On this week in history, the German Army launched its last-ditch 1918 offensive, aimed at breaking the Entente lines in northwestern France and marching to Paris. The offensive was something of a throw of the dice, an attempt by the German High Command to try and win the war before the full flood of American soldiers crashed across the Atlantic. It nearly worked.
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Otto Dix, Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas (1924) |
The Western Front in WWI had been a largely static war since the freewheeling days of 1914. In this, it resembled less battles and battlefields than sieges and fortifications. The trench system that stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel meant that the traditional methods of open warfare–flanking maneuvers, for example–had become essentially impossible. What was left were frontal assaults, with all the expected sanguinary implications. The central tactical question, from 1914 onward, had been how to get an attack across No Man’s Land, from one trench system to another, and then hold it, all without losing too many casualties in the process. The years 1916-1917 were experimental, as all the armies tried a variety of ways to mount assaults. Some were unsuccessful: the German gas attack at Ypres in 1915 momentarily opened a gap in the British line, but the German troops were mostly held by a combination of dogged Canadian defenders and the difficulties of moving up into their own gas. Some were successful: in 1917, the British mounted successful assaults at Messines Ridge and Cambrai, broke through German lines using, for the former, carefully organized artillery bombardments and “bite and hold” tactics and, for the latter, using mass ranks of armored vehicles, “tanks.” Some were disasters: at the Somme and Verdun in 1916, and Passchendaele in 1917, British and German assaults had turned in cauldrons that boiled hundreds of thousands alive. This mixture of successes, failures, and catastrophes had killed millions and stretched the war out without result.
By 1918, the Germans thought that they had figured out a way to do it. A wide-ranging debate over tactics within the German Army had led to the creation–largely by General Oskar von Hutier–of a set of “infiltration tactics.” von Hutier’s formulation would wed short artillery bombardments, designed to keep the heads of the frontline defenders down, with specially trained units of elite soldiers–Sturmbattalione or stormtroopers–who would creep out in the middle of the bombardment get to the edge of the enemy trench system and, when it lifted, be among the defenders before they could react. Once the frontline was cracked, larger units would move to consolidate the gains, while the stormtroopers moved deeper into the defensive system. Hutier’s tactics worked well on the Russian front, and at the 1917 Battle of Caporetto in Italy where, among others, Erwin Rommel, made his name.
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von Hindenburg and Ludendorff |
The German Oberste Heeresleitung (or Supreme Command)–consisting at that point of Generals Paul von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorff–aimed to bring those tactics to the Western Front early in 1918. His forces were swollen (though less than they might have been) by troops returning victoriously from the Eastern Front.
Hindenburg aimed his first assault–Operation Michael–mainly at the British Fifth Army, which had only recently moved into its section of the trenches. Some of the defensive fortifications in that area consisted only of paint markings on the ground. The offensive was timed to start at the end of March, plenty of time to move troops from the Eastern and Italian fronts, train them, and build up the necessary supplies. All of this took place in the strictest security, of course, though there were substantial leaks, especially closer to the day of the attack. The leaks were enough that the British knew the day and time of the assault, though not its extent.
The initial attack started on March 21st. The artillery bombardment started in the early morning hours, followed by stormtrooper assaults all along the line. There was extensive fog that morning, which made the defenders’ task more difficult, and the Sturmbattalione slipped easily through the gaps in the British lines, leaving the strong points for the following infantry to mop up. By the end of the day, the Germans had ripped a substantial hole in the British line and there was no sign that they were slowing down. The only problems up to that point had been that the stormtrooper casualties had been substantial, and that the bypassed British strongpoints were proving more of an issue for the followup waves than had been expected.
The advance continued. This was enough to create serious rifts between the Allied commanders. Douglas Haig, the British Commander, accused General Petain, the French Commander, of not reinforcing the British quickly enough. The imbroglio sucked in both the British Cabinet and the French Government and the result was the creation of a Supreme Commander of all the Entente forces on March 26th. This–somewhat to Haig’s discomfort–was given to a French General, Ferdinand Foch. Foch quickly threw reinforcements into the line to hold the German assault, and the British continued pushing fresh troops into strongholds such as Amiens and Arras.
