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    1918: Winning the War, Losing the War
    1918: Winning the War, Losing the War
    1918: Winning the War, Losing the War
    Ebook415 pages6 hours

    1918: Winning the War, Losing the War

    By Nicholas Carter, Matthias Strohn, James S. Corum and

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    This wide-ranging collection of articles by some of the most renowned names in the subject explores the tumultuous events of the final year of the First World War.

    In 2018, the world commemorated the centenary of the end of the First World War. In many ways, 1918 was the most dramatic year of the conflict. After the defeat of Russia in 1917, the Germans were able to concentrate their forces on the Western Front for the first time in the war, and the German offensives launched from March 1918 onward brought the Western Allies close to defeat. Having stopped the German offensives, the Entente started its counter-attacks on all fronts with the assistance of fresh US troops, driving the Germans back and, by November 1918, the Central Powers had been defeated.

    This study is a multi-author work containing ten chapters by some of the best historians of the First World War from around the world writing today. It provides an overview and analysis of the different levels of war for each of the main armies involved within the changing context of the reality of warfare in 1918. It also looks in detail at the war at sea and in the air, and considers the aftermath and legacy of the First World War.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 9, 2018
    ISBN9781472829344
    1918: Winning the War, Losing the War
    Author

    Nicholas Carter

    General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen commissioned into The Royal Green Jackets in 1978. At Regimental Duty he has served in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Germany, Bosnia, and Kosovo and commanded 2nd Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets, from 1998 to 2000. He attended Army Staff College, the Higher Command and Staff Course and the Royal College of Defence Studies. He was Military Assistant to the Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Colonel Army Personnel Strategy, spent a year at HQ Land Command writing the Collective Training Study, and was Director of Army Resources and Plans. He also served as Director of Plans within the US-led Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan and spent three months in the Cross Government Iraq Planning Unit prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. General Carter commanded 20th Armoured Brigade in Iraq in 2004 and 6th Division in Afghanistan in 2009/10. He was then the Director General Land Warfare before becoming the Army 2020 Team Leader. He served as DCOM ISAF from October 2012 to August 2013, became Commander Land Forces in November 2013, and was appointed Chief of the General Staff in September 2014.

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      Book preview

      1918 - Nicholas Carter

      CONTENTS

      Contributors

      Foreword

      General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen

      Chapter 1 Introduction

      1918: the final year of World War I and its long shadow in history

      Dr Matthias Strohn

      Chapter 2 The German Army in 1918

      Major General (Ret'd) Dr David T. Zabecki

      Chapter 3 The French Army in 1918

      Dr David Murphy

      Chapter 4 The British Army in 1918

      Dr Jonathan Boff

      Chapter 5 The US Army in 1918

      Professor Mitch Yockelson

      Chapter 6 The Forgotten Fronts in Europe

      Russia, Italy, and the Balkans in 1918

      Professor Lothar Höbelt

      Chapter 7 The War Outside of Europe

      Dr Rob Johnson

      Chapter 8 The Great War at Sea in 1918

      The role of sea power in achieving victory

      Professor Dr Michael Epkenhans

      Chapter 9 The Air Campaign of 1918

      Dr James S. Corum

      Chapter 10 Learning from 1918 on the Western Front

      Major General (Ret’d) Mungo Melvin CB OBE

      Endnotes

      Select Bibliography

      Glossary and Abbreviations

      CONTRIBUTORS

      General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen commissioned into The Royal Green Jackets in 1978. At Regimental Duty he has served in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Germany, Bosnia, and Kosovo and commanded 2nd Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets, from 1998 to 2000. He attended Army Staff College, the Higher Command and Staff Course and the Royal College of Defence Studies. He was Military Assistant to the Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Colonel Army Personnel Strategy, spent a year at HQ Land Command writing the Collective Training Study, and was Director of Army Resources and Plans. He also served as Director of Plans within the US-led Combined Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan and spent three months in the Cross Government Iraq Planning Unit prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. General Carter commanded 20th Armoured Brigade in Iraq in 2004 and 6th Division in Afghanistan in 2009/10. He was then the Director General Land Warfare before becoming the Army 2020 Team Leader. He served as DCOM ISAF from October 2012 to August 2013, became Commander Land Forces in November 2013, and was appointed Chief of the General Staff in September 2014.

