GERMANY STAKES ALL ON THE WEST

On Tuesday 8 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson drove to the Capitol and addressed a joint session of Congress. The United States had been at war for nine months, and the speech would shape both the ending of the war and the argument over its peace. It was a reply to three things at once. The first was the Bolsheviks, who had published the Allies' secret treaties from the Russian archives and were negotiating a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk. The second was David Lloyd George, who had set out British war aims to a gathering of trade unionists three days earlier. The third was the growing suspicion among liberals and socialists across the Allied world that the war was being fought for territory and spoils.

The text was drafted in a hurry but not out of nowhere. Since September 1917 Wilson's confidant Colonel Edward House had run "The Inquiry," a body of more than a hundred geographers, historians and economists, based at the American Geographical Society in New York, whose job was to assemble the facts for a future peace conference. Its director was House's brother-in-law Sidney Mezes, and its secretary the young journalist Walter Lippmann. Working from the Inquiry's memorandum, Wilson and House spent the first days of January over maps and drafts in the president's study, and Wilson typed the final version himself.

What the points said

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at: an end to secret treaties.
2. Freedom of navigation on the seas, outside territorial waters, in peace and war.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of economic barriers between nations.
4. Guarantees that national armaments would be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
5. An impartial adjustment of colonial claims, giving equal weight to the interests of the populations concerned.
6. Evacuation of all Russian territory, and an unhampered chance for Russia to choose her own path.
7. Belgium evacuated and restored.
8. All French territory freed, and the "wrong" of 1871 about Alsace-Lorraine righted.
9. Italy's frontiers readjusted along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary to be given the "freest opportunity of autonomous development."
11. Romania, Serbia and Montenegro evacuated, with Serbia given secure access to the sea.
12. Sovereignty for the Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire, autonomy for its other nationalities, and the Dardanelles open to all.
13. An independent Poland, with free access to the sea.
14. A general association of nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of great and small states alike.

Much of the program was shaped for a map that had not yet changed. Point 10 promised the peoples of Austria-Hungary autonomy, not independence; by October that promise was already obsolete. Point 5 spoke of colonies in a way that anti-colonial nationalists read as a promise, though it was never meant to dismantle the existing empires. Point 14, the League of Nations, was the one Wilson cared most about, and the one that would break him.

Why it mattered

The speech was aimed at several audiences at once. It was a bid to keep revolutionary Russia in the war; it was a message to German liberals and socialists, which Allied propaganda services translated and scattered over the front lines in leaflets as the year went on; and it was a statement of American independence, since the United States was an "associated" power and had never signed the secret treaties that bound London, Paris and Rome to Italian, Romanian and Japanese claims. A month later, on 11 February, Wilson added the phrase that would haunt the peace conference: "self-determination," he told Congress, "is not a mere phrase."

Allied leaders were polite and skeptical. Georges Clemenceau is said to have remarked that Wilson bored him with his fourteen points when God Almighty had only ten (an attributed remark). But the effect was real. When Germany asked for an armistice in October 1918 it asked for terms on the basis of the Fourteen Points and Wilson's later speeches, and Wilson made himself the German government's best hope. The Allies agreed to the points on 5 November only with two stated reservations: Britain would not accept the "freedom of the seas," and compensation had to be made for "all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea and from the air." That second clause, tucked into a note from Secretary of State Lansing, became the legal root of the reparations dispute (see chapter VIII).

The peace talks between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers opened on 22 December 1917 in the old fortress of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, Belarus), headquarters of the German Eastern Front. The Central Powers were represented by the German foreign secretary Richard von Kühlmann, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin, and the shrewd General Max Hoffmann, who actually commanded the front. The Soviet side, at first led by Adolf Joffe, used the talks as a revolutionary platform, hoping that workers in Germany and Austria would rise before their governments could dictate terms. On 7 January Lev Trotsky, the commissar for foreign affairs, arrived to take over, and the speeches got better and longer.

When it became clear that the German terms would take Poland, Lithuania and most of Courland from Russia, Trotsky's answer was a theatrical stroke. On 10 February 1918 he announced that Russia would not sign the treaty but would also stop fighting and demobilize: a policy later summarized as "neither war nor peace." The Germans, who had expected a signature, now faced an enemy who declared that he would not fight.

The bread peace

One day earlier, in the early hours of 9 February, the Central Powers had signed a separate treaty with the delegation of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the nationalist Rada government in Kiev. For Austria-Hungary especially the "bread peace" (Brotfrieden) was a necessity. A cut in the flour ration had set off a strike at Wiener Neustadt on 14 January that spread to Vienna; on 28 January the movement reached Berlin, and perhaps a million workers across Germany stopped work; and Czernin urged peace with Ukraine as the empire's best hope of grain before the summer. Ukraine promised grain and other foodstuffs in return for German military support against the Bolsheviks, who had already invaded. In the event, deliveries fell far short, and occupying Ukraine ate up much of the benefit.