But the attack was beginning to peter out already. The stormtrooper units had suffered heavy casualties, were low on supplies, and had moved beyond the range of artillery and other support. Hutier’s tactics worked well to break a defensive line, but the Germans found it much harder to consolidate that breakthrough and expand it past a few days. Once the British artillery learned to hammer No Man’s Land upon the news of an attack–thus catching the main German body of troops moving up–the stormtroopers found themselves isolated deep behind the lines, running out of food and ammunition. And British troops, strengthened by those hasty reinforcements, were holding their strongpoints and consolidating a new defensive line. On April 5th, Ludendorff called off the assault and turned to mount another attack at a different area of the line. Operation Michael had resulted in about 250,000 Entente casualties and about 240,000 German. It had been successful, and more success was to come, but the Germans were never able to figure out how to correc the weaknesses in the stormtrooper tactics, and it would end up dooming them.
45 comments
March 27, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Vance
Operation Michael had resulted in about 250,000 Entente casualties and about 240,000 German.
These kinds of numbers are part of what makes WWI so horrifying in the imagination — but almost worse is the fact that it really does follow from those numbers that
It had been successful….
March 27, 2009 at 12:23 pm
ekogan
Let’s give credit for the invention of the new tactics to the Russian General Brusilov, who used shock tactics against the Austro-Hungarians and Germans first in 1916
March 27, 2009 at 12:35 pm
ekogan
The expressionistic painting in the article reminds me of a story I’ve been told by an acquaintance who taught European History at a New York City College. Every year he would ask his students to rate paintings by Adolf Hitler and contemporary German expressionists (without identifying the artists). Hitler would invariably come out ahead. Just think of how many lives would have been saved if the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts shared their opinion!
March 27, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Vance
Well, Dix is associated more with the Neue Sachlichkeit, in principle rather distinct from expressionism. But I take the point of your anecdote, ekogan, to be that most people who haven’t gotten deeply into art are quite conservative, at least with respect to controversies and divergences that are no longer topical. Both Dix’s tendency and that of, say, Kirchner, were deliberately opposed to the conservative style to which Hitler aspired — and this opposition can still provoke.
March 27, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Erik Lund
I get less and less convinced by the claim to innovation in “stormttroop tactics” the more old-timey manuals of military engineering I read. MacAulay, _Treatise on Fortifications_ (1865) reads like Hutier when he gets to the point of describing the storming of fortifications, and so does Duke Charles IV of Lorraine in laying out his plan for the storming of Buda in 1686.
As Eric Dorn B[r?]ose finally made the point out of archives, at least some professional military men were _not_ surprised to be facing each across trenches in 1914. This was the war that the military engineers predicted. Storm troops would be needed to take the great French border fortresses, and the sooner begun, the sooner finished.
The Great German Generalquartermaster’s Staff promised to avoid that, and the history they wrote is faithful to that promise. I suspect that we will eventually find that the German military engineering leadership thought them little more than confidence men.
The German official history’s treatment of the attack plan against Verdun (and we’ll leave Falkenhayn’s after the fact rationalisations aside for the moment) bridges the gap. A siege-storming was proposed, using “traditional” storm party tactics, but on an unprecedented scale.
Yet that scale was not necessarily going to be limited to Verdun. Traditional storming parties had been formed by extracting capable old veterans, in the form of grenadiers and pioneers, one company/platoon per regiment. The German army of 1916 was vastly beyond the scope of any ancien regime army, and similarly the systematic detachment of elite troops would create “storming parties” of such unimaginable size that one could begin to imagine the application of siege/storming tactics right across the battle front.
March 27, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Erik Lund
Or to put it another way, engineers rule, artsies blow.
March 27, 2009 at 1:48 pm
ekogan
Well, Dix is associated more with the Neue Sachlichkeit, in principle rather distinct from expressionism. But I take the point of your anecdote, ekogan, to be that most people who haven’t gotten deeply into art are quite conservative, at least with respect to controversies and divergences that are no longer topical. Both Dix’s tendency and that of, say, Kirchner, were deliberately opposed to the conservative style to which Hitler aspired — and this opposition can still provoke.
Your point just completely flew – whoosh – over my head.
The point of my anecdote? It’s two-fold: (1) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and (2) A creative work that can be sold to the poor is pop culture, while art is whatever rich people buy.
March 27, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Vance
I’ll give you (1), but I have no idea how you get (2), true or false, from this anecdote. (Are Hitler’s watercolors pop?)
Perhaps I too am importing other experiences into the interpretation of the anecdote. The point I saw in it was that old radicalism such as that of Dix and the Expressionists still has the power to unsettle people — that such revolutions, though successful in many ways, still are being fought.
March 27, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Matt L.
Yes, but it was not just the casualties that stopped them. The German soldiers were hungry. The Central Powers had lost the war of logistics by 1916 or 1917 at the latest. Despite these strategic failures the General Staff and the Kaiser were ready to fight to the last teenager.
