After WWI there was a strong campaign to convince the Germans that the war was lost by the politicians and the army was never defeated. Regardless of your view of the truth of this, the fact that it was even possible to run as an argument, let alone successful, shows how little the “stalemate was broken”.
I’m not aware of anyone who considers WWI to be a decisive victory for the UK & France. The Germans lost because they were less able to cope with 4 solid years of stalemate, not because the stalemate was broken. They asked for an armistice before they had been fully beaten in the field (not that they wouldn’t have been - it was a race between mutiny and defeat).
The German High Command certainly thought the stalemate was broken!
They informed the Kaiser in no uncertain terms that the German defense
would soon suffer catastrophic collapse. The stalemate was broken, and
that the same Generals who insisted privately on peace should later lie about
it in public does not alter the historical truth of the matter.
Then you are not aware of the facts. The result was decisive enough to allow
the French to occupy parts of the Ruhr in the early 1930s with no military opposition
whatever. Furthermore, the Germans themselves admit that as later as 1936
they were no match for the French alone, and would have had to retreat if the
French had opposed the reoccupation of the Rhineland with force.
Huh? Excuse me? If one side but not the other is in “a race between mutiny and defeat”
then a stalemate does not exist.
The correct answers have been given but they are spread out across lots of posts and mixed with some – let’s say – misguided ideas.
The basic answer is that the Germany army had been ground down by 3½ years of war. All battles between roughly equal foes boil down to contact, wearing down, break-through and pursuit. It was just that in WW1 with million man armies the wearing down to years, not a day as at Waterloo. The German army of 1918 was nowhere near the quality of the Field Army of 1914. The cadre of professional NCOs was mostly gone as were the well trained pre-war intakes of recruits with the result that they were on a par with the wartime armies of Britain and the Empire and France. Designating some troops as “storm-troopers” was just recognising that most formations were of lower quality. In fact many of the formations in the British Army: the Australians, the Canadians, and a number of British Divisions were better than the Germans.
The wearing out of the German Army had been accelerated by the battles of early 1918. The Spring Offensive using the troops released by the defeat of Russia broke the British line but could not break out and exploit the victory. The subsequent attacks up and down the line had less and less result as formations were worn out.
This brings us to tactics. By 1918 both sides had learned to breaking into, and to a certain extent through, the opposing line. The combination of massive surprise artillery concentrations firing lightning bombardments without preliminary ranging shots, using gas to suppress opposing artillery batteries and smoke to hide advancing infantry, infantry advancing so close behind the creeping barrage that defenders had no time to come out of their deep dugouts before the infantry were on them, and infantry tactics that emphasised small group cohesion and moving on beyond the opposing line as well as the effective use of man portable machine guns to provide immediate fire power. All this supported by effective air attacks on concentrations of defenders trying to rally or counter-attack.
Tanks had a place in this all arms weapons system but were not essential. The German successes in 1918 were largely without tank support. With the British, tanks provide very helpful mobile artillery support but they were nothing like the panzers of 1940, never mind 1944. All the tanks were enormously unreliable and hell to spend long periods in. The greatest concentration of tanks in one battle was at Amiens in August 1918. The British started the battle with 414 tanks, next day there were 145 fit for action, the day after 85, then 38 and only six after five days – not likely to frighten the Germans!
The fact that the 1918 tank was not a pursuit weapon – the Whippet, the fastest British tank, had a maximum speed of 8 mph! – meant that it was still next to impossible to turn a breakthrough into a rout. The defenders could still bring up reinforcements to seal of the battlefield faster than the attackers could advance. This was made worse by the continuing lack of an effective means of battlefield communication as there were no man-portable radios. Effectively once the attackers had left their start line they were out of touch and the commander had practically no chance to influence the battle by feeding in reserves to exploiting a break-through. In the battles of the 100 days the British Army accepted this and went for a strategy of “bite and hold”, a series of set piece attacks using the tactics above to gain ground but not overextending such that they were vulnerable to counter-attack. It was this relentless advance and the resultant catastrophic losses of irreplaceable men that led Hindenburg and Ludendorf to tell the Kaiser to seek an armistice and German representatives crossing the lines under a flag of truce.
Two final points. It was not the fresh American armies that beat the exhausted Germans. It was the arrival of the Americans that forced the Germans to gamble on the final offensive before they were overwhelmed by numbers and allowed British and French forces to be concentrated for the offensive rather than manning the full length of the Western Front.
I completely disagree with the idea that:
Insisting that the Americans would not fight mixed amongst the British or French just meant they repeated every mistake the Allies had made in 1915, 16, and 17 and cost many American soldiers their lives as the assaulted in linear waves with insufficient artillery support.
Finally, almost no one has mentioned the French contribution to victory. From 1914 to 1916/17 it was the French that were the main fighting force opposing the Germans in the West. Britain was very much the junior partner. It was the French army that fought - and died – to wear down the Germans in battles from the Marne through Verdun to the Nivelle Offensive of 1917.
Probably not much. The “stab in the back” was only able to get going because many Germans felt like they hadn’t really lost the war in 1918. One thing you can say about the Nazis - they made sure you knew you were thoroughly defeated.
Exactly. The folks back home didn’t get all the information. All they (and the majority of the soldiers) knew was that despite heavy losses, they had beaten the Russians while holding the French and British at bay. And once the troops were moved from east to west, they made a big attack which was advancing just fine. But then, BAM, their troops were suddenly falling back. Not just to their defensive lines but back into territory they’d held since the start of the war. And then from out of nowhere, the Kaiser announced an armistice. For a people who relied mainly on their government for information, it must certainly have come from out of nowhere.
“Six months ago, we stomped the Russians and were totally kicking French butt. Now we’re surrendering?”
One need look no further than the disastrous Russian 1914 offensive culminating in the battles of Tannenberg and 1st Masurian Lakes. If the several 100k Germans engaged in the East had been available for duty in the West then Germany would probably have won on the ground in the West in 1914, in an earlier edition of what took place in 1940.
And even if perspective is limited to the West, the resolute defense put up by tiny Belgium delayed the German advance by critical weeks, and so did the actions of the BEF; France would have stood little to no chance of halting the Germans without the contributions of these two allies.
Furthermore, take a look at the number (in thousands) of military deaths for the entire war per Wiki:
1,811 Russia
1,398 France
1,116 British Empire
651 Italy
275 Serbia
250 Romania
117 USA
58 Belgium
5,702 TOTAL
As you see, France did not suffer the most military war dead, and its war dead were about 25% of the total.
Then there was the naval war, where British control of the sea was vital to the allied cause, and where France would have stood no more chance alone against Germany than on land.
There was also a political dimension. Germany had become a virtual military dictatorship by 1918. The General Staff was setting policy and the Kaiser and the Reichstag were essentially reduced to rubber-stamping.
But after the failure of the 1918 offensive, the military leadership collapsed (Ludendorff in particular). The civilians had to step up and run the country (Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and went into exile). But at this point, the only thing involved in running the country was surrendering to the Allies, which the new government did on the best terms it could get under the situation it had been dropped into.
Then once the dust had settled and the country had been pulled away from complete collapse, the generals forgot how they had run away from the responsibility of surrendering. They also forgot that they had been the ones in charge when Germany was brought to the point of defeat. They started saying things like “We never surrendered. We kept fighting. It wasn’t until those civilians took over that Germany gave up.”
The reality was they had driven the car off the cliff but quickly handed the steering wheel over to their passenger before they crashed into the ground. And then blamed him for the accident.
I stand by what I said. The conflict between France and Germany was the decisive point of the war. Russia may have received more casualties but the outcome of the war wasn’t decided in the east (if it had been, it would have been a German victory).
Same thing with Britain (and the British Empire), Belgium, Italy, Romania, Serbia, and the United States. Yes, they all contributed. But their contributions were in support of France, which made the main effort.
One lesson to be learned from WWI was that it was ended too early.
Germany was beaten in WWI. No ambiguity. They were down and out.
The problem is that UK/France didn’t keep the war going so that the Germans knew they had been beaten. Their armies returned home under their own power and no German territoy was occupied.
WWI should have continued into early 1919 and Germany occupied. It would have happened because Germany was defeated. If UK/France had done this, WWII would probably not have happened.
I remember thinking about this when Bush Senior stopped the first Iraq war.
If a World War theater is a necessary factor in the outcome of the entire war
then it is reasonable to consider that theater to be a decisive one, although not
necessarily the only decisive one.
From this perspective the Asiatic theater was not decisive in WW1, and CBI
was not decisive in WW2.
However, It is amply established that the WW1 Eastern Front was decisive
in allowing the UK and France to survive until US entry assured Germany’s
eventual defeat.
Standing up for something wrong does not make it right.
I think about this for the American Civil War. A long, grinding war was needed to convince everyone in the Confederacy to give up and give in. Otherwise, another war might have broken out later in the same fashion as the two world wars.
Not likely, given that the extinction of slavery removed the motive for secession. The Confederacy didn’t “give up” so much as it ran out of soldiers, the food to feed them, and was unable to hold land or slaves anymore.
Yes, they ran out of those things and therefore gave up. That’s what “surrender” means.
ETA: I live in and work for a county named after the very man who did the surrendering: Lee. He gave up. If you disagree please start another thread so that we don’t hijack this one anymore.
Not exactly. It’s true we made some of the same mistakes, but learned very different lessons, and learned them a lot faster. The British and French basically wanted to use Americans as mere anonymous war material - more warm bodies to soak up German bullets. Suffice it say that was not exactly them at their best, and better to lose people trying learning the hard way than deliberately endorsing old old idiocy.
I agree. Quite frankly, a lot of the problems the British and French had experienced was due to bad generalship. Giving those generals more soldiers to waste was not the solution.