Faustschlag

On 18 February Germany ended the armistice. Operation Faustschlag ("Fist Strike") put 53 divisions in motion across a front where the Russian army had effectively ceased to exist. There was no battle to speak of; there were railways. Small German detachments rode trains from station to station, taking towns, rolling stock and prisoners by the thousand. Dvinsk fell on the first day, Pskov on 24–25 February, and German troops were on the road to Petrograd. Kiev fell on 1 March.

The panic in Petrograd was real. In the Bolshevik Central Committee, Lenin argued for immediate acceptance, against Nikolai Bukharin and others who wanted a "revolutionary war," and he threatened to resign if he lost. He won, narrowly. The Soviets sent their delegation back to Brest-Litovsk, and on 3 March Grigory Sokolnikov signed the treaty at about 5:50 p.m., having refused to discuss its terms. The Fourth Congress of Soviets ratified the treaty on 15 March, and the government moved the capital from vulnerable Petrograd to Moscow.

The terms

Russia gave up Poland, Lithuania and Courland, to be disposed of by Germany and Austria-Hungary; withdrew from Livonia and Estonia, which German police were to administer; recognized the independence of Ukraine and Finland; and surrendered Kars, Ardahan and Batum to the Ottomans. By the usual estimates Russia lost about a third of its population, about half its industrial land and nearly nine-tenths of its coalfields. A supplementary agreement in August added a payment of six billion marks. The treaty made less difference than Germany hoped: roughly a million German soldiers were left in the east to police it, and the grain never solved the hunger. Still, it let Ludendorff shift around fifty divisions to the Western Front.

Romania and the German empire in the east

Romania had signed an armistice at Focșani on 9 December 1917 and was forced to sign the Treaty of Bucharest on 7 May 1918. It ceded Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria and the Carpathian passes to Austria-Hungary, handed over its agricultural surplus and leased its Ploiești oilfields to Germany for 90 years. King Ferdinand never signed the treaty, and on 10 November, the day before the Western armistice, Romania remobilized. In Finland, meanwhile, German troops landed at Hanko on 3 April and helped the Whites win the civil war in May.

The shadow of intervention

Brest-Litovsk also dragged the Allies deeper into Russia. London and Paris feared that the stockpiles of arms at Murmansk and Archangel would fall to Germany, and wished to revive an eastern front. A British force landed at Murmansk in March. The Czechoslovak Legion, some 40,000 former Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war promised passage to France via Vladivostok, was strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railway when the Soviet government ordered it disarmed on 25 May, after a brawl at Chelyabinsk on 14 May. The legionnaires rose instead, seized much of the railway from the Volga to the Pacific, and gave anti-Bolshevik governments a shield. On 2 August British and French troops landed at Archangel (American infantry followed in September), and Japanese, British and American forces arrived at Vladivostok in August. The interventions never had a clear aim, did little to affect the war in the west, and gave the Bolsheviks a lasting propaganda argument.

At a conference at Mons on 11 November 1917, Ludendorff decided that Germany must strike in the west before the Americans arrived. His staff settled on a blow against the British, weakened by Passchendaele and by a manpower crisis in London. The attack was named Michael. The target was the line between Arras and the Oise, where the British Third Army (General Julian Byng) held the north and the Fifth Army (General Hubert Gough) held more than 40 miles, thinly, on newly taken-over ground whose defenses were unfinished.

Stormtroops and the Bruchmüller bombardment

The tactical method had been tested at Riga in September 1917, at Caporetto in October and at Cambrai in November. Picked units of Sturmtruppen trained for weeks behind the lines to go forward in small groups with light machine guns, trench mortars, flamethrowers and grenades, bypassing strong points and pushing deep into the rear before the defenders could organize. Supporting them was Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, an artillery officer recalled from retirement and nicknamed "Durchbruchmüller" ("Breakthrough Müller"). His bombardments were short, violent and carefully sequenced: counter-battery fire with mixed gas shells to silence the British guns, then fire on command posts, communication lines and rear areas, then on the front trenches, and finally a creeping barrage that the infantry followed. Calculation replaced days of registering shots, so there was no warning.

At 4:40 a.m. on 21 March 1918 more than 6,000 guns and 3,000 mortars opened fire along a front of about 43 miles, and in five hours they fired over a million shells (some sources say more than three million). A dense fog covered the ground, and the stormtroops, who had crept up to the line in the dark, were upon them. By evening the Fifth Army's forward zone had been overrun. The British lost about 38,000 men on the first day (roughly 7,500 dead, 10,000 wounded and over 20,000 prisoners), their heaviest loss in a single day since the first day of the Somme.

Retreat and the Fifth Army

Over the next days the Germans advanced up to 40 miles, further than any army on the Western Front since 1914. The Fifth Army fell back across the old Somme battlefield and the river itself; Péronne, Bapaume, Noyon, Albert and Montdidier all fell by 27 March. The Third Army held better. Gough, with just 12 infantry divisions on the longest front, had little chance, and the blame fell on him: he was dismissed on 28 March (later historians have largely cleared him, and the official history acknowledged how well his men had fought).

