Total War and the Ludendorff Offensive of 1918

On the Western Front a hundred years ago, a furious and decisive campaign was in progress.  The great German Spring Offensive, often and rightly called the Ludendorff Offensive, was well into the process of launching about three million combat troops against the Allied lines. The Offensive would last from March 21 to July 18, 1918. The combined butcher's bill for both sides in the three-month struggle would amount altogether to over a million and half men killed, wounded, captured, or missing. The twin objects of the German assault were  to break the stalemate and end the war. The attack achieved the former, briefly, but its ultimate failure led to the Allied victory.

German Unit during Operation St. Michael

   Significantly, the battle was a product of the total war idea and the omnipotent state that had matured during the war. In 1916, the civilian leadership of Germany invited the successful Eastern Front team of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his "Quartermaster," General Erich Ludendorff, to take control of the High Command. The two had accepted on the condition that they would be given wide-ranging powers in civilian affairs as well as military. In August 1916, the High Command announced a total war plan dubbed "the Hindenburg Program"--largely shaped by Ludendorff--which introduced "total war" in myriad forms. Economic and industrial intervention became absolute. The state both operated and controlled industrial output, manipulated the economy to focus predominantly on war production. The accelerated the closing of "inessential" firms. Industries--though technically still privately owned--were centralized and conglomerated around favored companies. Inflationary finance was maximized, as were confiscation and other forms wealth transfers to the government.

     Workers lost most of the vestiges of autonomy, being ordered to work where needed. Labor forces were "recruited" in the occupied territories and used as forced labor. Civilian leaders with reservations about the powerful military industrial complex--to borrow a term coined much later--looked on helplessly as a new clique of favored industrialists, high-ranking military staff officers, and enthusiastic bureaucrats intervened at every level of the economy and society. Inflationary policies, government intervention, and the British Blockade caused the price of food and other essentials to soar. The regime sponsored books and pamphlets which extolled the virtues of an extremely low-calorie diet. Accidents and injuries in munitions plants and other factories climbed, as machinery wore out, and as various groups of Germans unaccustomed to factory work found themselves working on production lines. Labor strikes multiplied in factories across Germany, but the regime suppressed them in short order.

     Certainly, even at this late period of the war, German production of shells and other military essentials likewise climbed. But many wondered how long the whole system could last, and they were right to wonder. As Ludwig von Mises demonstrated  in his postwar analysis of the war in Nation, State, and Economy, the remarkable productive capacity of Germany did not result from the command economy, but from the previous structures of capitalism on which the command economy fed (see the "War and Economy" https://mises.org/library/nation-state-and-economy/html/p/406 section of this great book, in particular).

General Erich Ludendorff

  The Hindenburg Program and the "silent dictatorship" that ran it would have a huge impact on the world to come. Although historians tend to associate the term "total war" with Hitler and Goebbels ("Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?!"), the Third Reich planners would base many of their policies--and to a surprising extent, their military tactics--on the Hindenburg/Ludendorff model. More immediately, in 1917 Lenin looked at the Hindenburg Program admiringly from Switzerland and once in power praised the program as the appropriate model for the Bolshevik state.

   As the executive leader of the High Command, General Ludendorff had originally thought of building up impregnable fronts in the West and elsewhere, to wait for the right moment to negotiate with the weakening Allies. But the whole total war program seemed to energize him. Other factors likewise contributed to his plans for an all out roll of the dice.

    Nineteen Seventeen saw numerous Allied attempts at breakthrough on the Western Front: the Nivelle Offensive centered on the Chemin des Dames area, the British fierce but isolated battles of Vimy Ridge and Messine Ridge, and the slogging and costly campaign at Ypres called Passchendaele. Yet after relentless assaults, a substantial portion of the French army had mutinied during the Nivelle Offensive in the spring, and the Passchendaele battles were, if a technical success, an exhausting drain on the British army. Significantly, British troops also mutinied at the British training base at Etaples in September 1917. A month later, the Bolshevik Revolution touched off the final collapse of the Russian army, with enormous results detrimental to the Allies. Attempting to declare a policy of "no war, no peace," the Bolshevik regime found itself forced to the negotiating table at Brest-Litovsk, signing a peace in early March 1918 which took Russia definitively out of the Entente and resulted in the loss of one third of the European parts of the former Russian Empire.  Most ominously for the Allies, over half a million German troops from the Eastern Front were now freed up to fight on the Western Front.

