1918: The Year of Victories

By Martin Marix Evans

At the outset of 1918 Germany faced certain defeat as a result of Allied technical innovation in tanks and aircraft, and the American entry into the war. Victory could only be gained by the immediate application of overwhelming force in new tactical form; the 'fire-waltz' artillery barrage and the storm-trooper infantry attack.

1918 examines both the Germans' tactics and the Allies' preferred solution to fighting this war, the combination of artillery, tanks, infantry and aircraft, and argues that this reached a level of sophistication in command and control never before achieved.

The war of attrition was far from over, but as more Americans arrived in France the ghastly cost became affordable. For the Germans, it became a question of whether they could negotiate an armistice before their armies were utterly destroyed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2002
• ISBN: 9781848584259

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INTRODUCTION

THE FINAL MONTHS of the First World War were the ultimate test of two very different concepts of how the war should be fought. The Germans gambled in 1917 when they resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to impose a blockade on imports to Europe. They knew their decision was bound to bring the USA into the war, but decided that they would be able to defeat the Allies on the Western Front before significant American influence was felt. They hoped to achieve this by sophisticated use of artillery and new tactics developed for the infantry. The relevance of air power and tank warfare was not taken into account, and the expenditure of their soldiers’ lives was accepted at comparatively high levels.

The political and practical consequences of heavy casualties were clear to the Allies. Their approach to winning the war was to develop what Professor Gary Sheffield has characterised as weapon systems, the balanced combination of infantry, artillery, armoured fighting vehicles and aircraft to overcome both fixed defence line and less structured, open warfare styles of resistance.

The efforts of both sides were dogged by error, misunderstanding, uncertainty and mistrust. They were made distressingly glorious by the valour and steadfastness of the fighting men. The search by the leaders for understanding, and thus victory, was an undertaking that it is both moving and rewarding to study; even more so if it is possible to avoid hindsight and manage genuinely to recreate the point of view of those who bore the terrible responsibility of command. Much remains to be done by scholars to achieve that end. This, therefore, is an account of the start of that process.

PART ONE

LESSONS OF WAR

1

THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE

BY NOVEMBER 1917, it was clear that Germany’s chances of winning the war were becoming slimmer as time passed. If they could not defeat the Allies, or persuade one of them to make a separate peace in 1918, they would face certain defeat in 1919. The Allied blockade was preventing Germany’s sea-borne imports from being shipped in, while the Allied convoy system denied the German U-boat blockade similar success. The Americans had entered the war in April 1917, with the consequence of putting victory in the war of industrial production beyond German reach. What was more, the build-up of American forces in Europe was now becoming significant and by the end of 1918 could be foreseen as being overwhelming. Of their adversaries the Germans thought that the French were highly professional and strongly motivated while the British were stubborn and tough, but lacking in operational sophistication and flexibility. Given that the French army had mutinied that year, unknown to the Germans, and being unable to foresee the events of the coming July and August, the inaccuracy of these assessments is understandable but was to prove a fatal error.

The German experience on the Western Front had been mainly of success in defence. Only two major offensive campaigns had been attempted so far: the initial invasion of France and Belgium in 1914 and the assault on Verdun. The first outran both their command and control capability and their supply lines, a lesson that went unheeded. The second was planned as a device to tempt France into suicidal counter-attacks, but a failure by the Germans to adhere to their strategy, allowing themselves to be drawn into the attack, counter-attack, counter-to-the-counter-attack sequence that is war of attrition, led to their failure. On the Eastern Front, however, they had enjoyed success in aggression and particularly in the weeks immediately prior to their late 1917 cogitations. On 3 September they had taken the Baltic port of Riga after a stunning artillery bombardment.

THE INVENTION OF THE FIREWALTZ

The nature of artillery had been transformed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the First World War is rightly seen as a conflict in which the gunners were supreme. The experience of the South African War between the British and the Boers (1899–1902) had shown the potential of the quick-firing field gun, a gun that used shells in cartridge cases, and guns that absorbed the recoil and did not need to be re-aimed with every firing. The war between Japan and Russia (1904–5) had demonstrated that artillery was best used from a distance, delivering indirect fire, as the gunners were too vulnerable to the new invention, the machine-gun. It also showed how effective heavy guns could be in destroying fortified positions. At the start of the First World War the hardware was available in the form of guns, but the ammunition was still fairly primitive and the way in which soldiers thought the guns could be used was quite simple.

