Two of the Central Powers fronts have collapsed, one Central Power has left the war, and the
German Chancellor has asked the Allies for an armistice.
This week, that request is rejected, even as the Allies overrun the Hindenburg Line
of Defense.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week Bulgaria accepted Allied terms for peace and left the war; there are now only
three Central Powers.
The Allied breakthrough on the Palestine Front continued with the fall of Damascus.
There were four simultaneous Allied offensives in progress on the Western Front, and new
German Chancellor Prince Maximilian von Baden asked the Allies for an armistice.
Now, that request was not a surrender by any means, and was really a try to end the war
with no harmful conditions for Germany or Austria.
That was Max’s goal.
So he claims that he’s open to Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points for peace, which we’ve talked
about before and which are in the description.
On the 5th, Max says he’s open to a League of Nations, to the idea of restoring Belgian
independence, and is for the Reichstag Resolution of July 19, 1917.
That was passed last year by the Reichstag but ignored by German High Command, and sought
a peace with no annexations, no indemnities, freedom of the seas, and international arbitration
by a body such as a League of Nations.
Max also says civilians would have authority in all civilian matters.
The next day, though, a letter that he wrote to a Swiss Prince is made public.
In it, he jeers at western democracy and calls that July peace resolution a “disgusting
child born of fear and the Berlin dog days”, the whole letter is in fact a diatribe against
allowing the German people a voice in government.
On the 7th, German industrialist Walther Rathenau wrote a call for a final huge military effort
in Vossische Zeitung, a major national newspaper.
This wasn’t to win the war, but to get to the strongest possible negotiating position-
one of equality rather than defeat.
But he didn’t just encourage men to sign up, he wrote of all the armies of occupation
and security in the vast eastern regions Germany had gained earlier this year, pointing out
that only half of all the troops were actually on the western front.
German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff thought that combing out all those troops
would be more trouble than the army could stand, but Rathenau wasn’t finished- he
wrote to the minister of war that if Germany evacuated Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine, it
would end German capacity for defense in future and they would always be at the west’s mercy.
Well, whatever anyone else was thinking, Woodrow Wilson rejected Max’s proposal the 8th.
The first condition of ANY armistice was the evacuation of ALL occupied territories.
So no more Germans in Belgium or all of the eastern territory; no more Austrians in Serbia,
and so forth.
But it sure wasn’t going to be easy to drive them out of Belgium or France.
Autumn rain had come and slowed things, and of course the German infrastructure was still
formidable- particularly in the eastern part of France where the Americans were attacking.
And the Americans had a big problem- a serious shortage of horses.
But when American Commander John Pershing asked Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foch
for 25,000 of them, he was told to get them from the states, but there wasn’t shipping
space.
Pershing estimated he was 100,000 horses short.
French General Philippe Petain suggested solving the supply problems by dissolving the US 1st
Army and having those divisions with supply problems assigned to the French armies.
Pershing said no, though interestingly enough, ten of the 30 American divisions fit for fighting
were actually serving under British or French command.
This was all kind of unfair anyhow.
Foch’s changing of strategy in September and the speed of setting up the current offensive-
one in a rural location- was partly to blame for all this.
But the tensions in the Allied command that had ebbed and flowed all year flared up again.
Henri Gouraud’s French 4th Army had been making better progress than the Americans
in that offensive, and Foch’s staff was disappointed with the Americans.
And I said last week that French PM Georges Clemenceau got stuck in a traffic jam behind
the lines, right?
Well, he was furious and told Foch not to try to persuade Pershing of anything but to
order him to do it.
David Stevenson points out, “...the upshot was that the attempt to disorganize the Germans
by attacking them from the south had failed, although it had been crucial to (Sir Douglas)
Haig’s and Foch’s conception of the offensive as a whole.
It had done so, moreover, in circumstances that revived old tensions within the western
alliance.”
By October 6 the American offensive had reached casualties of 75,000 (Backs to the Wall) and
they couldn’t quickly replace their losses any longer.
The lousy weather prevented any air support and the acute horse shortage was really telling.
Pershing now decided not to attack the central position- his goal- but would focus on the
heights of the Argonne and the Meuse on the flanks.
By the end of the week, the Argonne forest was, in fact, cleared of Germans, though it
wasn’t a big breakthrough.
And yet, the Americans had slowly but surely battered their way to the Kriemhilde Stellung,
the main German defense line.
Also in the Argonne, on the 8th, an American conscientious objector, well a former one
on religious grounds, saw some action- Corporal Alvin York.
He and his men were tasked with taking out a German machine gun position.