Haig and the French commander Philippe Pétain met on 24 March; Pétain, fearing for Paris, talked of pulling his army back, while Haig's priority was the Channel ports: the two armies were in danger of being pulled apart, exactly the German aim. On 26 March, at midday in the town hall at Doullens, President Poincaré, Clemenceau, Haig, Pétain, Lord Milner, General Sir Henry Wilson and Foch agreed to give Foch the task of coordinating the action of the Allied armies. At Beauvais on 3 April his authority was widened to strategic direction, and that spring he took the title of commander-in-chief of the Allied armies. For the first time the Allies had something close to a unified command.

The Paris Gun and the Baron

On 23 March, at 7:18 a.m., the first shell fell on Paris from a gun more than 70 miles away. Parisians assumed that high-flying aircraft or Zeppelins were responsible. The "Paris Gun" (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geschütz), set up in the forest of Crépy-en-Laonnois, had a range of about 80 miles, and its 106-kilogram shells climbed some 26 miles into the stratosphere. On Good Friday, 29 March, one collapsed the roof of the church of Saint-Gervais and killed 91 worshippers. In all the gun killed about 250 Parisians and wounded some 620 before it fell silent in August. Militarily it was nearly irrelevant; psychologically it was a masterpiece of frightfulness.

The sky was changing too. On 1 April the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merged to form the Royal Air Force, the world's first independent air service. On 21 April, the war's most famous pilot died over the Somme. Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron," had 80 confirmed victories. He was chasing a Sopwith Camel low over the Morlancourt ridge near Vaux-sur-Somme when a single bullet struck him in the chest; he landed his Fokker triplane and died. Credit for the shot is still debated. Captain Roy Brown of 209 Squadron was officially credited, but most modern analysts think the fatal bullet came from the ground, probably from Australian machine gunners.

Ludendorff called off Michael on 5 April. His storm troops had taken a huge amount of ground, but not Amiens, not the railway junction at Arras, and above all not the British army. Michael cost the Germans about 239,000 casualties, many of them among the irreplaceable stormtroops, against about 255,000 for the Allies.

Ludendorff reacted to the failure of Michael as he did throughout 1918: by attacking somewhere else. On 9 April he struck the British again in Flanders, along the Lys river, in Operation Georgette. The German Sixth Army hit British corps whose line included the 2nd Portuguese Division, which was in the middle of being relieved when the attack came. The Portuguese lost roughly 7,000 men in a few hours, most of them captured; the line broke, Armentières fell on 10 April, and the British retreat gave up Messines and then, in mid-April, the whole Passchendaele salient, ground won in 1917 at a cost of some 250,000 British casualties. The Germans took Mount Kemmel on 25 April, but failed to capture the railway junction of Hazebrouck. The offensive ground to a halt by the end of April, each side having lost somewhere between 80,000 and 110,000 men (sources differ).

It was in the midst of this crisis, on 11 April, that Haig issued a special order to his army:

Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.

Sir Douglas Haig, Special Order of the Day, 11 April 1918

The words were more than rhetoric. The British Empire's reserves were so depleted that the army cut each division from 12 battalions to 9 that winter, and the government raised the conscription age to 50 (in the emergency Military Service Act of April 1918). The strains between the army and the prime minister, who was accused of having withheld troops in England, erupted in Parliament that May as the "Maurice Debate."

Blücher-Yorck: the Marne again

Ludendorff's next move was meant to be a feint. His plan, Blücher, aimed at the Chemin des Dames ridge, which was held by the French Sixth Army and, on its right, by four worn-out British divisions of IX Corps, sent there to rest. The idea was to draw French reserves away from Flanders so that he could strike the British a final time. On the French side the Sixth Army commander, General Denis Duchêne, ignored Pétain's directive for a defense in depth and crowded his divisions on the ridge, with the Aisne at their backs. At 1 a.m. on 27 May more than 4,000 guns opened fire under Bruchmüller's plan, and the infantry reached the Aisne within hours. By nightfall the Germans had advanced about 14 miles (22 kilometers), one of the greatest first-day gains of the war. Soissons fell on 29 May and the Marne was reached on 30 May; by 3 June, at their closest, the Germans were about 35 miles from Paris. More than 50,000 prisoners and 800 guns had been taken. Hundreds of thousands of Parisians took to the railways, and the government made plans to leave.

Ludendorff, to his own surprise, found himself with a success rather than a feint. He pressed on, but his new salient was a dead end. He had failed to take Reims, whose railways would have fed it, and the supplies had to come over damaged roads; and when the Germans tried to push their advantage with Operation Gneisenau on 9 June (a smaller attack toward Noyon and Montdidier), French defenders, who had learned to fall back in depth, stopped it in four days. Fresh American divisions had appeared at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in the meantime (see below), and Mangin counterattacked on 11 June.

Why Germany lost the spring

Historians still debate why an offensive with so many tactical triumphs failed. Several reasons stand out.

