A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (104 page)

Hamel has been called the first truly modern battle. It became the model for later British operations; a brochure describing Monash’s tactics was distributed to every officer in the BEF. It set the stage for the Anzacs, often operating jointly with the Canadians, to serve as Britain’s shock troops for much of the rest of the war.

Eleven days after Hamel—one wonders how such things continued to be possible—forty-nine divisions of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group made yet another attack on Reims. It was intended as the climax of Ludendorff’s Chemin des Dames operation. It was to open a second rail line into the Marne salient and prepare the way for the long-awaited push in Flanders, which was to follow in just five days. But again things did not go according to plan. Pétain, with patient argument, had won the commander of the French Fourth Army over to his way of thinking, so that an effective system of defense in depth was put in place east of Reims. The result validated Pétain’s ideas: the German attack on that side of the city got nowhere. On the west side, where the Foch school still prevailed, the Germans achieved a quick and deep penetration in spite of a total lack of surprise. By the second day, it was clear that the German failure east of the city had left the advancing troops to the west dangerously exposed. Ludendorff called the attack off. He left to meet with Crown Prince Rupprecht at Tournai in the north. It was time to finalize preparations for Flanders. Bruchmüller’s guns were already heading there on trains.

After four months of struggle and sacrifice, the German situation in Flanders was not remotely as good as Ludendorff had hoped to make it. Haig had greatly improved his defenses—his hundred thousand laborers were fully employed at last, building new fortifications and laying out miles of wire—and powerful reserves remained nearby, thanks to Foch’s refusal to release them for the Marne. But Flanders was the last card left to Ludendorff, and he was determined to play it. He and the Bavarian crown prince were deep into their discussion when shocking news arrived. The Germans south and west of Soissons had been hit by a massive French offensive and were in retreat.

This was another of Mangin’s surprises, and again it had come out of the forest west of the Chemin des Dames. Twenty-three divisions, four of them American, had followed five hundred tanks in an eastward attack aimed at recapturing Soissons and sealing off the salient. By nine-thirty
A.M.,
with Ludendorff speeding south by train, the Americans and French had overrun three German lines. The American First and Second Divisions were at the center of the attacking force, and the fighting was ferocious. “Machine guns raved everywhere; there was a crackling din of rifles, and the coughing roar of hand grenades,” one soldier would recall. “Company and platoon commanders lost control—their men were committed to the fight—and so thick was the going that anything like formation was impossible. It was every man for himself, an irregular, broken line, clawing through the tangles, climbing over fallen trees, plunging heavily into Boche rifle pits. Here and there a well-fought Maxim gun held its front until somebody—officer, non-com, or private—got a few men together and, crawling to left or right, gained a flank and silenced it. And some guns were silenced by blind, furious rushes that left a trail of writhing khaki figures, but always carried two or three frenzied Marines with bayonets into the emplacement; from whence would come shooting and screaming and other clotted unpleasant sounds, and then silence.”

Eventually arriving German reserves stopped the advance, and field artillery firing at point-blank range destroyed most of Mangin’s tanks. By day’s end the Germans had managed to cobble together a defensive line some five miles back from where they had started, but fifteen thousand of them had been taken prisoner, and they had lost four hundred guns. They had stopped Mangin short of Soissons, but he continued to pose a mortal threat. With all hope of taking Reims gone and Soissons in increasing danger, the Marne salient had become untenable. Ludendorff was left with no choice but to postpone Flanders indefinitely.

He dispatched an army to the defense of Soissons. Late in the day he met with Kaiser Wilhelm and told him that, as in 1914, it was necessary to withdraw from the Marne. Preparations began for getting the troops and as many guns and supplies as possible—much would have to be left behind—out of the salient and up through Soissons to safety.

The balance of power had shifted. In March the Germans had had three hundred thousand more troops than the Allies, but between the start of Michael and the end of July more than a million of those troops, a large proportion of them the prime young men trained as storm troops, had been killed, wounded, or captured. The British and French lost half a million men each, and the French, like the Germans, had almost no replacements. But the Americans were continuing to arrive in France at a rate of more than a quarter of a million a month, and they were going into action. Now the Allies had two hundred thousand more troops than the Germans, and the difference was widening daily. Though the Allies still had fewer divisions, that statistic has little meaning. The German divisions were ravaged. More than a hundred were classified as unfit for use on the offensive.