When 9 of his 17 men were wounded or killed, he told the rest to guard the prisoners they’d
already taken and he went after the machine gun post himself.
He killed as many as 28 men with insanely good marksmanship- picking them off their
machine guns with his rifle, and then foiling a six man bayonet charge with his pistol.
When the German officer running the post surrendered, York returned to the lines with 132 prisoners
and 35 machine guns.
He was promptly promoted to sergeant, and became not just a national American hero,
but an international celebrity.
That same day, some other men also returned to the American lines.
See, last week, an American force of over 500 men, holding a ravine about a half mile
ahead of the front lines, were surrounded by a far larger German force.
They were continuously fired upon by artillery too for two days.
Their food ran out.
Then they were hit by friendly fire artillery.
They sent their last carrier pigeon with the instruction for the Americans to please stop
shelling Americans.
The Germans sent in flamethrower units; these were dealt with.
American High Command thought it was all over for those men and listed them as “lost”.
But the Germans withdrew the 7th, and the lost battalion was not in fact lost.
The next day the survivors- 194 of 554, returned to the American lines.
And one more piece of American news: on October 10th the news reported that 20,000 Americans
had died in France in the past two months... of the flu.
As for the rest of the fighting on the Western Front this week, there was Allied success
further west in the center of the front.
The Beaurevoir Line, the last line of defense of the Hindenburg Line defense system, fell
this week.
After this, the Australia Corps was finally taken out of the lines for R and R. They were
nearing the limits of exhaustion.
The Germans fell back to the Suippe River.
The Allies launched the Second Battle of Cateau, and this combined with the ongoing fighting
for Cambrai, resulted in an allied advance on the 8th on the whole St. Quentin-Cambrai
front.
10,000 prisoners and 150 guns were taken in one day.
The French drove the Germans back on the Arnes, Aisne, and Suippe Rivers.
On the 9th, the Canadians entered Cambrai, and the following day, when the Germans were
forced back beyond the Oise Canal, the mighty Hindenburg Line had been totally overrun.
So near the end of the week, the German army began a systematic retreat along the whole
Western Front even stripping the Flanders coast of ships and planes, but they were still
fighting and fighting hard, and the Allied advance was halted.
The German retreat was by night from the 9th to the 11th to the still unfinished Hermann
Position, so when the British reached the new German defenses at the Selle River, which
was flooded to boot, they were stopped because the Germans had brought up their heavy artillery
and their reserves.
So this would require another planned set piece attack if it was to be broken.
The Allies had 6 million men now in the west (Undone), but since their tank, aircraft,
and artillery advantages were so great, and their combined attack doctrine widely adopted,
they didn’t actually need all of those men.
They could wear the enemy down with heavy guns, planes, and tanks.
The French now had 40% of their army in the artillery and 20 times the big guns they’d
had in 1914.
Those Canadians that first broke the Hindenburg Line did so in part by firing close on to
a million artillery rounds in two days.
A World Undone says that by early October 12,000 tons of munitions were being fired
every day.
The French 75s were firing 280,000 rounds a day.
And yet, Allied combat deaths still amazingly exceeded German ones; the Germans just didn’t
have as many easily available replacements.
They did, as Walther Rathenau pointed out, have huge amounts of troops in other regions,
though.
On the 5th, they were reported withdrawn from Macedonian Front.
By the 10th, the Allies were approaching Nis, which was held by none other than German Field
Marshal August von Mackensen.
As for the German allies, you gotta realize that even though the Bulgarians had just left
the war, Austrian troops were still fighting, but the Serbian and French forces were slowly
advancing northwards to Belgrade and the Danube.
The Allied advance continued on the Palestine Front as well, occupying Beirut this week.
Reports from the Ottoman Empire came out this week that Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of
War for the entire duration of it so far and a main architect of the Ottoman entry into
the war back in 1914, had been dismissed by the Sultan.
And the week comes to an end.
Allied advances taking ground in the west, but stalling because of new defenses or a
lack of horses.
Tales of heroism from the Argonne Forest.
The breaking of the Macedonian and Palestine Fronts continuing at speed, and German High
Command trying to figure out what concessions it is willing to make for an armistice to
stop the slaughter in the field.
But Wilson rejected Max’s proposal this week, so that slaughter is going to continue.
I don’t think I can even begin to imagine the frustration of the High Commands, now
that the victor in the war is pretty clear but the fighting is heavier than ever.
Sir Edward Grey, who had been the British Foreign Minister when the war began, had this
to say this week, very sad words when you think of what it will entail: peace is within
sight, but not within reach.
If you want to learn more about the famous or infamous Hindenburg Line defense system,
you can click right here for our special episode about that.
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