• Tactics without strategy. Ludendorff said, in effect, that he would break a hole in the line and let strategy follow. Michael's objectives changed from day to day; he shifted the weight to the southern wing, where success came easiest, rather than to the northern, where it was most needed. Each successful blow produced a salient that could not be exploited.
• Logistics. The Germans had to cross the old Somme battlefield and the zone they had devastated themselves in 1917. They had too little motor transport and too few horses, and their advance troops often outran their food and ammunition. Some stormtroopers, according to many accounts, stopped to loot British supply dumps, stuffing themselves with food and drink they had not tasted for months.
• Attrition of the best. The storm units who led every assault suffered the heaviest losses. By mid-July the five offensives had cost Germany about 690,000 casualties; the Allies lost about 860,000, but could replace them with Americans.
• Allied adaptation. Foch's command kept the reserves moving; Pétain's defense in depth cost the Germans dearly in the end; and tanks, aircraft and fresh American divisions were arriving in numbers.
• Exhaustion. German soldiers had been promised that Michael would end the war. When it did not, and when the captured British stores showed how well the enemy still lived, morale dropped.

When Germany went over to the attack in March, the American army in France numbered about 300,000 men, only some 160,000 of them combat troops. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), was determined that they should fight as an American army, and he refused for months to let Allied commanders break them up into battalions to fill gaps in British and French divisions. The crisis changed his mind, at least partly. On 28 March, at a conference of Allied leaders at Clermont-sur-Oise, he told Foch that all American troops were at the Allies' disposal. At Abbeville on 2 May a compromise was reached under which American infantry and machine-gun units would serve with British and French divisions for the time being (Britain was to provide shipping for at least 130,000 men in May and 150,000 in June) while Pershing kept his plan for an independent army.

The flow of men was now the most important number of the war. Pershing had one million Americans in France by July, up from about half a million in May, and at the peak, ships were bringing in some 10,000 a day. By the Armistice some two million Americans had reached Europe. British shipping carried a large share. An American division was twice as big as a European one, about 28,000 men at full strength, but it lacked guns, tanks and aircraft, which came mostly from French and British factories (the Americans fought largely with French 75 mm guns, Renault tanks and SPAD fighters).

The baptism

On 28 May the 1st Division captured the village of Cantigny, about 20 miles south of Amiens, in 30 minutes, helped by French artillery, tanks and flamethrowers; it then held it against repeated counterattacks, at a cost of more than 1,600 casualties. It was a small operation, but it told the French and British that the Americans could attack and could hold. Three days later, on the Marne, machine gunners of the 3rd Division blocked the bridges at Château-Thierry, while the 2nd Division, including the 4th Marine Brigade, went into the line near Belleau Wood on the road to Paris. On 6 June the Marines attacked across a wheat field into machine-gun fire, and took more than 1,000 casualties in a single day. It took three weeks of bitter fighting, until 26 June, to clear the wood, which changed hands several times. The French renamed it the Bois de la Brigade de Marine. The Marine brigade and its Army neighbors lost thousands of men there, and the Germans learned that these inexperienced troops were fresh, aggressive and willing to attack head on.

The disease came with them. The first wave of the influenza pandemic had been recorded among American recruits at Camp Funston, Kansas, in March (the true origin of the disease is still debated); it crossed the Atlantic on the troopships and was in Allied and German lines by May and June. This "three-day fever" was mild at first, and since neutral Spain's press reported it freely (the Spanish king himself fell ill), it got the name "Spanish flu."

The last German offensive: 15 July

Ludendorff now prepared a last blow, Operation Marneschutz-Reims, which he called the "Friedensturm" ("Peace Offensive"). On 15 July three German armies were to attack on both sides of Reims, the Seventh crossing the Marne to the west of it. This was the final test. But French intelligence had learned the day and hour from prisoners, and General Henri Gouraud's Fourth Army, east of Reims, had been ordered to abandon its forward trenches and fight a defense in depth. Gouraud's guns opened fire shortly before midnight, catching the German assault troops in their assembly areas. When the German bombardment began at ten past midnight it fell largely on empty forward positions, and the infantry who advanced at dawn found the main French line intact; the offensive east of Reims collapsed on the first day. West of Reims the Germans got across the Marne at several places, but the American 3rd Division's 38th Infantry held its stretch of the river so stubbornly (the regiment earned the title "Rock of the Marne") that the bridgehead remained shallow. By 17 July Ludendorff stopped the battle.

Mangin's counterstroke

On 18 July, at 4:35 a.m., General Charles Mangin's Tenth Army attacked out of the forest of Villers-Cotterêts, into the flank of the German salient. There was no preliminary bombardment. Instead, hundreds of tanks, the French 1st Moroccan Division and the American 1st and 2nd Divisions went forward behind a creeping barrage, in a morning mist after a night of thunderstorms. The Germans were completely surprised. By evening Allied guns could reach the Soissons-Château-Thierry road, the salient's main supply line. The Germans began to withdraw from the Marne pocket on 20 July. By 6 August they were back on the Vesle. That day Foch was made a Marshal of France. His summary of the situation to the Allied commanders on 24 July, at Bombon, was that the time had come to take the offensive everywhere. The war's initiative had changed hands.