   In the midst of the slaughters of 1916 and 1917, peace feelers and peace initiatives were floated on many sides, including a plan by the Pope. These trial balloons sometimes accelerated indirect communications among two or three belligerents at a time and numerous neutral powers. Yet by late 1917, the High Command strongly opposed making any concessions to the Allies in exchange for peace. German diplomats still took part in talks, but all discussions stalled on the intransigence of the total war planners, who had already opted to re-start unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917.

    The entry of the Americans in April 1917 also contributed to Ludendorff's decision to risk all on one throw of the dice. For one thing, the entry of the United States did much to limit the possibility that the British and French would consider negotiating. Before April 1917, British leadership was increasingly doubtful about the possibility of winning the war outright and was therefore open to some peace feelers. But after American intervention, victory seemed secure enough to ignore most diplomatic initiatives. Contemplating the situation, one British field marshal commented, “with the vast potential supply of men in America there should be no doubt of our winning.” On the American side, Woodrow Wilson had converted from would-be arbitrator of the war to the leader of a belligerent power, and his view was that Prussian-German militarism would only disappear in a total victory. Entente war diplomacy thus no longer needed to consider the possibility of a negotiated peace.

 At the same time on the other side of the Western Front, the corollary to Ludendorff's total war plans was the need for outright, total victory. Hence, once the Americans intervened, Ludendorff and his High Command planners came to see only one path: an all-out assault that would break up the stalemate and win the war if successful. Could German troops be transferred rapidly from the East and organized on the Western Front before the Americans could get troops into the front lines? Ludendorff's staff  looked at the coming race and prepared for an overwhelming breakthrough before substantial American forces could get into the trenches. The Ludendorff Offensive was the result.

  By utilizing most of available manpower and most of available supplies, Ludendorff determined to create five huge assaults, one after the other.  The first one alone (Operation Michael) would involve three German armies comprising something over 800,000 troops. The other four assaults would follow in stages. Each assault represented a "total" effort. In the first five hours of the first wave alone--in the early morning of March 21, 1918--the German artillery fired 1.1 million shells on a forty mile front. “We make a hole,” Ludendorff insisted, “and the rest will take care of itself.”

Tired British Troops Guard Exhausted Captured Germans, 1918

 The obvious flaw in this all-out plan was that if the gamble failed, depleted Germany would face defeat. At one with many of his generation of leaders as a kind of Social-Darwinian Romantic--one might even say Wagnerian--fatalist, Ludendorff staked all on the coming battles. But his reliance on the totality of the state was likewise a piece of his "all or nothing" plan.  In February 1918 Prince Max of Baden asked Ludendorff what would happen if the operation should fail. Ludendorff replied: “In that case Germany will go under.”

     The American presence in the Allied camp altered the dynamic of the war in many ways. Even before American entry, of course, the United States was serving as the banker and auxiliary armory of the Entente. Once in the war, the United States was an enormous financial resource: in its nineteen months at war, the United States would spend 17.1 billion in 1913 dollars on the conflict. This was somewhat below Britain (23 billion) and Germany (almost 20 billion), and more than France and Russia combined. And all of them had been at war since 1914. By means of war production, continued loans, and mobilization of its own version of a "military industrial complex," the most powerful economy in the world represented an enormous material factor.

  But financial and industrial might notwithstanding, the most immediate issue attached to American entry for both sides was, as seen above, American troops. In fact, from the moment John G. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) reached France, he faced enormous pressure from the British and French to send Americans into battle quickly and piecemeal, even as replacements in their own armies. Pershing refused the piecemeal plan of using Americans as British and French replacement troops, though he allowed a limited injection of American companies and regiments with the other Entente armies for the purposes of mastering the routines of Western Front warfare. Some American units fought on the Western front as early as December 1917, but for the most part, the hard-nosed Pershing stood up to British and French demands. Meanwhile, he carried out the task of building the American First Army, but it would not be combat-ready as a unit until late summer 1918.