      Dr Matthias Strohn FRHistS was educated at the universities of Münster (Germany) and Oxford. He has lectured at Oxford University and the German Staff College (Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr). From 2006 until 2016 he worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is currently on secondment to the British Army’s think tank, the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research in Camberley. In addition, he is a Reader at the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Buckingham where he works in the areas of Military History and War Studies. He holds a commission in the German Army and is a member of the military attaché reserve, having served on the defence attaché staffs in London, Paris, and Madrid. He has published widely on 20th-century German and European military history and is an expert on the German Army in World War I and the inter-war period. He has advised British and German government bodies on the World War I centenary commemorations.

      Major General (Ret'd) Dr David T. Zabecki retired from the US Army in 2007. He started his military career as an infantry rifleman in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. In 2003, he was attached to the US State Department as the Senior Security Advisor on the US Coordinating and Monitoring Mission (Roadmap to Peace in the Middle East), where he negotiated between the Israeli Defense Force and the multiple Palestinian security organizations. In 2004, he was the commander of US forces supporting the 60th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day Landings, Operation Market-Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge. In 2005–06 he was the senior US Army commander in Europe south of the Alps, based in Vicenza, Italy. He holds a PhD in Military History from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University, where his supervisor was the late Professor Richard Holmes. In 2012 he served as the Dr Leo A. Shifirn Distinguished Professor of Military History at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the War Studies Programme at the University of Birmingham (UK). He is the author or editor of numerous military history books. In 2016 his encyclopaedia, Germany at War: 400 Years of Military History, won a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award.

      Dr David Murphy is a lecturer at the Department of History, Maynooth University, Ireland. Since 2006 he has taught defence studies programmes at the Irish Military College and he has also given guest lectures at various international military colleges, including the Royal Netherlands Military Academy in Breda and the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. He is a member of the Royal United Services Institute and is an external examiner for the Department of Defence Studies, King’s College, London. His research currently focuses on WW1 and his publications include Breaking Point of the French Army: the Nivelle Offensive of 1917 (Pen & Sword, 2015), Lawrence of Arabia (Osprey, 2011) and The Arab Revolt, 1916–18 (Osprey, 2008), among others.

      Dr Jonathan Boff FRHistS is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham, where he teaches courses relating to war from Homer to Helmand. He specializes in particular in World War I. His publications include Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford University Press, 2018). He has undertaken consultancy projects for the British Army and the BBC and serves on the Councils of the National Army Museum and the Army Records Society.

      Professor Mitch Yockelson is a Professor of military history at Norwich University and the author of four books: Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I; Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918, named one of the best military history books by The Independent (UK); MacArthur: America’s General; and Grant: Savior of the Union. He directs the National Archives and Records Administration-Archival Recovery Program where he leads investigations of thefts of historical documents and museum artefacts. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on 60 Minutes, Fox News, PBS, and the History Channel. The chief historical adviser to the US World War One Centennial Commission, Mitch regularly leads tours of World War I battlefields for the New York Times Journeys and frequently lectures on military history. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

      Professor Lothar Höbelt was born in Vienna 1956 and graduated with honours from the University of Vienna in 1982. He was Assistant Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in 1992, and has been Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Vienna since 1997, and Lecturer at the Military Academy Wiener Neustadt since 2001. The main focus of his research is the history of Austria(-Hungary) in the 19th and 20th centuries. His publications include Franz Joseph I: Der Kaiser und sein Reich: Eine politische Geschichte (2009), and Die Habsburger: Aufstieg und Glanz einer europäischen Dynastie (2009). His latest work is ‘Stehen oder Fallen?’ Österreichische Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (2015).

      Dr Rob Johnson is the Director of the Changing Character of War (CCW) Research Centre at Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow of Pembroke College. His primary research interests are in the history of strategy and war, and their contemporary applications. A former British army officer, he is the author of The Great War and the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as several other works on conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. He is also the author of True to Their Salt (2017), a history of partnering local forces, and its part in indirect strategies used by Western powers.

