My E-Pal and dear friend Dr. Yale Kramer is a psychotherapist, author and historian. This is an excellent essay…. no url…rsk
Who owns history?
Some would say those who win the struggle, others would say whoever claims it. The trouble with history is human nature. Even the best history cannot escape its powerful gravitational pull–the human nature of its principal actors, its writers, and its readers. If one doubts this, there is no better example than the history of the last several months of the Great War–from March 1918, to November.
We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice between the Allied Powers and Germany at five a.m. on the morning of November 11, 1918 in the iconic railway car as it stood in the chilly darkness of the forest of Compiègne. It may be illuminating to review from today’s perspective the rapidly fading but dramatic and highly important events leading to that morning.
The United States Congress declared war on the Central Powers on April 6, 1917, after the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February and went on to sink seven American ships. At the time our army was pathetically undermanned, consisting of around a hundred thousand men and ranked 16th or 17th in the world. But by the summer of 1918 four million American soldiers were in training and on their way to the Western Front. However, they were not yet ready to meet the onslaught of what the German High Command believed would be their tie-breaking offensive, finally forcing the Allies to beg for a negotiated peace.
On the whole, the military situation of the Central Powers at the beginning of 1918 was not at all bad. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks they had forced the Imperial Russian Army out of the war, had easily conquered and occupied thousands of square miles of Russian territory, and forced the Bolsheviks to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, ending the war on the Eastern front for the Germans and thus releasing thousands of men to fight the Allies on the still stalemated Western Front. From their point of view the Germans had at least won half of the war.
By the Spring of 1918 the military dictators of the Central Powers, Generals Paul von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorff, were planning their final throw of the strategic dice–a monumental offensive using all of their manpower, even to their last reserves–to bring the Allies to the bargaining table. With their new infusion of first-rate troops from the Eastern Front they believed that they would have numerical superiority in the struggle.
Ludendorff conceived of the crucial new offensive based on his successful victory over the various Russian armies during the previous year–powerful and violent forward thrusts akin to the German Blitzkrieg of the early months of World War II. Beginning on March 21, 1918, the field commanders were ordered to push forward and keep moving no matter what; if they encountered resistance, to make an end-run around it and push forward.
The Germans understood the key to winning the battle was tempo. It meant beating the Allies quickly before the Americans could arrive in force. And for the first days of the powerful offensive things went well for the Germans. They stormed forward relentlessly and drove the British back with such force that by April 5 the Germans had advanced twenty miles along a fifty-mile front and stood within a few miles of Amiens, defended only by a group of makeshift units.
But in war things can change in the blink of an eye and several things took place within the German high command as well as on the field. First of all, as John Keegan, the British historian notes, “The accidents of military geography also began to work to the Germans’ disadvantage. The nearer they approached Amiens, the more deeply did they become entangled in the obstacles of the old Somme battlefield, a wilderness of abandoned trenches, broken roads, and shell-crater fields left behind by the movement of the front a year earlier.”
In addition, the men of the German army began to discover the niceties of the British rear areas, “…stuffed with the luxuries enjoyed by the army of a nation which had escaped the years of naval blockade that in Germany had made the simplest necessities of life rare and expensive commodities, time and again tempted the advancing German troops to stop, plunder and satiate themselves.”
Basking in the glory of their early success, the German generals split their forces into three different spearheads without realizing that none of the prongs would be strong enough to achieve a breakthrough. And shortly afterword the Allies counter-attacked and stopped the crucial offensive dead in its tracks, leaving the most elite units of the German army in tatters–a quarter of a million men killed or wounded. The German high command had to acknowledge that their greatest hope, the war-winning Kaiser Battle, was lost. More than ninety divisions were exhausted and demoralized. “The enemy resistance was beyond our powers,” Ludendorff finally recorded in his diary.