  So did the AEF make a difference in the total war struggle in the spring of 1918? The answer is yes. The first Spring Offensive German attacks did not reach all their objectives, but they broke through at many points, and indeed came as close as thirty-five miles from Paris. On April 11, the normally phlegmatic British commander on the Western Front, Sir Douglas Haig wrote a "Special Order of the Day" which sounded dire. The order concluded with these famous lines: "There is no other course open to us but to fight it out.  Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.  With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.  The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment."

American Attack, Cantigny, Early Morning, 28th of May, 1918

  With catastrophe looming, Pershing relented. He did not send individual American troops to the British and French, but he sent divisions to plug gaps where needed and provide fresh troops for counterattacking German advances. On May 28, the American First Division counterattacked German salient at Cantigny. The American Third Division linked up with French colonial (Senegalese) troops on their right and regular French troops on their left on May 31, making its stand on the banks of the Marne at the extreme point of the bulge made by the Germans, at Château Thierry, earning its permanent nickname, "The Rock of the Marne." Meanwhile in June, a few miles away from Chateau Thierry, the U.S. Second Division carried out a successful counterattack at Belleau Wood. In these and other sectors of the front, 250,000 American troops arrived at the front during the waves of the Spring Offensive.

British Lewis Gun Team at Hazbrouk, April 1918

 I am not suggesting that the experienced British and French were not doing the majority of fighting on the Allied side, or that, simplistically, American troops won the war on their own. Yet the presence of capable American forces allowed both British and French to concentrate forces at points of greatest need. The Americans were, most importantly, fresh to the battle. In the Marne stand of early June, one observer witnessed a French officer delivering the order to retreat to an American unit just digging in against the German onslaught. The U.S. Marine captain replied: “Retreat, Hell. We just got here!”

By July the German army showed clear signs of  exhaustion. Lack of fuel, supplies and troop replacements hamstrung the tired German divisions. And nearly a half a million troops had been lost by June 6. The Allies, it is true, lost as many--even more--but the mobilization of new troops by the Entente changed the ratios entirely: as Germans troop totals sank, Allied troop totals rose.

   Hence, in the course of July 1918, the momentum on the Western Front shifted to the Allied side. Ludendorff had used up his resources and worn out his divisions. Moreover, the total war state that he had created began to fracture. Successful Allied counterattacks in July led to the "black day of the German army" on August 8 when the British went on the offensive at Amiens and gained eight miles back from the Germans. What followed was a continuous Hundred Days of Allied offensives on much of the front during the last three months of the war. The German army did not break, but by the time rational civilian leaders were able to begin discussing negotiations with the Allies, their negotiating position was nearly non-existent. Ludendorff had been correct about one thing: when the plan failed, Germany "went under." But along the way, the total war thinking of Ludendorff and his planning elite had not only created a model for much worse to come in the twentieth century. In this way and others, the Ludendorff Offensive shaped the modern world.

          

The Bolshevik Great Experiment: One Hundred Years Later

Lenin speaking in Red Square, 1920

Since the beginning of the centennial of World War I, I have been writing a series of essays about the war as the memory of events passes us by--a hundred years later. But as we approach the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, I find it nearly impossible to delimit my thoughts on this profound event in the history of the human race as if it were only a passage of the war, like the Somme, or American intervention, or the internment of enemy aliens.

There are so many narrations of the "event" itself. There are so many answers to the question "why." There are so many clashing depictions of tectonic shifts in Russia and the world at that time, of Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and the rest as actors, heroes, villains, and (to some modern day sycophants) secular saints.

Buzuluk in the Volga Region: Victims of the famine
created by Bolshevik food confiscations, 1920-21

The inhuman cruelty, the killing capacity of this Marxist-Leninist movement which styled itself occasionally as the champion of the "people" (though much more often and much more truthfully as the vanguard of the proletariat on the march toward a revolutionary conflagration that would produce the new man) truly tests the bounds of human comprehension. Even if we take into account a group of recent historians who minimize standard historical estimates of total non-combat, democidal totals of deaths (based in part on recently found archival materials, but in part on soft hearts still loyal to the Great Experiment), the median calculation of Communist mortality by historians and demographers credits the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin with somewhere between eighteen and sixty-two million deaths beyond technically military losses. If we add up the democidal killings of spin-off Communist regimes across the globe, the totals are astronomical, with the estimates by historians, sociologists, demographers, and other serious analysts hovering around a hundred million human beings.