      Professor Dr Michael Epkenhans is the Director of Historical Research at the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the German Armed Forces (ZMSBw) at Potsdam. He is an expert in German and European History of the 19th and 20th centuries with a special emphasis on military history. His main field of research is German military history before, during and after the First World War. In addition to his role at the ZMSBw he is Professor at Potsdam University and editor of Germany’s leading journal on military history, the Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift. Professor Epkenhans holds a commission in the German Navy with the rank of Commander (Naval Reserve).

      Dr James Corum teaches military history at Salford University UK, having been Dean of the Baltic Defence College 2009–2014. From 1991 to 2004 he was a professor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In 2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he held a Leverhulme Fellowship, and then an Associate Professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr Corum is the author of several books on military history, including The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (1992); The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940 (1997); The Luftwaffe’s Way of War: German Air Doctrine, 1911–1945, with Richard Muller (1998); Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists, with Wray Johnson (2003); and Fighting the War on Terror: A Counterinsurgency Strategy (2007). His eighth book on Cold War history is Rearming Germany (2011). He is the editor-in-chief of the translation (from German) of the Encyclopedia of the First World War (two volumes) (2012). He has also authored more than 60 major book chapters and journal articles on a variety of subjects related to air power and military history. Dr Corum served in Iraq in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve. He holds a master’s degree from Brown University, a Master of Letters from Oxford University, and a PhD from Queen’s University, Canada.

      Major General (Ret’d) Mungo Melvin CB OBE is the author of Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General, first published to critical acclaim in 2010. In 2011 it was runner-up in the prestigious Westminster Prize; in 2012, it won a distinguished book award as best biography of the year from the US Society for Military History. Now retired from the British Army, General Melvin was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1975, and saw operational service in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the Balkans. During the latter part of his 37-year career as a member of the General Staff he specialized in strategic analysis, professional military education, and doctrine. A former President of the British Commission for Military History, he is currently advising the British Army on the World War I centenary commemorations, and has edited the Army’s battlefield guide to the Western Front (2014). He is author of Sevastopol’s Wars: Crimea from Potemkin to Putin (2017), also published by Osprey. He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow of the Department of War Studies of King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Royal Engineers, Chairman of the Royal Engineers Historical Society, and Vice President of the Western Front Association. He lectures widely on strategy and military history in both the public and commercial sectors.

      FOREWORD

      General Sir Nicholas Carter KCB, CBE, DSO, ADC Gen Chief of the General Staff

      Even after a century, World War I still exerts a strong hold on the consciousness of many nations. For all engaged, it was a transformational experience and its legacy on states, institutions, communities, and individuals was profound. While it was predominantly destructive, it was also constructive, forging new national identities and the establishment of a global ‘league of nations’ intended to prevent future conflict. This legacy and the scale of human loss help to explain the war’s enduring place in popular sentiment and why, in the UK, the centenaries of Jutland, the Somme, and Third Ypres have provoked renewed public interest. Understandably, this has focused largely on human experiences; but for politicians, academics and the military there is much to be gained by understanding how wars start, are fought, and, looking to 1918 as this volume does, how they are brought to an end. For, as each chapter reveals, World War I did not peter out through mutual exhaustion, but continued to the Armistice with growing intensity and extended range: across the Western Front, Russia, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, and Africa; as well as on land, at sea, and in the air.

      In recognition of the war’s importance across so many fields of human endeavour, since 2014 the British Army has run an extended programme of reflective study, as part of a national commitment to mark its centenary. Appropriately, our work has been known as ‘Operation Reflect’, with two of its aims being to honour all those who served and to remember all those who suffered and died. However, this reflection has also had a strong instructive element, with its other two aims being to educate modern soldiers about the actions and achievements of their forebears and, perhaps most importantly, to learn lessons that may help to guide our development for an uncertain future.

      The importance that I attach to learning from the past is worth expanding upon. It is not in many fields that actions a century old can retain the ability to inform and instruct a modern professional cohort, but in the military sphere I am clear they do. For a start, mercifully, wars are not frequent events, so armies must prepare for them, in part, by studying how conflict is and has been conducted. Such study reveals, as Carl von Clausewitz observed, that war has a ‘nature’ (violent, contested, and determined by human will) that is constant, and a character (the ways and means of its conduct) that continuously changes. Therefore, in training for war, the military must understand, and be ready to deal with, both constant and changing elements. It is to help modern soldiers meet these intellectual challenges that I established the Army’s Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research (CHACR), under whose auspices this volume has been published. Its role is to conduct and sponsor research into the nature and character of conflict, and act as a hub for military scholarship, to sustain and develop the conceptual (i.e. the thinking) component of fighting power (the others being physical and moral). Hence, it has been instrumental in shaping and supporting Operation Reflect and in encouraging modern soldiers to study the history of the war and their profession in general. The CHACR is just part of a raft of initiatives that have been implemented to re-emphasize the conceptual component of fighting power within the British Army.