The battle that began on the morning of 8 August 1918 was planned with a care that the Somme of 1916 had lacked. The British Fourth Army (General Henry Rawlinson) would attack east of Amiens with the Canadian Corps (Lieutenant-General Arthur Currie) on the right of the main thrust, the Australian Corps (Lieutenant-General John Monash) in the center, and the British III Corps on the left; on their right, 45 minutes later, would go the French First Army (General Marie-Eugène Debeney). The plan was Rawlinson's and Haig's, and the preparations were an exercise in secrecy. The Canadians, who had been in the line near Arras, were moved south only in the last days, in the night. A few Canadian wireless units and two battalions were sent to Flanders to deceive German eavesdroppers into believing they were still in the north. Guns were not registered but ranged by calculation, as the Germans did, so there was no warning.

Zero hour was 4:20 a.m. A mist rose from the Somme and the Luce, and it was thick enough that the infantry could not see their own officers. Behind a creeping barrage from some 2,000 guns, nearly 600 tanks of all types (Mark Vs, Whippets and supply tanks) rolled forward, with aircraft overhead, the Canadians on the right advanced about eight miles, the Australians about seven, and the French about five. The attackers took more than 15,000 prisoners and hundreds of guns in a single day for about 12,000 casualties of their own. Armored cars ranged behind the German lines, shooting up transport columns and a corps headquarters. Whippet tanks, designed to act like cavalry, ran loose across open country.

What made the difference

The Amiens plan was a model of the mature British "all-arms" battle. Its elements were: precision artillery (counter-battery fire from the first minute against German guns located by flash-spotting and sound-ranging, not by firing for days beforehand); a creeping barrage that fell just ahead of the infantry; tanks to crush the wire and the machine-gun nests; aircraft to bomb bridges and strafe retreating columns; infantry organized in sections with their own Lewis guns, rifle grenades and trench mortars; and a line of supply that went forward on schedule. Monash had previewed it on 4 July at Hamel, where the Australian Corps took a village and a ridge in 93 minutes with tanks and a few American companies. At Amiens, the method was applied at scale. The learning curve that historians describe from 1916 to 1918 had reached its summit.

August 8th was the black day of the German Army in the history of this war.

Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories, on the Battle of Amiens

Ludendorff's phrase referred to more than territory. German units had surrendered in large bodies, and as fresh divisions marched up, retreating men shouted at them that they were strike-breakers and prolongers of the war. The high command had to recognize that the army's will to fight was cracking. At a council at Spa on 14 August Hindenburg and Ludendorff conceded that the war could no longer be won by offensive means, but hoped that a stubborn defense on French soil would wear the Allies down and bring a negotiated peace.

The art of stopping

The most important decision came after the battle. On 10 and 11 August, as the attack bogged down in the old battlefield of 1916, with the German defenders reinforced and the tanks wrecked, Rawlinson and Currie wanted to stop, and Foch wanted to push on. Haig sided with the generals on the spot: he ended the attack at Amiens and shifted the weight to the north, where on 21 August the Third Army struck at Albert. This policy of attacking a new sector as soon as a first blow lost its force kept the Germans off balance and denied them the chance to dig in. Foch's directive, repeated again and again, was to attack everywhere at once, with the whole of the Allied forces in a series of converging blows.

The Hundred Days, from 8 August to 11 November, were the most successful continuous campaign the British Army has ever fought, and also one of its bloodiest: estimates of its toll for the British Empire run from over 300,000 to about 412,000 casualties, a loss comparable to the Somme. In that time the British armies took 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns, according to Haig's final dispatch, while the French, Americans and Belgians took tens of thousands more. Many German divisions were by now reduced to a fraction of their strength.

After Amiens came a rolling series of attacks: the Third Army at Albert (21 August); the Battle of Bapaume; the Second Battle of Arras (26 August to 3 September), where the Canadians broke the Drocourt-Quéant Line on 2 September; and the Australian capture of Mont Saint-Quentin and Péronne on 31 August and 1 September, often reckoned the finest feat of the Australian Corps. By mid-September the Germans were back on the Hindenburg Line, the great system of fortifications they had built in the winter of 1916–17 (Siegfriedstellung) and retreated to in March 1917. Foch now ordered a "general offensive" for the last week of September: the Americans and the French toward Mézières on 26 September in the Meuse-Argonne; the British First and Third Armies against Cambrai on 27 September; the Belgians, British Second Army and French in Flanders on 28 September; and on 29 September the Fourth Army, with Australians and Americans, against the strongest part of the Hindenburg Line at the St Quentin Canal.

Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne

The first great American operation was Saint-Mihiel. This salient south of Verdun had been in German hands since September 1914. On 12 September Pershing's First Army, some 500,000 men by his own count (about 70,000 of them French; other tallies run higher), attacked it from both flanks, with about 2,900 guns, some 400 tanks (George Patton led the American tank brigade), and 1,481 aircraft under Colonel Billy Mitchell, the largest air operation of the war. The Germans had already begun withdrawing, and the salient fell in about two days, with about 15,000 prisoners and 450 guns taken, for about 7,000 casualties. Pershing wanted to continue to Metz. Foch had other plans: he wanted the Americans in the Meuse-Argonne, a larger attack, in two weeks' time. In an extraordinary logistical effort, hundreds of thousands of men and thousands of guns moved by night over a few narrow roads from one battlefield to another.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive began on 26 September in fog. It was the largest battle in American history: some 1.2 million American soldiers fought in it over 47 days. The ground was a nightmare of wooded hills, ravines and fortified positions, and the German defenders held three lines. Several of the American divisions were green. Montfaucon, the central observation hill, fell on 27 September, a day late, and the advance was soon tangled in traffic jams on a single road. A "Lost Battalion" of the 77th Division was trapped for five days in the Argonne in early October; on 8 October a patrol led by Corporal Alvin York captured 132 prisoners. In mid-October Pershing created a Second Army under Robert Bullard and gave the First to Hunter Liggett, and attacks resumed in late October. By early November the Americans were on the heights above Sedan. The battle cost the AEF 26,277 dead and 95,786 wounded, the worst losses in the army's history.

The St Quentin Canal

The assault on the Hindenburg Line on 29 September was the most formidable of all. The Germans had made the St Quentin Canal part of their defenses; in one stretch it went underground in a tunnel at Bellicourt, and the Germans had built shelters, machine-gun posts and wire along the ridge above. Rawlinson's Fourth Army attacked with the Australian Corps and the green American II Corps (27th and 30th Divisions), after days of bombardment. The Americans pushed forward without clearing the tunnels and dugouts behind them, and suffered heavy losses when German machine gunners emerged in their rear; Australian troops had to finish the work. Further south, the 46th (North Midland) Division crossed the canal at Bellenglise using lifebelts borrowed from cross-Channel steamers, and seized the Riqueval bridge before the Germans could blow it. A famous photograph taken on 2 October shows the men of the 46th Division posed on the canal bank at Riqueval. By 5 October the Allies were through the whole Hindenburg system.

From then on, there was no stopping. Cambrai fell on 9 October, Lille was liberated on 17 October, the Canadians took Valenciennes on 1 and 2 November in a careful assault that used shells to spare men, and the British crossed the Sambre-Oise Canal on 4 November (the poet Wilfred Owen was killed there). On the night of 10 November and the morning of 11 November the Canadians recaptured Mons, where the British Army had first fought in August 1914.

Germany's allies had been tied to its fate since 1914, and in the autumn of 1918 they gave way, in an order that made the German position hopeless. First was Bulgaria. Its army, which had held the Macedonian front since 1915, was exhausted: the troops were short of food and boots, their commanders could not replace the casualties, and soldiers' committees had begun to reject the war. On 14 September General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey, the French commander of the Allied armies at Salonika, began his offensive. On 15 September at Dobro Pole, a plateau high on the Nidže massif, Serbian and French troops stormed the heights in some of the most difficult terrain of the Balkan front. The Bulgarian line broke. Mutinous soldiers streamed back, and on 24 September rebels seized the army headquarters at Kyustendil; on 27 September they proclaimed a republic at Radomir. On 29 September Bulgaria signed an armistice at Salonika, effective at noon the next day. Tsar Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son Boris on 3 October. The way into Serbia was open and the rail link between Germany and Constantinople was cut.

Megiddo and Damascus

In Palestine, General Edmund Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force had spent the summer deceiving the Turks and Germans. Dummy camps, canvas horses and a fake headquarters made them believe that the main attack would come inland, in the Jordan valley, while real strength was massed on the coastal plain. On 19 September 1918 the infantry of XXI Corps broke the line near the coast in a few hours. The Desert Mounted Corps rode through the gap, 60 miles in barely a day and a half, into the plain of Esdraelon (the Megiddo of the Bible) and Nazareth, where it almost captured the German commander, Liman von Sanders. Royal Air Force bombers destroyed the Ottoman headquarters' telephone exchange at Afula, and the Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies were cut off and destroyed. Meanwhile Arab irregulars under Emir Faisal and T. E. Lawrence cut the railways around Deraa. In the 38 days of the campaign Allenby's forces took some 75,000 prisoners for fewer than 6,000 casualties. Australian Light Horsemen and Arab troops entered Damascus on 1 October; Beirut fell on 8 October and Aleppo on 26 October. In Mesopotamia, British forces defeated the Turks at Sharqat on 28–30 October.

The Ottoman government sued for peace. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, commander of the British Mediterranean fleet, received the Ottoman delegate Rauf Bey aboard the battleship HMS Agamemnon at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. The armistice was signed on 30 October and took effect at noon on 31 October: the Straits were to be opened, the army demobilized, garrisons throughout the empire surrendered, and the Allies were given the right to occupy "any strategic points" in the event of disorder. The Young Turk leaders Enver, Talaat and Cemal fled on a German vessel on 2 November.

