You launch a series of stunningly successful offensives over a period of months, and yet,
when they’re over you find yourself in a worse position then when you started.
How can that be?
Let’s take a look.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week, the Battle of Amiens ended, with a resounding Allied victory that really shook
the Germans.
This was a part of the new Allied strategy of launching small attacks all up and down
the western front.
Allied troops continued arriving in Vladivostok as well, even as Russia’s Bolshevik government
launched a terror campaign against its internal opponents.
In the Caucasus, Baku managed to defend itself from the Ottomans.
But disorder within Baku was growing and growing and Lionel Dunsterville - in command of the
small British force there - was pessimistic.
He had been under the impression that he was bringing limited technical help to train the
locals to defend themselves; the locals thought the British were coming to fight for them.
He had just three battalions from the Midlands.
Baku itself could be pretty easily defended from the west where there were steep but not
very high cliffs and the gap of Wolf’s Gate.
Heck, one battalion was probably enough for that, but northwest of the city the cliffs
disappear into flatlands, and that was also where some of the main oil fields and refineries
were located, as well as where the railway entered the town, so defensive lines were
going to have to be stretched up there, and that’s like a 25km front.
It would be tricky, if it were at all possible, to defend the city from that direction.
Further south, some other British were trying to fool the Ottomans.
On August 20th, the British Imperial Camel Corps, having ridden all the way across the
desert from Al Mudawwarah in under two weeks, was now some 25 km southeast of Amman.
They learned that the Ottomans were in force between them and the Amman railway, which
they had come to sabotage.
But even if they couldn’t do that, they could still fool the enemy into thinking they
were far more than they actually were all over the region.
So each man opened 3 or 4 tins of bully beef, destroyed the contents, and littered the cans
around.
The cars they had with them drove around like crazy, leaving all sorts of crisscrossed tire
tracks.
They even took animal droppings that they burned as fuel and scattered that around to
suggest a whole lot more camels.
Then they headed out.
By this time, Edmund Allenby’s overall plan of deception, ahead of his planned September
offensive, seemed to be working.
If he could convince the Ottoman 8th Army, under German Liman von Sanders, that he would
be attacking to the east of the Ottoman lines across the River Jordan as he had before,
Sanders was in for a nasty surprise.
The Germans were being repeatedly surprised on the Western Front, though, unable to gauge
where the next Allied attack would come.
This week saw the Battle of the Ailette, conducted by Charles Mangin and the French 10th Army.
It was a success, and after the French attacked between Soissons and Compiegne the 20th, German
Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff will call this a second “black day for the German
army” (Stevenson)
The British army launches the Battle of Albert - also called the Battle of Bapaume - the
21st.
Here, it’s Julian Byng and the 3rd army using tanks to take the Albert-Arras railway.
Byng attacked with 13 infantry and 2 cavalry divisions, and five tank battalions numbering
156 tanks.
Now, they attacked on a 20 km front, which was pretty wide for that size force, but the
Germans only had ten divisions opposing them.
The New Zealand Rifle Brigade had spearheaded the attack the 21st, and by leapfrogging as
the British had at Amiens, by the end of the week the frontline was east of the Albert-Arras
railway, and they had taken 5,000 prisoners in just the first two days (Generals)
On August 20th, with the French at the outskirts of Lassigny, Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand
Foch is now confident enough that he writes French PM Georges Clemenceau and said they
can secure victory in 1919.
The French recaptured Lassigny the 21st.
That day when the attack on the River Somme was resumed, British Commander Sir Douglas
Haig said he thought they could win by the end of the year.
On the Somme front, though, the Germans still outnumbered the allies 42 divisions to 32
(Gilbert), but the Allies had momentum and morale.
They began taking all of the scenes of the bloodiest fighting from 1916 as the week came
to an end.
But let’s look at the overall German situation in the west, now with a month of hindsight
since their last Western Front Offensives.