      I find World War I a particularly rich source of instruction as it came at a time when the British Army was neither designed for, nor recently experienced in, a major conflict against a peer competitor and when technology was driving a rapid evolution in the character of conflict. Thus it had to adapt rapidly to a war for which it was unprepared, most notably by creating a mass citizen army that endured a brutal induction to the character of modern warfare. While its failings and losses cannot be ignored, the British Army was by 1918 a victorious force that combined mass with professional sophistication. This argues that its ability to adapt and innovate, while fighting every step for over four years, was genuine and greater than has sometimes been acknowledged.

      I think this resonates with today’s challenges. As in 1914, the British Army exists within an uncertain strategic environment in which the threat of miscalculation could lead to direct conflict – a conflict we would not choose, but in which we might be compelled to fight. And this could well be further afield than Europe. This conundrum of coordinating coherent strategy and precious military resources across multiple theatres echoes that faced by Britain’s government throughout the war. Another parallel is the rapid evolution of the means of warfare and the ways in which they are employed. World War I saw industrial capacity and technical innovation transform warfare, a highly interactive and gradual process that all armies struggled to master. In our own time it is pervasive information that is driving a rapid evolution in the character of conflict; a challenge that demands a similar commitment to innovation and adaptation. Hence, understanding how a small army can adjust its structure rapidly, expand, exploit emergent technology, adapt its doctrine and innovate tactically is close to the heart of our modern conceptual challenge. Studying past conflicts will not offer us a ready template for how to fight the ‘war we might have to fight’, but it will reveal many enduring truths about how armies prevail amidst the violent, contested, and frictional nature of war.

      In pursuit of such insights, Operation Reflect has addressed its core themes through a series of major ‘staff rides’¹ to the battlefields of the Western Front. These have been significant endeavours, each engaging over 100 participants, including representatives from many of the combatant nations: Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and, in 2018, the United States. The first of these, in 2014, took an overview of the war on the Western Front, while the second, in 2016, focused on the battle of the Somme in 1916 that so marked the British Empire’s experience of the war. The third and final Army Staff Ride in 2018 will focus on the decisive events on the Western Front in 1918, which brought the war against Germany to an end.

      In preparation for the 2016 staff ride, Dr Matthias Strohn assembled a selection of thematic essays by leading historians, providing a companion volume for those participating, which set the strategic and military contexts for the Somme in 1916. This new volume has been born of similar intent to provide a strategic context for those participating in the Army Staff Ride in 2018. This staff ride is the most ambitious yet, reflecting the full span, scale, and significance of the ultimately decisive events on the Western Front in 1918. Most importantly, it is being conducted in partnership with our French, German, and American allies, whose chiefs share my emphasis on learning from our shared past. Accordingly, the staff ride programme has been constructed around the central theme of ‘four armies in four days’: focusing by turn on the German spring offensives; the French counter-attack in the Second Battle of the Marne; the British Expeditionary Force’s counter-offensives from Amiens to the breaking of the Hindenburg Line; and the American Expeditionary Force’s offensive through the Meuse–Argonne region to the Meuse River.

      This volume does much more than reflect the primacy of these four armies and the Western Front as the decisive theatre of operations. It captures vividly the global span and the strategic complexity of nations that had committed the full capacity of their dispersed imperial possessions to winning a war that anticipated what the generation which followed called a ‘total war’. In so doing, its component chapters serve to illustrate the unifying themes that I have assigned to the Army Staff Ride in 2018.