Comrade Lenin sweeps away the kings,
capitalists, priests

These deaths were, in the view of Communist elites from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, necessary. The grist of History's mill, so to speak.

Still, many persist in wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and longing for the Great Experiment. In 2011, Rasmussen pollsters found that eleven percent of Americans thought that a Communist regime would be better than the current "system" of politics and economics in the United States.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/march_2011/11_say_communism_better_than_u_s_system_of_politics_and_economics

Such attitudes come in part from the lack of much serious study of history at any level in the schools in the United States and in other parts of the world. My own history students read Solzhenitsyn, or Yevgenia Ginzburg, or The Blackbook of Communism and express surprise at the enormity of Communist mass murders and persecution they have hardly  been aware of previously. But this phenomenon is by no means recent. In my own education, which took place, from first grade to Ph.D., during the Cold War, only one or two teachers dealt with Soviet and Communist mass murder in any way, and that was not until I was well into university historical studies. And of course Hollywood, that great shaper of popular historical awareness, has assiduously avoided all of this murder and misery. No doubt because it offers so little in the way of human drama.

In any case, the answer is not the schools, whose bureaucracy and whose ideological and even pedagogical limitations will never add to the curriculum a special chapter studying the bloody history of the Great Experiment. Rather, the solution will come through individual reading and learning among a growing subset of educated, and especially self-educated, persons committed to the exploration of the total state and its origins--outside and typically after the completion of formal schooling. The materials of this kind of guerrilla education takes the form these days of books, online seminars, special courses on economics and society, and myriad other forms of information that somehow escape from and flow around the historical narratives that avoid mentioning these profound crimes which took place in the name of the Marxist historical dialectic.

So as we come to this particular grim centennial, we do well to pay even more attention to the influence of the even through the whole hundred years. By any measure, World War I shaped the century after it by institutionalizing and to some extent normalizing mass violence, by unleashing the state in its aggressiveness, acquisitiveness, and power. But the "contributions" of the Bolshevik Revolution hold pride of place. As yet, the legacy of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire beginning in October/November 1917 represents the single historical fact from the Great War--of dreadfully many possible choices--that must be viewed as having visited the most misery and death on the human race in its time and over the century to come.

Deeper Forces and the Great War from January to June, 1917

A hundred years ago, the First World War was reaching its crisis. Though we tend to think of the war in terms of stalemate and attrition, the war was a complex web of human activities and human choices that seemed anything but static to most of the millions of participants. An illustration of this idea, in the broadest sense, can be seen in trends and events during the first half of 1917, just one hundred years ago. Taken as as a whole, the first six months of 1917 represents a startling shift in the shape of the war. As the fine historian René Albrecht-Carrié put it, the deeper forces emerged. The huge battles of 1916 and the resulting alterations in the size and scope of the state in all belligerent societies combined with profound events in international affairs--above all, American entry--to create an entirely new dynamic of a war that is still not done with shaping the future. As evidence, we might contemplate briefly just some of the changing components.

Since 1914, the war had been fought on many fronts besides the vast Eastern and Western Fronts. To add to these, in August 1916, Romania's entry into the war opened a new war

Romanian 105mm howitzers at the Battle of Mărăști, 1917

front involving forces from Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia, as well Romania. As the commander of Germany's army, Paul von Hindenburg, sized things up just before Romania joined the war, "It is certain that so relatively small a state as Romania had never before been given a role so important, and, indeed, so decisive for the history of the world at so favorable a moment." Romania came in on the side of Entente shortly thereafter but faced disaster. Combined Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and German forces handed the Romanian army defeat after defeat until the front stabilized in January 1917. But much of Romania was now in the hands of the Central Powers, and the Romanian army had lost a large part of its army, certainly the majority of the 300,000 military deaths (and an equal number of civilian deaths) the country would suffer before the end of the war. Still, Romania's contribution no doubt helped substantially in delaying Entente collapse on many other fronts.