Vittorio Veneto and the end of Austria-Hungary

The Habsburg monarchy dissolved from within before it was beaten in the field. On 16 October Emperor Charles issued a manifesto promising to federalize the empire, which was too late to hold it together. On 28 October a national committee in Prague declared Czechoslovak independence; on 29 October the South Slav lands declared themselves the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; on 31 October, in a revolution in Budapest, the Hungarian government of Count Mihály Károlyi recalled the Hungarian divisions from the front, and the former prime minister István Tisza was murdered.

Into this chaos the Italian army sent its final offensive. The Italian commander, General Armando Diaz, was cautious, but under pressure from Orlando and the Allies to act before the war ended, he ordered an attack across the Piave on 24 October, the first anniversary of Caporetto. He had 57 divisions in all, among them three British, two French and a Czechoslovak division, plus an American regiment, against some 52 to 63 Austro-Hungarian divisions, depending on the count. The river was in flood, and the first crossings were delayed; the Austrians resisted for three days. Then they began to fall apart. Whole units, Hungarians, Croats and Czechs, simply marched for home. By 30 October the Italians had broken through to Vittorio Veneto. The Austro-Hungarian command asked for an armistice; the Armistice of Villa Giusti, near Padua, was signed on 3 November and took effect at 3 p.m. on 4 November. In the 24 hours between signature and entry into force the Italians kept advancing and the prisoners kept coming in. Diaz's victory bulletin of 4 November claimed about 300,000 prisoners and 5,000 guns for the whole offensive, and later Italian counts run above 400,000; how many were taken after the signature is uncertain. Trento and Trieste were occupied on 3 November. Germany stood alone.

On 28 September 1918 Erich Ludendorff, whose will had driven the German war effort since 1916, had what his staff described as a nervous collapse. News from Bulgaria had arrived, and the Hindenburg Line was under attack. The next day, 29 September, at the headquarters in Spa, Ludendorff and Hindenburg told the Kaiser and the foreign secretary, Paul von Hintze, that the army could not be certain of holding out for more than a short time, and that an armistice request must go to President Wilson at once. Ludendorff also demanded that the government be put on a parliamentary basis, so that the Reichstag parties, not the army, would bear the responsibility for asking for peace. On 1 October he is reported to have told his staff that the politicians who were to take over should now "eat the soup" they had cooked for the army, an attitude that was a seed of the stab-in-the-back myth (see chapter VIII).

The Reichstag and the public had been told for months that the army was winning. On 3 October Prince Max of Baden, a liberal aristocrat and heir to the Grand Duchy, became chancellor with a cabinet that included the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann. Under pressure from Hindenburg, who demanded an immediate offer, Max's government sent a note on 4 October to Wilson. The exchange of notes that followed was brutal. Wilson demanded that Germany evacuate occupied territory (8 October), stop sinking passenger ships and devastating land during its retreat (14 October), and in a third note on 23 October made it clear that he would deal only with a Germany with a representative government: if the Allies had to deal with "the military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany," they must demand not negotiations but surrender. On 24 October Ludendorff, who had recovered his nerve, wanted to fight on. The Kaiser dismissed him on 26 October. His successor was General Wilhelm Groener. On 28 October the Reichstag changed the constitution so that the chancellor was answerable to it; Germany became a parliamentary monarchy overnight.

Hunger

Behind everything was hunger. The British blockade, maintained since 1914, had cut Germany's imports of fertilizer and food. The harvest of 1916 had failed, and the "turnip winter" of 1916–17 had made the turnip the staple of the German diet. The ration of bread, potatoes and fat shrank; women queued for hours; the black market grew. Official German estimates counted 763,000 civilian deaths from malnutrition through the war, while later statisticians suggested a figure of about 424,000 excess deaths; both are disputed. The strikes of January 1918 had shown that the home front could stop work, and the autumn influenza ran through weakened bodies.

Kiel

The spark came from the navy. On 24 October the Admiralty staff, led by Admirals Scheer and Hipper, ordered the High Seas Fleet to sail from Wilhelmshaven for a last battle with the Royal Navy, without informing the government. The sailors, who suspected that the fleet was to be sacrificed in a "death ride" to save the officers' honor, refused. On 29 and 30 October stokers on several ships put out the fires; on 3 November in Kiel a demonstration for the release of arrested sailors was fired on, and some demonstrators died. The next day sailors, soldiers and dockworkers had seized the port and formed a council. Berlin sent a Social Democrat deputy, Gustav Noske, who was elected governor of Kiel on 5 November. The movement spread by rail to Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and the Rhineland. In Munich on 7 November Kurt Eisner proclaimed a Bavarian republic, and King Ludwig III fled.