March 27, 2009 at 4:01 pm
drip
I think this chart, may say a good deal about Hitler, artists and the military.
March 28, 2009 at 5:43 am
silbey
what makes WWI so horrifying
So right, and WWII was worse.
engineers rule, artsies blow.
In siege warfare, sure. In counterinsurgency, the equation is reversed.
The German soldiers were hungry
And don’t forget one of America’s great contributions to the war: the influenza pandemic, which was starting to hit the armies.
March 28, 2009 at 8:57 am
kid bitzer
silbey–thanks for this.
this is one of those posts that may not generate extensive threads simply because people read it, say “awesome! i learned something!”, and don’t have much to contribute. (though i’m glad that others *do* have something to contribute).
a question of etymology: is the “storm” in the “sturmbattalione” derived from a word previously used to describe storming defenses?
i ask because when i think about ‘storm troopers’ in wwii, i relate it etymologically to ‘blitzkrieg’, which generally involves the *evasion* of defenses, rather than to e.g. ‘storming the bastille’ kind of direct assault on defenses.
it would be interesting (to me, at any rate) if it turned out that ‘storm troopers’ originally got that name from the idea that they would ‘storm defenses’.
March 28, 2009 at 9:34 am
Erik Lund
My reading is “yes.” The two concepts (of infiltration and frontal assault) aren’t actually that distinct, and the usage is popularised first in the (early 1916) siege of Verdun.
March 28, 2009 at 9:50 am
silbey
I’m not sure about “storm.” I have a vague memory of the meaning being that the soldiers would go out in the “storm” (the artillery barrage). I can’t remember where I read that, though, so take it as you will.
March 28, 2009 at 11:27 am
Matt L.
And don’t forget one of America’s great contributions to the war: the influenza pandemic, which was starting to hit the armies.
The other great contribution being mountains of corned beef and spam.
March 28, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Josh
Re the influenza pandemic: I remember seeing a TV special on it a couple of years ago which suggested that it actually originated in a French (IIRC) army camp; if I’m remembering correctly, the French kept both pigs and chickens in close proximity, and influenza is known to transfer between both species and humans relatively easily.
March 28, 2009 at 1:23 pm
wayne fontes
On impulse I picked up “The Great Influenza” out of the bargain bin at borders. It was a excellent book tracing the evolution of medicine as a profession and science in addition to recounting the impact of the flue. I highly recommend it.
March 28, 2009 at 6:25 pm
tf smith
I think where von Hutier deserves some credit for trying something new is combining the infiltration tactics (that had been around forever – Stony Point in 1779 is an example of a success, Montgomery’s assault in 1775 on Quebec a failure) with the ability of artillerymen to lay down accurate barrages (“creeping” and otherwise) that really required the weapons and communications equipment of the Great War to put into practice.
That being said, the speed necessary to take advantage of the initial tactical successes of the infantry didn’t really develop until full motorization – the tanks, the artillery, and the supply echelons – and that didn’t happen until the 1940s; and even then, it still took pretty adept leadership and well-trained/experienced troops to do it sucessfully…
March 29, 2009 at 7:11 am
Roger Albin
The geographic origin of the 1918 pandemic is unknown.
See: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no01/05-0979.htm
The historic geographic generator of new pandemic flu strains has been South China.
March 29, 2009 at 7:22 am
silbey
The geographic origin of the 1918 pandemic is unknown.
As the article you cite mentions, the first wave of flu hit in the United States, and there’s some evidence that it was exported to Europe along with U.S. Army soldiers.
March 29, 2009 at 8:30 am
kid bitzer
i don’t suppose there’s any chance that the red Indians cooked it up in oklahoma and infected the army blankets with it?
naah. poetic justice never works out as neatly as that.
March 29, 2009 at 9:57 am
JPool
Wait a second, Boxers, Chinese flu, German defeat, paintings, Hitler, Paul Krugman, squid!
It’s all coming together.
March 29, 2009 at 11:04 am
kid bitzer
…and only one group of bloggers can stop it!
but will they make it in time: to the edge of the american west?
March 29, 2009 at 11:20 am
Roger Albin
“Before and after 1918, most influenza pandemics developed in Asia and spread from there to the rest of the world. Confounding definite assignment of a geographic point of origin, the 1918 pandemic spread more or less simultaneously in 3 distinct waves during an ≈12-month period in 1918–1919, in Europe, Asia, and North America (the first wave was best described in the United States in March 1918). Historical and epidemiologic data are inadequate to identify the geographic origin of the virus (21), and recent phylogenetic analysis of the 1918 viral genome does not place the virus in any geographic context (19).”