The Germans, beginning in March, had put together the greatest string of tactical successes
of the whole war, and yet they had not produced any great advantage, let alone strategic victory.
In fact, it was the opposite; Germany in August 1918 was in a far weaker strategic position
than it had been at the beginning of the year.
It was now weaker in manpower and equipment than its opponents; and I mean both quantitatively
and qualitatively, and morale was at a new low.
And the reasons for the failures?
In “The German 1918 Offensives”, David Zabecki has quite a lot to say about that.
On a strategic level, he thinks the offensives were doomed from the start in terms of achieving
a true military victory.
They had only a slight numerical superiority, but their equipment was inferior and worn,
and they had an inadequate supply system.
They may, however, have been able to convince the allies that Germany itself could not be
defeated militarily, and entered into peace negotiations from a position of strength,
but they didn’t do this.
They could, Zabecki argues, with better operational design, have split the British from the French,
and probably even driven the British off the continent, but then what?
Britain wasn’t going to abandon the fight as long as Germany held the Belgian coast,
Britain - and the Allies - had naval superiority and the blockade was strangling Germany.
The Americans could have just been re-directed to Britain for an eventual counterattack like
- spoiler alert - what happened a couple decades later.
Thing is: “On the tactical level, the Germans were formidable opponents.
Their discipline, training, leadership, and tactical doctrine produced units that were
almost impossible to beat in anything approaching evenly matched force-to-force encounters,
either on the defense or the offense...
The German army’s greatest tactical handicap was its mobility, which limited its ability
to maneuver to operational depth.”
But even off the Western Front, looking at the total German picture, you saw other major
problems.
G.J. Meyer writes in “A World Undone”, “Further to the east, the folly that had
been Brest-Litovsk was continuing to draw German troops into a military, political,
and economic quagmire.
They had to occupy the city of Kharkov deep inside Ukraine to maintain some vestige of
control and any hope of extracting grain... they had to move into the Donets Basin...
in search of fuel for the decrepit railways taken from the Russians.
They had to stretch their lines of communication into the Crimea to discourage an Allied advance
from the Middle East.”
This were looking grim for them all over.
On the 22nd, the Allies announced their aims with the landings at Archangel.
Those forces were called in by the “legitimate representative of the Murman government”
to expel the Germans and annul Brest-Litovsk.
They guarantee no interference in internal Russian affairs.
That’s interesting, because this week after secret negotiations between the Soviets and
Germans, the Soviets recognize an independent Georgian state.
This is part of the German machinations to secure Baku and its oil.
But this causes anti-German sentiment to grow and grow in the Turkish press.
And as for the Soviets, this week saw them again lose Irkutsk to the Czechoslovak Legion.
And that brings us to the end of a rather confusing week of an almost impossibly confusing
war.
A ruse by the Imperial Camel Corps on the Palestine Front, defense issues in the Caucasus,
Allied successes on the Western Front, an overall depressing situation for the Germans,
but specifically - tactical success but overall failure for them on the Western Front.
But the Germans’ single greatest flaw, according to Zabecki, and if you read his monumental
work on the German 1918 offensives, there’s not a whole lot of reason to dispute him,
was the lack of clearly defined strategic and operational objectives.
Even postwar, Ludendorff and Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg in their writings still
don’t have any clear vision of a concrete military objective this year.
Or a concrete political one.
What Ludendorff was doing this summer, and this he did admit in his writing, was keeping
the initiative, keeping the attacks going, in the hope of exploiting whatever opportunities
came up.
Well, American General Gordon Sullivan once said, “Hope is not a method”.
But, as Zabecki points out, hope was the only method German High Command had left in the
summer of 1918.
If you want to get David Zabecki’s book about the German Spring Offensive, you can
get it via the link below in the description and if you buy it there we get a small cut
from the checkout price.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Michael Harrington who is supporting our show in memory
of his great uncle Timothy who died this month 100 years ago in The Great War.
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