9 November

By 8 November councils of workers and soldiers had taken power in most large German cities. In Berlin the Social Democrats, who feared to be overtaken by the radical left, demanded the Kaiser's abdication. Wilhelm II, at Spa, hesitated, thinking of marching the army home to restore order; but Groener told him that the army would march home in good order under its commanders, "but not under the command of Your Majesty." At around noon on 9 November Prince Max, with the capital on strike, announced that the Kaiser had abdicated, before Wilhelm had agreed to it, and handed the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democrats. Around two in the afternoon, Scheidemann, learning that Karl Liebknecht was about to proclaim a socialist republic from the balcony of the Berlin Palace, stepped to a window of the Reichstag and told the crowd below that the monarchy was gone.

The old and the rotten, the monarchy, has collapsed. Long live the new. Long live the German Republic!

Philipp Scheidemann, Reichstag balcony, Berlin, 9 November 1918 (translated)

Two hours later Liebknecht proclaimed his "free socialist republic." That evening and the next day Wilhelm II, advised by Hindenburg that the army would no longer follow him, took a train to the Dutch border and crossed at Eijsden on 10 November; he was taken to Amerongen castle, where he signed a formal abdication on 28 November. On the evening of 10 November, Ebert and Groener agreed by telephone that the army would support the new government against Bolshevism, a bargain with long consequences.

The German delegation crossed the lines on 7 November with a white flag and a bugler, in a convoy of cars, and was taken through the devastated country of northern France to the Forest of Compiègne. At a siding near Rethondes, in the middle of a clearing, Marshal Foch's railway train, with his headquarters carriage and a Wagons-Lits dining car, stood waiting. The Germans were led by Matthias Erzberger, a Centre Party politician, with Count Alfred von Oberndorff of the foreign ministry, Major General Detlof von Winterfeldt and Captain Ernst Vanselow of the navy; the delegation was led by a civilian politician, which the Allies noticed, since it left the army's leaders free to claim afterward that the politicians had surrendered. The Allied side was Foch, with his chief of staff General Maxime Weygand, and the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss.

The meeting began at about 9 a.m. on 8 November. Foch asked the Germans what they wanted. Erzberger said they had come to hear the Allies' terms for an armistice. Foch replied that he had no proposals to make; the Germans had to ask. They asked. Weygand then read the terms, and the Germans were given 72 hours to reply. They could not negotiate, only protest. News of the Kaiser's abdication and the German revolution reached them on 9 November, and the next day Berlin sent word that Erzberger must sign whatever the terms. There was some haggling over details in the night of 10 and 11 November, and a few clauses were softened (the number of machine guns, for example, was reduced). The text was signed at about 5 a.m. on 11 November, and the hostilities were to cease six hours later, at 11 a.m. Paris time.

The terms

• Cessation of hostilities on land and in the air at 11 a.m.
• Evacuation within 15 days of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, and within 31 days of the left bank of the Rhine, with Allied occupation of the bridgeheads of Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne to a radius of 30 kilometers on the right bank.
• Surrender of 5,000 guns, 25,000 machine guns, 3,000 mortars, 1,700 aircraft, 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 railway wagons and 5,000 lorries.
• Surrender of all U-boats within 14 days; internment of most of the High Seas Fleet in Allied or neutral ports.
• Annulment of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, and withdrawal of German troops from the former Russian territories.
• Release of Allied prisoners without reciprocity; reparation for damage; return of gold; and continuation of the Allied blockade until the peace.
• A term of 36 days, to be extended by agreement (it was extended three times).

The last day

11 November was a Monday, and the fighting went on in earnest until the last minutes. Allied commanders had been told in the early morning that the Armistice was signed, but many units attacked until 11 a.m. to gain ground or to cross rivers, and the artillery fired off its remaining shells. By one count, the last day cost about 11,000 casualties on all sides, among them 2,738 dead. Among them were these:

• Private Augustin Trébuchon, a French soldier of the 415th Infantry Regiment, was killed at about 10:45 a.m. near Vrigne-Meuse, in the Ardennes, while carrying the message that soup would be served after the cease-fire.
• Private George Ellison, a 40-year-old British soldier of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, was shot at about 9:30 a.m. north of Mons. He is buried in St Symphorien cemetery, a few yards from the grave of John Parr, the first British soldier killed in the war in August 1914.
• Private George Price of the Canadian 28th Battalion was shot at Ville-sur-Haine at 10:58 a.m., two minutes before the end, and is often named as the last Commonwealth soldier killed.
• Private Henry Gunther, a 23-year-old American from Baltimore serving in the 313th Infantry, was shot dead at 10:59 a.m., a minute before the Armistice, while charging a German roadblock near Ville-devant-Chaumont; the Germans, who knew the war was ending, reportedly waved him away.

At 11 a.m. the guns stopped. Soldiers in some places cheered. In many others there was an eerie silence, and then a wave of exhaustion. In London, Paris and New York (where a false report of the Armistice four days earlier had caused premature celebrations) crowds filled the streets. In Berlin, the news was received with a heavy calm: the war had ended, but the revolution and the hunger had not. Everywhere the second and deadliest wave of the influenza pandemic was reaching its peak. In the United States alone, about 195,000 people died of it in October 1918. Armistice crowds in several cities helped feed the contagion.