– Taubenberger et al.
Did the pandemic spread first in the USA or was the spread merely first documented well in the USA? Europe in 1918, as you know well, wasn’t exactly the place for even the primitive epidemiology of the period.
Barring some major new development in viral phylogenies, the geographic origin of the pandemic is probably unknowable.
March 30, 2009 at 8:04 am
Anderson
“It nearly worked.”
Is that really plausible? What was the objective, and would it have won the war for the Germans?
The infiltration tactics succeeded in breakthroughs, but as the Germans found out in 1941, breakthroughs don’t win campaigns. And there’s nothing I can see to indicate that the Germans had any basis for thinking they could follow through in 1918.
IIRC, the hope behind the 1918 attacks was to “break the will” of the Allied coalition — an all-too-typical German substitute for strategic planning.
March 30, 2009 at 8:24 am
silbey
Is that really plausible?
I think so, yes. The Germans were essentially aiming for the seams between the British and French armies. Their goal was to split the two and force the British to fall back on the Channel Ports, then capture Paris. Had that happened, something like a negotiated peace was plausible.
Having said that, I don’t think it was highly likely. As you and Erik L have pointed out, exploitation was difficult, and the technology for it didn’t really exist in 1918 (it did exist in 1940, when a breakthrough *did* win a campaign). Hindenberg was wildly optimistic about the chances of success, but I think the chances existed, and I think the Germans came pretty close.
March 30, 2009 at 8:31 am
Anderson
Their goal was to split the two and force the British to fall back on the Channel Ports, then capture Paris.
Well, we can agree to disagree — I don’t see how the Germans could’ve gotten to and held Paris, and by 1918, I can’t imagine the French surrendering, especially with the U.S. coming into the war. France in 1918 was not France in 1940, and 1940 was much more of a special case than the Germans realized at the time.
March 30, 2009 at 8:59 am
kid bitzer
interesting. we had a family friend who had been an artillery officer in the austro-hungarian army before moving to the states in the ’20s.
he always warned that the American penchant for unconditional surrender was going to get us into trouble. i think his view was that negotiated peaces were the historical norm, and both 1918 and 1945 were much more of special cases than we callow yanks realized. (our “unconditional surrender” civil war might partly explain our myopia, but did not refute the general historical regularity).
i think to his mind, the negotiated ending constituted a kind of avoidance of hubris and over-reaching, an acknowledgement of the complexity of human viciousness on all sides.
a slightly less repellent view for someone whose politics had been shaped by wwi than if it had been shaped by wwii.
i never asked him whether he had read keynes on reparations. he was a very old man when i knew him.
March 30, 2009 at 10:26 am
Vance
Should “penchant for” read “insistence on”, kb?
March 30, 2009 at 10:47 am
kid bitzer
you know better than i do, vance, which american conflicts have ended in which ways. seems like there have been some that ended without glorious unconditional surrenders and the enemy prostrate at our feet. the dinner-table talks i’m recalling happened after the korean war, so there was at least some variety on display.
(if only that bastard truman had let macarthur use the bomb!)
March 30, 2009 at 10:50 am
kid bitzer
oh–wait:
perhaps i misunderstood you entirely.
“penchant for surrender” might sound like a penchant for surrendering. whereas “insistence on surrender” sounds like “insistence that one’s enemies surrender.
if that was your point, then, yes: i meant “penchant for insisting that our wars end with the enemy’s surrender”.
March 30, 2009 at 11:02 am
Vance
Yes, that’s all I meant. We’re not in disagreement about the history, and I’m not trying to sustain the fantasy that GI Joe always crushes the enemy.
I think I’ve mentioned here before a conversation I had in grade school, with a classmate who told me the US had never lost a war. What about Korea, I said, or Vietnam? This would have been in 1976. I understand Derek went on to join the Air Force.
March 30, 2009 at 11:04 am
kid bitzer
we didn’t lose vietnam! it was a tie!
March 30, 2009 at 11:41 am
Erik Lund
If Operation Michael aimed to split the French and British armies, all that empty space on the map ahead of the big arrow makes it look pretty hopeless.
But not all space is equal. It’s been argued (Malcolm Brown, I think) that the key rail/canal nodal point of Arras would have been sufficient, and the Germans got very close.