All the force that Ludendorff had expended in driving his troops south to the Marne had gone for nothing. The men who had fought their way across the Marne were being destroyed at a horrendous rate by the Allied armies now opposing them, and the only remaining question was whether they could be got back out of the salient before their escape was cut off. “Midnight,” a German soldier remembered of the start of the withdrawal. “Time to leave, to escape the annihilating fire at daybreak. The Sixth Company remains behind to cover the retreat. The first group starts off, ten minutes later the second, and then after a few rifle salvoes the rest. We leave the ruined glade, climbing over the numerous shell holes in the underbrush. Here and there rises a sandy mound in which a rifle is stuck, a steel helmet over its butt. There they lie buried, those who would never come back from the battle of the Marne…Along the road back to Romigny the column passes rattling artillery, the riders in the blowing rain bent over in their saddles, the cannoneers hanging on the limbers of the guns. Between slouch the dispersed fragments of infantry, the remnants of companies, guns slung round necks, tarpaulins over heads against the rain, the knapsacks underneath bulging with the effect of a line of comic hunchbacks…The long lines of infantry file in the gray morning out of the woods, over the open field, without haste…Behind us thunder the engineers’ demolitions. The engineers soon come running down the slope, followed by the infantry rearguard…Only our dead remain behind.”

The great Flanders offensive that was supposed to be the point of everything the Germans had done was overdue and unlikely ever to take place. Ludendorff himself was in obvious torment—self-isolated, distracted, easily enraged, on the edge of collapse. 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.

The fighting was not only bloody and continuous but extended over huge sections of front. Allied troops, at Foch’s prodding, were attacking all around the edges of the Marne salient, which shrank rapidly as the Germans hurried to extricate themselves from it. On July 24 Foch, Haig, Pershing, and Pétain met and agreed, with some difficulty, on a coordinated series of major offensives. Haig was to attack eastward out of Amiens (Monash’s success at Hamel had made this possible), Pétain northward across the Marne. Pershing, who was demanding the return to his sector of the divisions that had been scattered to help deal with the German offensives, would advance on the old St. Mihiel salient south of Verdun. The objective in each case was to capture rail lines that were essential to the Germans and that, if taken, would tremendously improve the Allies’ ability to move their troops and supplies. The fact that the Allies were able to make plans on such a tremendous scale demonstrates the extent to which they now had the initiative, while Ludendorff could only react.

Nevertheless, the next day Ludendorff made a final, desperate effort to encircle Reims. It was another complete failure; his armies no longer had real offensive punch. The retreat back toward Soissons proceeded in orderly fashion in spite of continuous attacks from three directions; it was punctuated with counterattacks that kept the Allies from getting too close. When Pétain attacked along the Marne, his troops made little headway against a thin but tenacious rear guard. His attack drew in additional German troops, however, thereby preparing the way for the next French blow. It came on August 1, when Mangin advanced from the west in a renewed attempt to take Soissons. It was a near-triumph. Mangin’s combined French-American force pushed the Germans back five miles in a day and captured the high ground south of the Vesle, from which they could train their guns on Soissons. By the tiniest of margins, however, the attack had come too late. The Germans slipped safely out of the salient and took up new positions north of its mouth. They gave up Soissons, and the French moved in behind them, with scarcely a shot being fired.

It had all been weirdly like 1914. Once again the Germans had reached and crossed the Marne, had been unable to sustain their advance, and had recovered their footing along the Aisne after a hurried withdrawal. But the German army of August 1918 was not what it had been in September 1914. It faced bigger and stronger enemies, and it had fewer resources with which to establish a defensive line. Ludendorff, strangely, could not accept or perhaps even see this. As late as August 2, in a communication to his army commanders, he spoke of an imminent return to the offensive. Nothing of the kind was even remotely possible.

