany." Wilson's note of November 5
apprised the Germans of these reservations and stated that Foch would
communicate armistice terms to Germany's accredited representatives. On November
8 a German delegation, led by Matthias Erzberger,
arrived at Rethondes, in the Forest of Compiègne, where the Germans met
face to face with Foch and his party and were informed of the Allies' peace
terms. |
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Meanwhile, revolution was shaking
Germany. It began with a sailors' mutiny at Kiel on October 29 in reaction to
the naval command's order for the High Seas Fleet to go out into the North Sea
for a conclusive battle. Though the U-boat crews
remained loyal, the mutiny of the surface-ship crews spread to other units of
the fleet, developed into armed insurrection on November 3, and progressed to
open revolution the next day. There were disturbances in Hamburg and in Bremen;
"councils of soldiers and workers," like the Russian soviets, were
formed in inland industrial centres; and in the night of November 7-8 a
"democratic and socialist Republic of Bavaria" was proclaimed. The
Social Democrats of the Reichstag withdrew their support from Prince Max's
government in order to be free to contend against the Communists for the
leadership of the revolution. While William II,
at Spa, was still wondering whether he could abdicate his imperial German title
but remain king of Prussia, Prince Max, in Berlin on November 9, on his own
initiative, announced William's abdication of both titles. The Hohenzollern
monarchy thus came to an end, joining those of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.
Prince Max handed his powers as chancellor over to Friedrich
Ebert, a Majority Social Democrat, who formed a provisional government. A
member of this government, Philipp Scheidemann,
hastily proclaimed a republic. On November 10 William II took refuge in the
neutral Netherlands, where on November 28 he signed his own abdication of his
sovereign rights. |
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The Allies' armistice terms presented in
the railway carriage at Rethondes were stiff. Germany was required to evacuate
not only Belgium, France, and Alsace-Lorraine but also all the rest of the left
(west) bank of the Rhine, and it had to neutralize that river's right bank
between The Netherlands and Switzerland. The German troops in East Africa were
to surrender; the German armies in eastern Europe were to withdraw to the prewar
German frontier; the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest were to be
annulled; and the Germans were to repatriate all prisoners of war and hand over
to the Allies a large quantity of war materials, including 5,000 pieces of
artillery, 25,000 machine guns, 1,700 aircraft, 5,000 locomotives, and 150,000
railroad cars. And meanwhile, the Allies' blockade of Germany was to continue. |
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Pleading the danger of Bolshevism in a
nation on the verge of collapse, the German delegation obtained some mitigation
of these terms: a suggestion that the blockade might be relaxed, a reduction in
the quantity of armaments to be handed over, and permission for the German
forces in eastern Europe to stay put for the time being. The Germans might have
held out longer for further concessions if the fact of revolution on their home
front had not been coupled with the imminence of a new blow from the west. |
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Though the Allied advance was continuing
and seemed in some sectors even to be accelerating, the main German forces had
managed to retreat ahead of it. The Germans' destruction of roads and railways
along the routes of their evacuation made it impossible for supplies to keep
pace with the advancing Allied troops; a pause in the advance would occur while
Allied communications were being repaired, and that would give the Germans a
breathing space in which to rally their resistance. By November 11 the Allied
advance on the northern sectors of the front had come more or less to a
standstill on a line running from Pont-à-Mousson through Sedan, Mézières,
and Mons to Ghent. Foch, however, now had a Franco-U.S. force of 28 divisions
and 600 tanks in the south ready to strike through Metz into northeastern
Lorraine. Since Foch's general offensive had absorbed the Germans' reserves,
this new offensive would fall on their bared left flank and held the promise of
outflanking their whole new line of defense (from Antwerp to the line of the
Meuse) and of intercepting any German retreat. By this time the number of U.S.
divisions in France had risen to 42. In
addition, the British were about to bomb Berlin
on a scale hitherto unattempted in air warfare. |
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Whether the Allies' projected final
offensive, intended for November 14, would have achieved a breakthrough can
never be known. At 5:00 AM on Nov. 11, 1918, the Armistice document was signed
in Foch's railway carriage at Rethondes. At
11:00 AM on the same day, World War I came to an end. |
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The fact that Matthias Erzberger, who
was a civilian politician rather than a soldier, headed the German armistice
delegation became an integral part of the legend of the "stab in the
back" (Dolchstoss im Rücken).
This legend's theme was that the German Army was "undefeated in the
field" (unbesiegt im Felde) and
had been "stabbed in the back"--i.e.,
had been denied support at the crucial moment by a weary and defeatist civilian
population and their leaders. This theme was adopted soon after the war's end by
Ludendorff himself and by other German generals
who were unwilling to admit the hopelessness of Germany's military situation in
November 1918 and who wanted to vindicate the honour of German arms. The
"stab in the back" legend soon found its way into German
historiography and was picked up by German right-wing political agitators who
claimed that Allied propaganda in Germany in the last stages of the war had
undermined civilian morale and that traitors among the politicians had been at
hand ready to do the Allies' bidding by signing the Armistice. Adolf
Hitler eventually became the foremost of these political agitators,
branding Erzberger and the leaders of the Social Democrats as the "November
criminals" and advocating militaristic and expansionist policies by which Germany
could redeem its defeat in the war, gain vengeance upon its enemies, and become
the preeminent power in Europe. |
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The casualties suffered by the
participants in World War I dwarfed those of previous wars: some 8,500,000
soldiers died as a result of wounds and/or disease. The greatest number of
casualties and wounds were inflicted by artillery, followed by small arms, and
then by poison gas. The bayonet, which was relied on by the prewar French Army
as the decisive weapon, actually produced few casualties. War was increasingly
mechanized from 1914 and produced casualties even when nothing important was
happening. On even a quiet day on the Western Front, many hundreds of Allied and
German soldiers died. The heaviest loss of life for a single day occurred on
July 1, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, when the British Army suffered
57,470 casualties. |
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Sir Winston Churchill once described the
battles of the Somme and Verdun, which were typical of trench warfare in their
futile and indiscriminate slaughter, as being waged between double or triple
walls of cannons fed by mountains of shells. In an open space surrounded by
masses of these guns large numbers of infantry divisions collided. They fought
in this dangerous position until battered into a state of uselessness. Then they
were replaced by other divisions. So many men were lost in the process and
shattered beyond recognition that there is a French monument at Verdun to the
150,000 unlocated dead who are assumed to be buried in the vicinity. |
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This kind of war made it difficult to
prepare accurate casualty lists. There were revolutions in four of the warring
countries in 1918, and the attention of the new governments was shifted away
from the grim problem of war losses. A completely accurate table of losses may
never be compiled. The best available estimates of World War I military
casualties are assembled in Table 4. |
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Similar uncertainties exist about the
number of civilian deaths attributable to the war. There were no agencies
established to keep records of these fatalities, but it is clear that the
displacement of peoples through the movement of the war in Europe and in Asia
Minor, accompanied as it was in 1918 by the most destructive outbreak of
influenza in history, led to the deaths of large numbers. It has been estimated
that the number of civilian deaths attributable to the war was higher than the
military casualties, or around 13,000,000. These civilian deaths were largely
caused by starvation, exposure, disease, military encounters, and massacres. |
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