March 30, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Anderson
i think to his mind, the negotiated ending constituted a kind of avoidance of hubris and over-reaching, an acknowledgement of the complexity of human viciousness on all sides.
That was the previous understanding — you sent your armies out, saw what happened, and negotiated on that basis. They could’ve rolled dice with a lot less bloodshed.
(Exceptions come to mind, like the Seven Years’ War, but that was basically a cage match for the survival of Prussia, where Frederick had little alternative but to keep on fighting.)
I suppose the advent of industrialized “total war” makes war so costly that it seems unacceptable to public opinion (another new factor) to come to any gentlemen’s agreement — “look, you take Alsace, we’ll keep Lorraine, fair’s fair, okay?”
Then of course, in our case (and don’t forget the precedent of the Civil War), unconditional surrender mapped all too well onto our national messiah complex. “We don’t negotiate with evil — we defeat it.”
March 30, 2009 at 1:34 pm
kid bitzer
well, right: it was exactly the “national messiah complex” that this veteran of old europe was concerned about. he saw it as a kind of dangerous naivete in the u.s. outlook.
i just looked up his wikipedia entry. quite extraordinary now in retrospect to think that i spoke with him. really a survivor from a previous, previous century.
but then, my father remembered civil war veterans.
March 30, 2009 at 1:52 pm
silbey
Note also that the end of WWI without an unconditional surrender was seen as leading to WWII, and that fed demands in 1939-45 for the policy of unconditional surrender.
In any case, I think that the “American penchant for unconditional surrender” is a historical case that isn’t established and, to my mind, doesn’t seem particularly true.
Unconditional surrender policies: Civil War, WWII, Gulf War II.
Non-unconditional surrender policies: Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Lots of the Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War (sort of), WWI, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I.
March 30, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Anderson
well, right: it was exactly the “national messiah complex” that this veteran of old europe was concerned about
Yes, but to that extent, he exaggerated a bit — France and Britain in 1918 weren’t interested in a negotiated peace, nor were Britain and the U.S. in WW2. For that matter, I don’t recall the Germans’ doing other than imposing terms on the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk.
So I do think it’s also a feature of total war, not just our Puritan complex.
March 30, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Anderson
Note also that the end of WWI without an unconditional surrender was seen as leading to WWII
What conditions did we grant? I’m not up on the legal technicalities of the “armistice,” but basically we handed the Germans the Versailles diktat in 1919, and then told them we’d start rolling again if they didn’t sign.
Maybe I’m confusing “dictated peace” with “unconditional surrender.” But then, did the Germans ever “surrender” in WW1, as opposed to signing the armistice and the Versailles treaty?
March 30, 2009 at 4:16 pm
silbey
The Armistice left the German government and army intact and in place, about as far from ‘unconditional surrender’ as you can manage. Germany was not occupied until later, and even then the occupation was limited in area and scope. Versailles was not the wholesale diminution of Germany that the Germans (and later Hitler) argued.
(And to continue the ‘unconditional surrender’ penchant, even the Japanese surrender in WWII was hardly unconditional; we accepted that we wouldn’t get rid of the Emperor, for example.)
March 30, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Jonathan Dresner
No, we didn’t. That decision came later.
March 31, 2009 at 3:13 am
ajay
engineers rule, artsies blow.
In siege warfare, sure. In counterinsurgency, the equation is reversed.
No, you’re wrong; engineers are still much more valuable than artillery in COIN.
March 31, 2009 at 6:55 am
silbey
No, we didn’t. That decision came later
Let me rephrase that: with the Japanese surrender, the U.S. elided a number of issues (particularly those surrounding the emperor) enough that it could hardly be called “unconditional.”
March 31, 2009 at 8:15 am
Jonathan Dresner
It’s bad history to conflate the surrender — the unconditionality of which was a deeply significant and difficult point for all involved — with Macarthur’s later decisions regarding the Emperor and the anti-communist “reverse course.” The surrender was unconditional, which means that MacArthur’s decisions were seen as moderate and merciful, rather than obligatory.
March 31, 2009 at 9:36 am
silbey
the unconditionality of which was a deeply significant and difficult point for all involved
It wasn’t unconditional, though. The Truman administration had been clarifying what it meant by “unconditional surrender” since the end of the war in Europe, and the clarifications essentially watered it a fair bit. For example, at his V-E press conference, Truman talked not about the unconditional surrender of Japan, but the “unconditional surrender of the armed forces” of Japan. That was different–and lesser–than the German surrender. And that’s without going into the delicate textual balancing act that Stimson executed with the Emperor’s status.