      The first of these is the importance of ‘coalition warfare’, then and now. In 1918 both sides were extensive coalitions and a great virtue of this book is that it offers such a range of perspectives from many of these combatant nations.² Each coalition experienced the many benefits of partnership, but also the inherent frictions of fighting without unified direction, and there is good reason to conclude that ultimate victory went to the coalition that best cohered its collective strength to strategic effect. As we have learned latterly in Iraq and Afghanistan, coalitions are no easier to manage today and there is much to learn from the way in which in 1918 France, Britain, and Italy managed the loss of one partner in Russia, absorbed the arrival of another in the United States and, belatedly, achieved a more unified military command structure. By contrast, it is arguable that the Germans failed to exploit the full potential of their own coalition with Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire to achieve strategic success.

      The second theme is the ‘restoration of manoeuvre’ to achieve operationally decisive effect. In 1918 this was about breaking the physical stasis imposed by the advantages technology had bestowed upon the defending side in trench warfare. Both sides sought to achieve this by combining material might, technological innovation, and tactical adaptation. The last of these was focused on achieving closer coordination between the expanding capabilities of land and air forces to deliver an integrated ‘all-Arms battle’. The Germans led the way with a series of great offensives in the spring of 1918, but for all their tactical gains, operational success and ultimately strategic victory eluded them. As these offensives culminated in early summer, the Allies wrested back the initiative, their newly unified command structure coordinating their attacks to roll the Germans back, first to their start lines of March, and ultimately further east, liberating much of occupied Belgium and northern France. Today we are embracing our own conceptual transformation as we appreciate that the ability to manoeuvre to gain advantage over an opponent lies not only in the physical, but also in the information domain. This has led the British Army to espouse a new unifying doctrine, that of Integrated Action. This places emphasis on analysing all audiences – friendly, enemy, and neutral – before applying actions across all domains to achieve the appropriate effects upon each audience.

      The third theme is ‘adaptation and innovation’, which focuses on the abilities of the respective armies to learn and implement change (whether their structure, equipment, tactics, training, or leadership) in order to achieve success. The German, French, and British armies of 1918 had transformed out of all recognition from those that had first engaged in 1914. This was a product of constant striving for competitive advantage, with innovation, adaptation, and experimentation (across the technical and tactical domains) central to what we might see now as an institutional learning culture. Peacetime armies have an often-deserved reputation for conservatism, which contrasts starkly with the imperative to be aggressively radical in war. In an era of constant competition we cannot wait to adapt or innovate until war is upon us; we must ensure that we are changing constantly so we can maintain a competitive edge that will deter adversaries from attacking our interests or allies. We can only do this by emulating the armies of 1918 in embracing a learning culture, with the instinct and energy to question orthodoxy, experiment relentlessly, and learn by the experience.

      The fourth theme combines the enduring military issues of ‘command, leadership, and morale’. On the one hand, this highlights the technical challenges of communicating command direction to thousands of men across a dispersed and devastated battlefield, which reflects the modern challenge of assuring our ability to exploit the medium of a contested electro-magnetic spectrum. On the other, it focuses on the human experience of war: the leaders and the led. To modern minds the ability of citizen soldiers to function amidst the horrors of industrial warfare seems almost super-human, but it is certain that the strains that contemporary war will impose upon the human mind and body will be no less than those of a century ago. Hence, we will remain dependent upon the courage and stoicism that has characterized the British soldier down the ages, while ensuring that he or she is consistently provided with exemplary, inspiring, and enlightened leadership.³

      The final unifying theme is ‘conflict resolution’, or, in simpler terms, how wars end. Today we see terms like ‘defeat’ and ‘victory’ as being harder to define given that success is often more about the triumph of a narrative as opposed to the facts on the ground. The experience of 1918 illustrates this conundrum neatly. While the Armistice of 11 November 1918 brought welcome relief to the exhausted armies, it was also met with dismay on both sides. For a German Army that considered itself to be unbeaten, it was not a defeat but a betrayal, a conviction that played its part in the rise of Nazism and the renewal of conflict in 1939. Meanwhile, some on the Allied side, noting that their opponents did not yet accept that they were beaten, felt that the war would not be won until the Germans had been driven back into their homeland and forced to accept defeat. While militarily this was both feasible and pragmatic, fighting on was a political impossibility for all nations.⁴ As Clausewitz reminds us, the origins of all wars lie in politics and it is to politics they must return at their end.

