He’d been planning for it all spring and summer, his baby, what all of his offensives
had been leading up to, but this week, Ludendorff cancels his plans.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week saw the beginning of the Second Battle of the Marne, but the German advance
was stalled by the French defense-in-depth system, and the Allied counterattack, spearheaded
by Americans and Senegalese and using some 500 tanks, smashed through the German lines
at the end of the week.
A German attack on the British in Palestine failed, the Army of Islam is stalled by dysentery
in the Caucasus, and the former Russian Tsar Nicholas and his family were executed in Yekaterinburg.
Here’s what followed.
The salient on the Western Front that the German advance in late May and early June
had created was no longer really holdable by the middle of the week.
On the 21st, the Germans abandoned Chateau-Thierry.
On the 22nd, they were pushed back nearly 10 km, and again on the 23rd, as British tanks
advanced up at the Somme.
Still, the action by the Marne was mainly a French battle, and French General Philippe
Petain had followed up last weeks counter attacks with new attacks on the 20th at the
south and east sides of the salient.
David Stevenson points out that he committed 50 reserve divisions to this, leaving exactly
zero fresh reserves left.
But after the 20th, the Allied advance couldn’t help but slow down, since 1) they were beyond
their artillery’s range, and 2) the wooded countryside they had to cover was dotted with
German machine gun nests, 3) they no longer had the element of surprise, and 4) a lot
of their tanks were out of action.
In Martin Gilbert I read something German Chancellor Georg von Hertling wrote about
the first few days of the battle, “The Germans were still expecting to receive peace proposals
within two months, with Paris at their mercy.
That was on the 15th; on the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was
lost.
The history of the world was played out in three days.”
Having said that, when Hertling asked German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff if
the German army could ever take the offensive again, Ludendorff said (Gilbert), “Five
times thus far during the war I had to withdraw my troops, and was still able, at the end,
to beat the enemy.
Why shouldn’t I succeed a 6th time?”
But let’s look at the new situation after the attacks and counter attacks of last week.
In mid March, when the German Offensives were just about to begin, they had 300,000 more
troops on the Western Front than the Allies, but between then and now a million German
soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured, and a lot of these were the storm troops,
who were not easily replaced.
The French and the British had also lost a million men together, and though the French
would have problems replacing theirs, the Americans were now pouring in at like 250,000
per month.
And now they were fighting too.
So by this time it was the Allies that had a few hundred thousands more troops there
than the Germans, and that gap was widening every day.
This week, on the 24th, Allied leaders Ferdinand Foch, Sir Douglas Haig, Petain, and John Pershing
met and agreed that they would soon launch a series of coordinated offensives.
Haig’s guys would attack eastward from Amiens, Petain’s north from the River Marne, and
Pershing’s south of Verdun.
All of the main objectives were railway lines.
On the 25th, the Germans made another desperate attempt to surround Reims.
This was a complete failure, since the German armies just didn’t have the bite any more,
though their retreat was an orderly one, even with Allied counterattacks.
Remember our episodes from September and October 1914?
Doesn’t it sorta seem like that all over again?
The Germans reach the Marne, the Germans cross the Marne, they can’t maintain the pressure
and get pushed back, and then they regroup along the Aisne.
Thing is, the German army now faced a stronger enemy, and a lot more of them, and we’ve
talked to the point of boredom about the German lack of resources or replacement troops.
It was a grim situation.
But everything wasn’t exactly rosy for the Allies.
G.J. Meyer points out in “A World Undone” that the end of the German threat to Paris
meant the end of any chance for the Clemenceau government to fall, which meant the end of
any chance for a French government that would seek peace instead of prolonging the war for
who knew how long.
The French now had combat units that were entirely made up of men over 40; the British
were drafting men of 50 into their army.
And look at the map- Germany not only had basically all of Eastern Europe, they had
more of the Western Front than they had just a few months ago.
But Germany had fresh problems.
On the 20th, the Flanders offensive that Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff had been waiting
to launch all summer, Operation Hagen, hit some hitches.
That day, German Command received recommendations to postpone it for a few days, in light of
the ongoing German failures in France.
Now, the Battle of Soissons, the Allied counterattack that began at the end of last week, ended
after just four days, but it had cost the Germans 168,000 casualties to just over 100,000
for the Allies.
German General and strategic planner Fritz von Lossberg recommended now executing Hagen
with whatever was available, but as a limited tactical attack and not a big operational
one.
He also recommended that after that putting the whole front on the defensive, with lines
further back behind areas that could be flooded.
Ludendorff, though, could not bring himself to give up all the ground gained over the
spring and go back into an attritional war of defense.
Still, after the next couple of days, forced by circumstance in France, Hagen was called
off indefinitely.
(Meyer), “The Great Flanders Offensive that was supposed to be the point of everything
the Germans had done was overdue and unlikely to ever take place.
Ludendorff himself was in obvious torment...
To all the weight of his military problems was added the fear of what would happen when
the German public, still assured daily that its armies were victorious in the field, awoke
to the magnitude of his failure.”
So in a general view, all of that force, all of that fighting, all that the Germans had
done in even getting to the Marne was for nothing.
But you know who’d done a whole lot more travelling?
The Czechoslovak Legion.
On the 24th, Legionnaires reached the Volga River and now held a neatly 5,000km line from
the Volga to the Pacific.
The next day they reached Yekaterinburg, where the Tsar and his family were recently murdered.
At the end of the week in the north, French troops added their numbers to the British
at Murmansk, so if you look at the big picture, including the Germans holding the formerly
Russian shores of the Black Sea, the Bolsheviks were now struggling just to hold power in
the center.
And here are a couple notes to end the week.
On the 22nd- Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg resigns as Austrian Minister-President, succeeded
by Dr. Maximilian Hussarek von Heinlein.
On the 25th, British aircraft dropped 300 tons of bombs behind the German lines near
Amiens, but the following day, the top scoring British flying ace of the war, with 72 kills,
though only 61 officially, Edward “Mick” Mannock, met his fate.
He shot down his 73rd plane, but after that disregarded his own rule and flew low over
the wreckage, and into a storm of German small arms fire.
As he and his New Zealander wingman flew away, the wingman saw a blue flame spout from Mannock’s
engine cowling.
Them the left wing of Mannock’s plane broke off and he plunged to his death.
Interestingly enough, it was really unlikely that Mannock should’ve ever been in the
skies in the first place.
When the war broke out, he had been in Turkey laying telephone cables, and being British,
he was imprisoned.
After a failed escape attempt, he was put in solitary and then contracted dysentery.
The American consulate got his release, but when he tried to enlist back in Britain he
was at first classified as “unfit for military duty”.
It would not be until late 1916 that he qualified as a pilot.
And the week comes to an end, with the Allies still gaining ground in the west, and making
plans for new offensives, even as the Germans are forced to cancel theirs, and the Bolsheviks,
who are not even fighting this war, find themselves surrounded by its participants.
It’s been exactly four months since Operation Michael began the German Spring Offensives
and the Germans have lost a million men.
And the Allies have lost a million men.
Two million men in four months - one third of one year.
And you think, that can’t be sustainable, I mean, how long can that go on?
And then you realize that next week, it’ll be four YEARS its been going on, and that’s
just par for the course, and there’s still no end in sight.
If you want to learn more about the German Spring Offensive 1918 and how it all started,
you can click right here for our weekly episode about that.
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