LECTURE 4

WHY GERMANY LOST

1. THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN AS A HIGH-RISK STRATEGY

It's possible to regard the outcome of the First World War as the result of a series of failed gambles undertaken by the Germans. Again and again, the Germans resorted to high-risk strategies because of their desperate race against time. The longer the war went on, the more advantages would accrue to a coalition of adversaries whose collective economic strength was greater than that of the Germans.

The Schlieffen Plan was the first of these high-risk strategies. The Germans gambled that they could march through Belgium without bringing Britain into the war. And of course they gambled that they could defeat the French in six weeks, before the Russians could mobilize fully. Once these bets failed, the Germans found themselves in a two-front war of attritionÜexactly the situation they had always feared. Hence their willingness to throw the dice again.

2. CHANGING THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: TOWARD TOTAL WAR

The Germans, as Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, were in the vanguard of terror. That is, they were often the first to introduce new technologies of mass destruction and to target civilians. As we have seen, their treatment of occupied Belgium was brutal: they shot considerable numbers of hostages, including octogenarians, clergymen, women, and children; they destroyed the library of Louvain (founded in 1426), with its 300,000 volumes; bombed cathedral towers; and dismantled factories. In 1915 they initiated the aerial bombardment of cities, using Zeppelins. On the battlefield, they introduced flame-throwers at Verdun and were the first to use poison gas. But Zeppelins and flame-throwers made easy targets, and since the prevailing winds in Europe blow from west to east, the gas often blew back at the Germans. And of course the enemy could defend against gas with masks. Another high-risk strategy was unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans gambled that they could knock out the British before the Americans could enter the war. On February 1, 1917, German submarines received orders to sink all merchant-men shipping on sight. The gamble failed, and submarine warfare provided President Wilson with the perfect rationale for entry into the war. (Another gamble: the Zimmerman telegram, intercepted by British codebreakers and published on March 1, which promised significant territorial gains for Mexico if that country would support the Germans. Here was another reason for the Americans to join the Western powers, in addition to the economic and ideological ones.)

3. VERDUN: THE FURNACE

On the Western Front the Germans had the high ground and their basic strategy in 1915 was defensive: let the French and British soldiers exhaust themselves in futile offensives against entrenched positions. But in the winter of 1916, the ablest of the German generals, Erich von Falkenhayn, conceived a risky plan to exacerbate the war of attrition. Verdun was an ancient French fortress, a vital gateway into central France. It had been the most imposing of the chain of fortresses constructed during the reign of Louis XIV, and it had been the last of the French fortresses to fall to the Prussians in 1870. In 1914 it had acted as the eastern pivot of the French line and had made possible General Joffre's recovery in the Battle of the Marne.

Falkenhayn's rather fiendish idea was to attack a position so dear to French pride that the French would be forced to waste hundreds of thousands of lives in order to defend it. His tactics were superior to those of his adversaries. He began by gathering his troops in underground galleries in order to foil French reconnaissance. Instead of the long, dense, vulnerable lines of an Allied attack, his infantry came forward on the first day of the offensive as powerful fighting patrols, making skillful use of the ground, probing for sectors of least resistance, using their new flame-throwers to create panic.

But this offensive too bogged down in mud; most men fell without ever having seen the enemy under the murderous, unceasing artillery bombardment that came to characterize this battle more than any other. The French re-supplied the bottle-shaped salient of Verdun along a single narrow road with a continuous truck convoy. The battle lasted for ten months as the two sides shelled, took, lost, and retook a few square miles of heavily fortified terrain. One writer (Duhamel) described "painful scenes, in obscure corners, of small compass, where you cannot possibly distinguish if the mud is flesh, or the flesh mud. To be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support." A million men were killed or wounded here: "whole regiments gambled away eternity for ten yards of wasteland" (Ivan Goll). Henri Desagneaux's description reads like a diary from hell.