      Over the past four years, I have found it both intellectually and professionally rewarding to renew and revise my understanding of World War I. While it is ever-more remote in time and there has been a complete transformation in the political, social, technological, and military aspects of warfare, it remains highly instructive to study how our forebears addressed the many challenges with which the war confronted them. Thankfully, a generation of dedicated scholarship has freed us from a tendency to dismiss the war as pointless and wasteful, and therefore not deserving of study. This work has led us to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this war and how it was fought, without diminishing in any way the honour and respectful remembrance that we bear towards its combatants. I believe this volume adds further to that scholarly work, perhaps most significantly in assembling a comprehensive set of international perspectives. Too often we seek to understand wars from a single perspective, which fails to reflect the essentially contested nature of warfare.

      I commend this book to military and civilian audiences alike, as a penetrating and thought-provoking exploration of the final phase of, what was then dearly hoped to be, the ‘war to end all wars’. That this proved a vain hope, is, perhaps, the most salutary lesson of all.

      CHAPTER 1

      INTRODUCTION

      1918: the final year of World War I and its long shadow in history

      Dr Matthias Strohn

      On 28 June 1919, a German delegation signed the Treaty of Versailles with the Allies.¹ The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace on the outskirts of Paris, the same place in which in 1871 the united German Reich had been founded. Hostilities had ceased on 11 November 1918, when Germany had surrendered to the Allies, the last state of the Central Powers to do so. And yet, only a few months earlier, it had seemed as if the Central Powers were winning the war; on 23 March 1918, two days after the beginning of Operation Michael in the West, the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, made the joyful statement that ‘The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated’.² How did the pendulum of victory swing so quickly from one coalition to the other and leave the Central Powers, seemingly expecting to end the war victorious, with the bitter aftertaste of defeat?

      In order to understand the events of 1918, it is necessary to begin the story in the previous year. Seemingly, 1917 had been a successful year for the Central Powers and a less successful one for the Entente and its associated powers. On the Western Front, the offensives conducted by the Allies did not break the German lines. The main British offensive in Flanders resulted in a bloody stalemate and so did the French offensives against the German positions, in particular at the Chemin des Dames. There was one exception to this general trend. In November 1917, the British had broken through the German lines at Cambrai, not least because of the use of tanks. As a result, church bells in Britain rang for the first time since the start of the war. However, the British did not exploit their success, and German reserves were moved quickly to the front, where they launched a counter-attack. In the end, this battle ended as yet another draw.

      In the Italian theatre of war, eleven battles had been fought on the Isonzo front between Austria-Hungary and Italy between 1915 and the summer of 1917. Although these battles had resulted in huge casualties on both sides, the front had hardly moved. This only changed with the twelfth battle, which lasted from 24 October to 7 November 1917. The Austro-Hungarians, reinforced and spearheaded by German troops, managed to break through the Italian front and routed the Italian forces in front of them. The front collapsed and the Italian Army withdrew to the Piave River, having lost over 3,000 artillery pieces and 334,000 men. Over 290,000 of these were soldiers captured by the Central Powers; a clear indication of the collapse of the moral component of the Italian Army’s fighting power.³

      In the Balkans, the front had also held. In June 1917, Greece entered the war on the side of the Entente, but the army’s poor training and lack of equipment meant that the declaration of war did not result in an immediate increase of fighting power on the Entente side. By the summer of 1917, the Allies had 24 divisions on the Macedonian front. The so-called Allied Army of the Orient contained French, Serbian, British, Italian, Greek and Russian troops in what the Central Powers called ‘Our biggest prisoner of war camp’; the French Premier Georges Clemenceau called them the ‘gardeners of Salonika’ due to their inactivity. ⁴

      In the greater scheme of these developments, certain set-backs for the Central Powers in the Near East did not seem overly worrying. The Ottomans (with their German advisers and small troop contingents) had been pushed back by the Allied forces, and on 11 December 1917 General Allenby entered Jerusalem, effectively ending Muslim control over the holy city for the first time since the end of the Crusades.⁵

      The developments described so far would have been enough to make 1917 a successful year for the Central Powers, but one front has not been mentioned yet. On the Eastern Front the Central Powers achieved their biggest victory of the year, indeed of the entire war. In March 1917 the so-called February Revolution (in accordance with the Julian calendar that was being used in Russia at the time) resulted in

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