The Germans in particular had developed heavy guns for use against fortifications; they were, after all, the people who planned to strike against the Belgian and French forts in what they foresaw as the most likely war to come. They had started the war with 5,086 field guns and 2,280 howitzers and heavier guns. By 1918 the field guns had only increased in numbers to 6,764 but the heavy guns had gone up to 12,286, indicating the importance they attached to counter-battery work, shooting at the enemy guns from afar, and an outlook influenced by the experience of static warfare. Heavy guns are not easily moved and re-deployed, but if you are operating in a trench war environment, and using guns with a range of tens of miles, that is acceptable. Such guns are obviously suited to the destruction of enemy fortifications and by 1917 were used in this way by both sides. However, as the British learned to their cost before Passchendaele, the destruction is not limited to the fortifications alone; the whole environment is smashed into fragments which, mixed with rain, creates a barrier to the advance as formidable as the defence it replaces.

The object of the exercise is not mere destruction. To succeed, the enemy’s ability to resist and respond has to be neutralised. The man who transformed German artillery tactics was a reserve Lieutenant-Colonel, Georg Bruchmüller. He was born in Berlin on 11 December 1863 and served as a gunner both in heavy fortress artillery units, and as an instructor until he was invalided out of the army in 1913. When war broke out he was recalled to active duty on the Eastern Front and proved himself so effective that he was awarded the Blue Max, the Pour le Merite, the highest Prussian decoration, in May 1917. The key to this success was his recognition of the importance of neutralisation and the fact that it could be achieved more quickly and economically with what became known as the Feuerwalze, the Firewaltz. The name came from the orchestration of a number of elements in a sequence in time. Its objective was to break enemy morale, pin him in position and open the way to overcoming him with a massive assault.

To do this, Bruchmüller planned his bombardments with great precision. He used a mix of shells – gas of various types, high explosive and shrapnel. Fire was brought down at different times on different, precisely-defined targets. Instead of the days of shelling that preceded attacks in 1916 and 1917, he needed only hours. In its most simple form the bombardment went through three phases: first, a short attack on the enemy’s command quarters and communications systems; second, fire on their artillery positions and, third, shelling of the infantry defences.

Bruchmüller organised his artillery into groupings with specific tasks to perform. The AKA (Artillerie-Kampf-Artillerie) was charged with the destruction of enemy artillery and used field guns because of their high rates of fire and the availability of ammunition in great quantity. The IKA (Infanterie-Kampf-Artillerie) was principally concerned with action against enemy infantry and were under the command of divisions. At corps level were the AKA and the long-range artillery, FEKA (Fern-Kampf-Artillerie), responsible for the attacks on deep-battle targets such as reserves. Finally, at field army level, were the heavy artillery groups known as SCHWEFLA (Schwere Flachbahn), heavy flat-trajectory, with responsibility for the destruction of major installations such as concrete shelters and railway bridges. Each of these might be required to act alone on in concert with another.

The selection of the appropriate gas or mix of gasses for a particular purpose was another of Bruchmüller’s specialities. Mustard gas immobilises by causing blisters on skin and in the lungs and is long lasting, so was useful for shielding the flanks of an operation and for putting enemy gunners out of action. Gas-masks were proof against poison gas such as chlorine, but not against the non-lethal arsine which made the victim vomit. A mix of these therefore worked very well, the latter forcing the removal of the gas-mask in order to expose the target to the former and kill him. Arsine shells were marked with a blue cross, chlorine with green and the cocktail was called Buntkreuz, multi-coloured. The cold-blooded horror of the technique was not a characteristic of the Germans alone; this was becoming a highly technical war on all sides.

The final contribution to the effectiveness of Bruchmüller’s bombardments was the element of surprise. In order to overcome the vagaries of weapon performance and atmospheric conditions it had been the custom to carry out test-firings. A shot would be directed at a target, the extent to which it missed taken into account, adjustments made and another one tried. Eventually the adjustments needed for the given gun, its ammunition, the wind and the weather would be determined and the process called registration would be complete. By this time the people on the receiving end would be well aware of what was going on. The problem was, of course, shared by the Allies and both sides devised methods of overcoming it. Captain Erich Pulkowski produced the German solution which involved test firing each gun at a location removed from the combat zone and establishing its performance as an individual weapon in a range of atmospheric conditions. It could then be fired on a target identified by map reference alone.

The effectiveness of Bruchmüller’s methods was demonstrated at Riga in September 1917, and the colonel was moved to the Western Front in 1918 to organise the artillery for the German offensives.

THE INFANTRY

The German tank, the A7V as it was designated after the department responsible for its development, was a failure both in its performance and in the trivial number built. The tactical concepts that were to inform infantry training excluded the tank and the aircraft as well. While aircraft, reconnaissance, fighter and bomber, were significant, the possibility of domination of a land battle by command of the air was an idea that far outran the technical development of the flying machines of the time. Close support by Schlachtstaffeln, battle squadrons, was a requirement of the tactical plan, and no doubt seemed impressive at the time, but was not sufficiently formidable to make a great difference. The achievements of the German army in the forthcoming attacks were thus to depend on the abilities of the gunners and foot-soldiers alone.

