Some of you regular viewers might like to see a brief refresher on what’s recently
gone on, and some newer viewers may want to catch up more quickly, so we’ve made a series
of recaps to help out, and this is one of them.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Recap Special covering November and December
1917, and January 1918.
As November began, things were looking grim for Italy.
The Battle of Caporetto had begun in late August and had turned into a rout.
The Italian second army had been destroyed, and the Austro-German advance had taken nearly
200,000 prisoners.
Eventually, the Italians established a new defensive line behind the Piave River, after
retreating 100km.
The fiasco cost Italian army Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna his job, and he was replaced
by Armando Diaz.
Caporetto, with its hundreds of thousands of deserters and refugees, in addition to
the prisoners, was one of the great triumphs and great disasters of the war.
Diaz would spend the winter reforming and reorganizing his army.
There were other offensives in progress as November began as well, specifically two by
the British.
In Palestine, they had ended August by taking Beersheba, and Gaza and Jaffa would fall as
November unfolded, and they then made for Jerusalem.
On the Western Front, the enormous slaughterhouse that was the Battle of Passchendaele was in
its final stages by November.
It ended the 10th, and the Allies had gained 7km for a combined allied- central powers
total of over half a million casualties.
The British began a new offensive- the Battle of Cambrai- less than two weeks later, and
it began with great success, and featured more tanks in the field than had ever been
used before- over 400 of them.
However, a German counter attack kicked off at the end of the month, and the gains the
British made were quickly being retaken.
But the biggest news of the month, and perhaps the century, was a revolution in Russia during
the first week of November.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now in power and the Provisional Government that had reigned
since the Tsar abdicated was no more.
The first thing the new government wanted to do was to end Russia’s participation
in the world war.
This did not bode well for Russia’s allies.
By the 19th, Lenin was asking for an armistice and authorizing troops to negotiate peace
with the enemy.
Hostilities ceased on the Eastern Front by the end of the month, though there was plenty
of bloodshed in Moscow and Petrograd.
Russia further distanced itself from its former allies by making public all the secret treaties
they had made during the war, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which partitioned the
Middle East after the war, with no regard for the local peoples.
There was another big political shakeup in the Allied command as Georges Clemenceau became
the new Prime Minister of France.
There were peace demonstrations in Budapest, and Estonia declared independence from Russia.
Many other nations would soon follow suit.
There was still fighting on the Italian Front in December.
For much of the month the Austrians tried to break through the new Italian lines, and
tried and failed to take Venice just before Christmas.
The front then went quiet for the winter.
The Battle of Cambrai came to an end in the West, as the German counterattack erased nearly
all of the British gains.
The battle showed, though, that both sides’ new methods of attack, whether British tank
warfare and tank tactics, or German stormtroop tactics combined with gas and artillery, were
deadly effective.
The British advance in Palestine continued, as they took Hebron and Jerusalem, but there
were no major offensives in progress.
Well, as far as the actual war was concerned.
See, Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers, and delegates from both sides met
at Brest-Litovsk to hammer out the details of a peace treaty, but there was anything
but peace in Russia.
The White Russian armies, including former imperial Generals, had already formed in response
to the Bolsheviks, and the country descended into civil war.
This was further complicated by places like Ukraine, Moldavia, Latvia, and Finland declaring
their independence and of course being forced to fight not only Russians for it, but also
their own sides in civil wars of their own.
The Czechoslovak Legion was now isolated in Russia and would have to head east to Vladivostok
in order to head to Europe and join the allies.
Lenin and Trotsky were trying hard to consolidate their power, but it was anything but easy.
Germany, for its part, could now bring hundreds of thousands of men from the former eastern
front to the west, to try and score victory there.
Because of that and the Central Powers’ success in Italy, it seemed a dark time for
the Allies, at least until the Americans could one day arrive in force.
The Allies did form a Supreme War Council, which would hopefully be able to coordinate
activity between the Allied armies, but there were those in the cabinets and high commands
of the allied nations that were worried enough about the situation to begin thinking of making
a separate peace with AH or the Ottoman Empire.
Those empires, though, had serious issues of their own.
Hunger, and even starvation, was rampant in both, and there were desperate shortages of
men and munitions to continue the fight.
Allied production at least continued apace, bolstered by all the stuff coming from America.
But the central powers were not ready to concede.
The end of the eastern front meant Ottoman expansion in the Caucasus in addition to the
relief Germany and AH could have from fighting a two front- or three front- war.
In fact, German High Command was making plans already for a gigantic spring offensive in
the west, to win the war once and for all.
And a December side note- the largest man made explosion in history up to this point
occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when the munitions ship Mont Blanc blew up in the harbor.
And 1917 ended and 1918 began.
Three and a half years of war with no end in sight.
As the Ne w Year began, Germany announced that German occupation of Poland, Lithuania,
Courland, and Estonia would be part of any peace treaty with Russia.
Russia obviously had big problems with that.
Leon Trotsky joined the peace talks to try and prevent that.
January actually saw a lot of talks and machinations behind the scenes.
The most famous of those being Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points speech, where he laid out principles
that would hopefully guide peace negotiations after the war.
Bu that war still had to be fought in the field.
Erich Ludendorff continued his plans for the western front, and settled on Operation Michael
as the first step in his series of spring offensives.
He would bring in Storm troop strategist Oskar von Hutier and artillery genius Georg Bruchmuller
to make the assault as deadly as possible.
The British would bear the brunt of that offensive, but they were having manpower issues at the
front.
PM David Lloyd George was keeping hundreds of thousands of men in Britain that were ready
to go into action, because he was so appalled by the slaughter of the gigantic battles in
the west.
He still hoped for a solution on another front.
He also very much wanted to remove Douglas Haig and Wully Robertson from army command,
though this he could not directly do.
So he began political machinations to remove those he could from army command, which was
quite a few, and saw in the Allied Supreme Council a means to curb Haig’s ambitions
in the field.
There was a lot of news from Russia in January, and not just political machinations.
An assassination attempt on Lenin failed, but the Bolsheviks managed to shut down and
dissolve the elected constituent assembly.
Representative government was at an end in Russia, but the Bolsheviks still had to win
a bloody civil war to gain full control of the country.
We saw strikes in Germany and Austria-Hungary, a heating up of the war at sea and the war
in the skies, and endless intrigue within the high commands of both sides.
So this is where we stand as January ends.
The major battlefronts are quiet, though there are small actions every day.
There is major action every day in the east, though, with civil war and wars of independence
the theme of the winter.
Perhaps the theme of the spring will be something less bloody.
No wait, Germany is planning its largest offensive of the whole war for the spring.
The theme of the spring will involve hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers.