This would make sense if the British and French were still sticking to the “old old idiocy” and the American’s had better generals. As it was the the Americans went into St Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne using the idiocies that the British had used in 1916 - and with the same results. Equally the French and British (and Australian and Canadian) generals and their staffs were pretty good. The ones that had survived had learned from their mistakes of the earlier years. The American commanders were green - even Pershing had never commanded a force of full divisional size - and there just were not enough competent staff officers to plan the complex all arms battles that were winning the war in late 1918.
This not to run down the AEF or the American contribution to victory but it is clear that the AEF was in the same position as the Kitchener armies of 1916, enthusiastic amateurs, enormously keen to do their bit but without the competencies and experience to match the tactics being used by the British, French, and Germans. Green troops were always going to suffer and make mistakes but it is at least possible that working with rather than shunning the experience gained over three bloody years might have saved American lives.
You mean like Douglas Haig? He commanded the BEF from 1915 until the end of the war.
In the summer of 1918, when the German spring offensive had worn down and the Allies were preparing to counter-attack, what was Haig’s suggestion?
A frontal assault against the Somme.
The attack was launched. It gained some ground on the first day and then, in a development that nobody could have foreseen, the offensive began to outrun its supply lines, the Germans brought in reserves, and the attack began to slow down. And Haig had a brilliant insight - throw more soldiers into the attack.
It was 1918 and Haig was still making the exact same mistakes he had been making throughout the war.
Citation, please, and your account is seriously at odds witht the Wiki article:
(from Wiki):
The Allies were fortunate that the Germans had begun to evacuate the target salient,
but it is still noteworthy that note the allies suffered only 7,000 casualties (out of
~600,000 engaged) during the operation, which was called short because of the need
for troops in other sectors.
Not true. The attack over the old Somme battlefield in August 1918 was the battle of Amiens and generally recognised as a shining example of the new tactics - surprise,a massive concentration of artillery firing blind at pre-planned targets, tanks, and air power achieved a stunning victory. “The black day for the German Army”. Unlike earlier battles this was discontinued when progress slowed and the fighting was swapped to fresh fronts where further meticulously planned attacks kept the Germans reeling. Even John Keegan - no friend of Haig - does not criticise him for the 100 days offensive.
Having said that, the generals I was actually referring to were the army and corps commanders who actually planned and directed the battles: men like Rawlinson, Byng, Currie, Monash, etc. All had gone through the earlier disasters and come out stronger and a lot wiser.
(Bolding mine.) I don’t think that’s true. To the best of my knowledge, when Germany surrendered it came as a surprise to the soldiers, who in many respects at that point thought the war was going fairly well (they were not aware that Germany was exhausted, they didn’t have the data we have now), and that was the soil in which the highly successful Stab-in-the-back legend was planted. Hitler wasn’t the only one who was furious that they “gave up” and tried to find someone to blame (Hitler seems not to have been an anti-semite in his youth, by the way). The perceived “fact” that they actually did not loose but were betrayed together with the Treaty of Versailles and failure of the Weimar Republic is perhaps the most important background to how the Nazis came to power.
A point regarding tactics: It was mentioned way upthread that the development of aerial reconnaissance (not a new thing, balloons were used for observation as far back as the American Civil War, maybe farther, but airplanes greatly expanded the capabilities of this) made it difficult to mass troops and equipment for major offensives without tipping your hand.
One way they dealt with this problem late in the war was to mass air power together to essentially sweep enemy aerial recon forces out of the area, so they couldn’t see what you were doing. They might know you planned something big in a particular region, but they were deprived of details. They didn’t know exactly where your forces were, what kind or how many forces you had, or even if this wasn’t just a huge feint and there was no ground attack attack to prepare against at all.
Do you have a cite for that? I think any German troops on the Western Front would have known (at least) that they were retreating, that the Hindenburg Line had been broken and that American troops were reaching the battlefield in numbers.
My main source is Ludendorff’s* quote abut the Battle of Amiens. He called it “the black day of the German Army” “not because of the ground lost to the advancing Allies, but because the morale of the German troops had sunk to the point where large numbers of troops began to capitulate. He recounted instances of retreating troops shouting “You’re prolonging the war!” at officers who tried to rally them, and “Blackleg!” at reserves moving up.”
Likewise the Allies seem to have been in no doubt that the morale and effectiveness of the German troops was going sharply downhill - Rawlinson is quoted as saying that if it hadn’t been, he would never have attempted an attack on the Hindenburg Line.
On the other hand, I can’t find any evidence of the sort of disintegration that hit the Russians in 1917 or the Austro-Hungarians in 1918. The German Navy mutinied en masse when ordered to fight a final battle, the Army seems to have been just about holding together.
*Ludendorff, of course, was later one of the major proponents of the stab-in-the-back theory. It wasn’t his High Command that had led Germany to disaster, oh no, it was those wimpish socialist civilians…
I too am going to call “cite?” on this. After near-stasis for 4 years they’d suddenly been pushed out of their comfortable trenches and back to the German border in a few weeks; how could they possibly think the war was going well for them?
No data to add, but just as an observation on human psychology, I think it’s quite possible to be in a situation where any rational person could tell they were clearly defeated, but many less rational people could refuse to admit it. And once a few years have gone by, and it’s not a question of ‘surrender or face likely death in a lost cause’, but rather ‘think about things in a more comforting way or not’, there’s a lot less personal risk in taking the irrational side.
So yeah, I think it’s quite possible that an average German soldier could in 1918 want Germany to surrender, while in 1938 loudly decry the politicians for stabbing him in the back by surrendering.
I agree that the “stab in the back” theory was not a rational belief, but still a popular one. The veterans felt that they had fought hard for years, getting shot, shelled, gassed, bayonetted and just plain beaten up while standing their ground and dishing out some hurting of their own. So from their point of view, it must have been the cowards in the rear who dropped the ball. If their memory about their retreat and conduct near the end of the war got a little muddy in subsequent years, then so much the better for their pride. The “stab in the back” is what many Germans wanted to believe. And that’s all you really need to make it true to a lot of folks.