In January 1918 General Erich Ludendorff had published The Attack in Positional Warfare, the work of Captain Hermann Geyer, which was the blueprint for the training of troops in readiness for the battles of that year. The German battalion, of which there were three to a regiment, consisted of four rifle companies with five light machine-guns and two mortars, a machine-gun company with twelve Maxims and a mortar platoon with four Minenwerfer. The tactics for Ludendorff’s offensive grew out of this. Special training was to be given to all infantrymen to turn them into Stosstruppen, shock-troops, whose task was to punch a hole in the adversary’s line and push on through, leaving it to following troops to clean up strongpoints by-passed by the initial attackers. The approach derived to an extent from the failure of German pillboxes and barbed wire to prevent British advances at Ypres in August and September of 1917, before the weather turned the field to a mud-bath. The shock-troops would be accompanied by a creeping barrage rather than following one, and would depend on grenades and light machine-guns, the new Bergmanns where available. Flares would be used to request a speeding-up of the barrage’s progress and bugle calls would provide communication at the early stage, before telephone lines could be deployed.

The reduction of the strongpoints by the next wave was made possible by bringing forward man-hauled trench mortars, Minenwerfer, and field artillery with four horse-drawn guns to each regiment. By this means the Germans intended to breach the Allied line. Ludendorff was not inclined to worry much about what would happen next. He pointed out that they had broken through at Riga and all had followed from that satisfactorily and the October smashing of the Italian line at Caporetto using similar tactics in a more primitive form reinforced his confidence.

In a memorandum issued on 1 May 1918, based on the experience of the 28th Division in the March/April offensive, the German author, Captain Schmidt of the General Staff, discussed what he termed ‘the battle in the intermediate zone’ which he defined as the battle against an adversary who no longer has a continuous line of defence. This memo was acquired by the French who published it in their Fourth Army Bulletin of 23 July and GHQ, American Expeditionary Force issued it in English on 19 August 1918. The author’s comments were, it seems, respected by his foes. He starts by speaking of another aspect of the new tactics, the ‘battle of position’ or the prepared attack for abolishing trench warfare. In this phase, after a prepared artillery attack, large masses of infantry, organised in depth, are launched at the same, pre-determined time and overcome the enemy by the act of advancing. It is with the next stage, the battle in the intermediate zone, that troubles begin. Here Captain Schmidt is recounting experience, not the pre-offensive theory of January 1918:

Once the barrage has ceased the attackers are exposed to machine-gun fire from the flanks, defensive artillery, tank attacks and infantry fire. The nature of the battle changes continually and the divisional command can do nothing to influence the fight in detail. It must concern itself with the supply of reserves to exploit areas of lesser resistance, and with artillery fire to secure flanks while the conduct of the fighting devolves on the junior commanders. A clear tactical insight, knowledge of other branches of the service, the faculty for rapid decision and high personal merit are the qualities which characterise the victorious subordinate commander in the battle in the intermediate zone.

Schmidt points out the long-term problem here; it depends on the quality of the field commanders, the captains, lieutenants and noncommissioned officers on the battlefield itself. It also depends, he says, on the support of other arms for the infantry’s enterprise:

The battalion thus becomes a mixed body of troops composed of companies of infantry and machine-guns, light trench mortars and accompanying artillery… It permits the battalion commander to fulfil the duties which fall to his lot in the intermediate zone without outside aid [my emphasis].

It is clear that the German tactical concept was a very powerful one and that this combination of sophisticated artillery work and supplemented infantry operation presented a new, very real threat to the Allies. It is also clear that the risks associated with it in practice are great, both in terms of the losses likely to be sustained at the front and the difficulty of communication with, and control of, the fighting force.

THE FORMULATION OF PLANS

The signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 brought the war between Russia and Germany to an end. It had been the inevitable outcome of the revolution the previous autumn and the cessation of hostilities on the Eastern front was assumed in German planning. In November 1917 there were 150 German divisions on the Western Front; by February there were 180 and by the end of March another twelve would have arrived. Furthermore the forces that Ludendorff could place in the forefront of the battle were to include seven Guards units, three Bavarian regular divisions and a Marine division: all troops of the highest quality.