The British began the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916 to take pressure off the French and because General Haig believed that with enough shells a breakthrough was possible. But a week-long artillery barrage forfeited the element of surprise. The Germans again had the high ground, with dugouts in the chalk forty feet deep. The hastily trained British troops had been taught only to go forward in a straight line and to rely on the bayonet. The artillery shells pitted the ground so thoroughly as to make an orderly advance impossible and offer fresh cover for the Germans. Here again the losses were staggering. Thirty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first thirty minutes of the battle on July 1, 1916. By the end of the day, half of the 120,000 British troops who had clambered out of their trenches lay dead or gravely woundedÜthe worst day in the history of the British army. Over the next five months, the fighting at Verdun and the Somme consumed nearly a million lives. Men perished at the rate of 277 per hourÜnearly five per minute.

4. TO THE FINLAND STATION

Another high-risk strategy was to foment rebellion or revolution behind the lines. The Germans encouraged the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916, and played on the nationalist sentiment of Russian subjects like the Poles and the Ukrainians. They also tried to encourage Muslims to revolt in India and central Asia against the British Empire. The Allies played the same game against the Ottomans, allies of the Germans in the Middle East: hence T.E. Lawrence's participation in the Arab Revolt against the Turks. Meanwhile, German projects for empire in the Middle East and Africa expanded.

The Germans had one great success: Russia. In 1917 Berlin was unwilling to offer a genuine compromise peace in the east. Instead, the Germans decided to extend the policy of internal subversion in Russia itself by encouraging and subsidizing revolutionary discontent. Hence the famous sealed train in which the German authorities returned Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, to Russia. As we'll see next week, one of the great weaknesses of the Provisional Government that took power in February 1917 was that it remained committed to the War. Lenin, meanwhile, could propagandize for peace in a desperately war-weary country.

5. THE FINAL OFFENSIVE

When the Bolsheviks seized power in October, they took Russia out of the war and signed the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia lost (temporarily) virtually all of its oil and cotton production, three quarters of its coal and iron, a third of its railways and agriculture, and a third of its population. And the Germans could now concentrate on the Western Front.

On March 21, 1918, the German army began a final offensive that brought it within fifty miles of Paris once again. But it could not capitalize on its initial gains. It ran out of reserves of manpower and materiel just as the American troops were beginning to weigh in. The Allies won the war primarily because they were able, with the help of their overseas empires and the Americans, to field their armies without starving their civilian populations.

One of the best historians of the First World War, Jay Winter (whose excellent documentary on the war we have been watching) explains the result as follows: "The paradox of World War I was that Germany fought a war to gain an empire, but needed an empire in order to win the war. In other words, the economic strength of the Allies derived from their extra-European reserves of manpower, materiel, and money. Germany and Austria lacked this second line of supply, support, and finance. The longer the war went on, the greater was the economic gap between the two sides. To try to bridge that gap, Germany launched unrestricted submarine warfare. This policy failed. In contrast, the Allied blockade of central Europe was a major source of the greater cost of war to the Central Powers. Bureaucratic inefficiency, harvest failures, labor shortages, and the Allied squeeze formed a recipe for black marketeering and inflation. While retail prices doubled in wartime Britain and France, they trebled or quadrupled in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany spent 83% of total public expenditure on military items; 2% on the civilian sector. The figures in Britain were 62% and 16%. Heavy industry boomed while ordinary people went hungry."

Over the course of the conflict, then, there was a radical shift in resources away from the civilian production in GermanyÜespecially food. A fifth of all the calories consumed in Germany before the war had come from abroad. During the war the food shortfall was worsened by a drop in domestic production approaching 50% as men entered the army and draft animals disappeared from the farms. Starvation was responsible for 250,000 deaths during the war, a thousand times greater than the number of those resulting from Allied bombing. The black market disposed of somewhere between a fifth and a third of total available food, while fat cat businessmen, war profiteers, grew fatter. Prices rose by 250%; inflation cut real wages by 40%.

6. LESSONS OF TOTAL WAR

The great military historian Michael Howard describes the lessons military planners drew from the German defeat: "The lesson seemed to be that so long as the railways kept the armies supplied, the armies could not be defeated until the nations themselves were exhausted and begging for peace. For the military, the lesson was clear. If the center of enemy power lies, not in his armed forces, but in his civilian population, then that population must be attacked directly. It must be softened and subverted by propaganda. It must be starved and enfeebled by blockade. It must be remorselessly bombed from the air. Its morale must be undermined to the point where its capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." These grim conclusions set the stage for the next great war, a war that would from the beginning target civilian populations with fearful weapons of destruction.