Reality came crashing in on August 8, remembered ever since by the name Ludendorff conferred upon it: the Black Day of the German Army. It arrived in the form of the British attack east of Amiens. This too was planned, organized, and executed by Monash, whose corps had become part of a new army created to replace Gough’s broken Fifth. The attack had been put together hurriedly in order to deny the Germans any opportunity to regroup after their race back from the Marne, but it proceeded flawlessly. With six hundred tanks and Monash’s Anzac troops in the lead, it took the Germans by surprise and scattered them in all directions. Their organization collapsed as completely as their morale. The Anzacs advanced six miles by ten-thirty
A.M.,
nine miles by noon. What was new and shocking was the refusal of the German troops to respond to orders, even to attempt to stop and fight. Reinforcements coming up from the rear were taunted as “scabs” and “strikebreakers.” The Germans lost more than six hundred and fifty officers and twenty-six thousand troops that day. Two-thirds of them surrendered. They did so willingly, eagerly, often in large and well-armed groups.

Almost as surprising as the Germans’ initial disintegration was Marwitz’s success in bringing the situation under control. He sealed the hole in his line with reserves and organized a counterattack that shrank the British gain to a few miles. Not all his troops were out of fight, obviously, and those willing to continue were learning that the Allied tanks were not invincible. Many tanks would break down after an hour or two in action. Others overturned or became stuck in muddy, shell-pocked terrain, and the rest could be perforated by heavy machine guns or blown apart with field artillery. The Germans were also helped by the British and French infantry’s lack of experience on the offensive. As black as August 8 may have been for the Germans, as clearly as it showed the extent of their decline, it showed too that finishing them was likely to be a slow and costly process.

August was a hard and bitter month across Europe. On the Western Front the initiative lay entirely with the Allies. With Foch in command, the British, French, and Americans were constantly either attacking or preparing to do so. The Germans recovered their cohesion and defended effectively under conditions that Ludendorff was making unnecessarily difficult. Though his own staff and the army group commanders begged him to order a pullback to the Hindenburg Line and other redoubts left behind by his offensives, he refused to do so, perhaps finding it impossible to acknowledge that his gains were worth nothing and in fact were barely defensible. The weakness of the positions he was requiring his divisions to hold was increasing their losses and making things easier for the enemy.

At meetings of the German leadership, it came to be generally acknowledged, even by Ludendorff, that military victory was now out of the question. Somehow, however, no one did anything to try to get negotiations started. At one point Kaiser Wilhelm instructed Foreign Minister Kühlmann to approach the Queen of the Netherlands about acting as an intermediary, but Kühlmann did nothing to follow up. He and the others clung to the hope that, by restabilizing the front and returning it to stalemate, Germany would be able to initiate peace talks from a position of strength. It was a vacuous hope. The troops were in such a sorry state, many of them rebellious and undependable, that Ludendorff had ordered deserters to be summarily executed and whatever property they possessed confiscated by the state. This was another sign of desperation: throughout the war, up to this point, the German army had been far more restrained than either the British or the French in its use of the death penalty for cowardice and desertion.

The Western Front was far from Germany’s only problem. If any embers of life and force had continued to glow inside Austria-Hungary, they were extinguished in mid-June in an offensive out of the Tyrolean Alps. The architect of this final disaster was, inevitably, Conrad von Hötzendorf, long since replaced as Vienna’s chief of staff but now in a field command. In May he had bullied the young and thoroughly demoralized Emperor Karl into approving his scheme. Actually, the emperor did worse than simply allow Conrad to proceed—he suggested expanding the offensive into a two-pronged affair, making it doubly certain that at no point would the Austrians have enough strength to succeed. Originally planned for May 28, the operation was delayed by problems with Austria’s barely functional transport and supply systems. When they finally attacked on June 15, the Austrians managed to push the Italians back and cross the River Piave. This gave Ludendorff a moment of hope that, with continued progress, they might cause a diversion of American troops to Italy. But then the Austrians ran into a British-French rear guard and were abruptly brought to a stop. On the second day they were driven back to their starting line with a loss of forty-six thousand men. By June 25 their losses were ruinous: one hundred and forty-two thousand men, of whom eleven thousand had been killed and tens of thousands had surrendered. Those not yet dead, wounded, captured, or absent without leave found themselves without food or ammunition.