What to do with the men they knew were becoming available was considered at a meeting in Mons held on 11 November 1917, exactly a year before the last shot of the war was to be fired at this same location. Two schools of thought became evident, one for hitting the British in Flanders and forcing them back to the Channel ports to extract their submission, and the other for pinching out the Verdun salient and bringing the French to the point of surrender. The Flanders plan ran the risk of bogging down, while the Verdun plan might well provoke a British attack which they would be hard pressed to resist while busy on the Meuse. Ludendorff himself offered a third idea, favouring Artois or Picardy as the scene for the offensive they all knew they had to undertake. The meeting came to no conclusions, but plans were to be examined for a number of possible operations in the coming weeks; Saint George south of Ypres, Mars at Arras, Michael against the southern end of the British line on the Somme, and two hooks either side of Verdun, and Castor and Pollux.

What had changed after the November meeting was the British attack at Cambrai on 20 November 1917 in which a surprise artillery bombardment coupled with a tank attack had smashed the German line, but which had failed when exploitation was unsuccessful and counterattacks drove them back. British capacity to launch a fresh offensive before late spring or early summer 1918 was thus lacking and the reallocation of British reserves reduced the attraction of a German offensive in Flanders. Ludendorff toured the front on 20 December and decided on Michael, but after another top-level meeting at Bad Kreuznach on 27 December no fewer than twelve plans for operations at different locations all along the front from the North Sea to Switzerland were on the table. The discussions and modifications to possible plans went on into January. Ludendorff travelled from one army to another, weighing up the evidence and arguing the possible outcomes.

General Hermann von Kuhl, chief of staff to Crown Prince Rupprecht, had considerable misgivings about Michael, which he was largely expected to arrange. The plan to drive through the British between Péronne and Arras in a bid to divide them from the French by reaching the sea appeared to him too vague, with no solid objective, while to have his southern flank covered by an army reporting to a different Army Group commander, the Crown Prince, son of Wilhelm II, suggested politics had over-ridden military wisdom. Further, without the British reserves being distracted by an attack to the north in the shape of Saint George, he gave the whole enterprise little chance of success. He met Ludendorff at Mons on 3 February to have his hopes of the Flanders operation dashed. Meanwhile Colonel Georg Wetzell, Ludendorff’s chief of the operations division of his general staff, was advocating a series of attacks to be made successively at various places up and down the front, what he called a hammer-blow strategy. It is clear that it took a long time and much discussion before the series of attacks that were to become known as the Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser’s Battle, were defined and ordered, and the attacks themselves were much-modified ideas by the time they came into effect.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Chief of the General Staff, issued the final orders on 10 March. The attack was to take place on 21 March with, in simplified terms, the taking of the Cambrai salient, a breakout towards Péronne and, while the left flank was held against any French intervention from the south, the attack would wheel northwards to roll up the British. The whole operation was, in fact, a good deal more complicated with numerous provisions for change and vague objectives.

THE GERMAN FORCES

Against the British the Germans arrayed their Seventeenth Army, with eighteen divisions and 2,236 guns under General Otto von Below, in the north facing Arras. The Second Army, comprising twenty divisions and 1,789 guns under General Georg von der Marwitz, was north of St Quentin and the Eighteenth Army, twenty-seven divisions, 2,448 guns and nine tanks under General Oskar von Hutier faced the River Oise. The German guns outnumbered the British by a ratio of five to two and included 1,000 weapons transferred from the Russian front. As far as possible the troops and artillery were moved under cover of darkness to conceal the point of attack from the British. They were ready.

2

THE ALLIED EXPERIENCE

The problem endemic to the alliance was just that: it was an alliance, a cooperative venture; coalition warmaking, as a leading scholar has put it. This was felt both at the overall command level and in the relationships between units of different nations attempting to work together in the field. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig did not report to the French commander-in-chief of the armies of the north, General Henri Pétain, but maintained his attitude of treating his requests as if they were orders, just as he had those of Pétain’s predecessors. With the entry of the United States of America into the war, General John J. Pershing arrived on the scene, expressly charged by his chief, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, with maintaining ‘the underlying idea… that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.’ So here was another country’s commander-in-chief, not under French orders and not willing to split up his army to shore up the sagging strength of his allies. The potential for confusion in opposing a unified enemy force is clear, and it was fortunate for the Allies that, in the planning of Operation Michael, Ludendorff had muddied the waters of his own stream by having two army groups involved.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MEN

At lower levels of the hierarchy relations between British and French were rarely of crucial importance as, for the most part, each unit fought alongside its own countrymen and took orders from its own officers. The Americans, however, were parcelled out for training and their first fighting experience was with the French and British until the formation of the American First Army in August 1918. They found the experience stimulating in some respects, unpleasant in others and, sometimes, plain baffling. Lieutenant-Colonel Calvin H. Goddard, making preparations in June 1942 for working with allies in a later war, made a study of their experiences. He took the precaution of suggesting that, to avoid offending their foreign friends, his conclusions should not be given general circulation!

The American officers found their British opposite numbers difficult to get to know, but soon realised they acted no differently between themselves.