In Russia, the strains of the vast 1916 Brusilov Offensive had depleted Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and other armies in numbers that prefigured the Eastern Front battles of the Second World War. The 1916 Russian offensive was counted as a victory, but it was a Phyrric one. The half a million Russian casualties it cost brought the Russian wartime total to almost six million killed, wounded, or missing soldiers by early 1917. Russian industry still produced shells, but the economy was increasingly a shambles. Corruption was rife. The famous and sordid dynamic of Nicholas, Alexandra, and Rasputin had weakened the war effort both in perception and in reality. The murder of Rasputin on December 30, 1917, did little to reverse this weakening. The relationship between the parliament (the Duma) and the High Command (headed by the Tsar) worsened. Famine threatened in many areas. Mutinies and desertions were increasing drastically by early 1917. It was in this context and at this moment that crowds poured into the streets of Petrograd, starting a chain of events which ended with the February Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar in March. The new

Students and soldiers firing on police in Petrograd
during the February Revolution

Provisional Government pledged itself to continue the war effort, but observers in all countries had doubts--especially since the Russian Caucasus army facing the Turks had disintegrated the moment the news of the February Revolution reached it. On the other hand, strategists of the Central Powers began to revive their early visions of a victory in Russia followed by a concentration of forces in the West. To many German leaders it now seemed possible to achieve a delayed and attenuated version of the failed Schlieffen Plan at long last.

It was on the heels of these events that the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Of course, the United States had been neutral in the official sense before April 6. But in fact, American loans, goods, and shipping had been a major component of Allied war-making since 1915. Equally important, the United States as a "neutral" had impacted the shape of German naval policy and the maintenance of the British Blockade of Germany by means of Woodrow Wilson's pressure on the Germans to curtail their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.  

From April to June 1918, the exact nature of the American contribution was yet to be worked out, but it was immediately evident that without the hindrances of official neutrality, the efforts the Americans would be crucial, if they materialized in time.

Robert Nivelle in 1916

And even the promise of American intervention came none too soon for the Entente powers. The French launched the murderous "Nivelle Offensive" in the center of the Western Front three days after American entry. Nivelle had managed to sell to Allied leaders an updated theory of offensive-mindedness with the promise of a total victory against the Germans in France within a few days. The method--throwing away Henri Petain's proven system, "artillery conquers, infantry holds"--was, simply, one furious attack after another. The result was the "French Mutinies." Beginning in early May, frontline soldiers in many, perhaps half, of French divisions simply refused to go over the top in these suicidal attacks. Desertions grew, but for the most part, French poilus disobeyed orders and held their positions instead of charging across No Man's Land to attack impregnable German positions. Self-preservation by means of "informal truces" had meant survival throughout the war for many soldiers in all armies, but this widespread mutiny represented something far more serious. Further, in Italy, a Nivelle-like offensive on the Isonzo Front produced a similar plunge in morale, with desertions and mutinies beginning in June 1917. Likewise, the failure of the Russian Kerensky Offensive of

The ruined village of Soupir, one of many such in the wake of
the Nivelle Offensive

June 1917 reignited the wave of mutinies in the Russian army, rendering it incapable of further offensive operations. As for Britain, a sizeable mutiny at the brutal British training base at Etaples would break out in September 1917, with much less effect on the front itself. Still, Allied leaders were faced with the irony of an enormous diplomatic victory in the form of American entry--but potential Entente military collapse before the United States could mobilize.

Artillery preparation for the Canadian attack at Vimy Ridge

It is true that the Entente had some important successes during the first half of 1917, almost all of them by British and Empire units. The Arras Campaign (in particular the Canadian assault at Vimy Ridge and the Messines battle in the Ypres sector) made gains that were large by Western Front standards. But these victories were local, and in their primary mission (to divert Germans from the larger Nivelle offensive) unsuccessful. They never came close to any breakthrough, and the Germans would recapture much of the gained territory in 1918.

Finally, the specter of a collapse of Entente fighting morale in 1917 took shape as all the home fronts (Entente and Central Powers alike) developed fissures, above all in the vital area of war production. The sheer pressure of manpower shortages in the face of accelerating munitions needs had led to increasing hours, dangerous working conditions, food shortages, and government repression of many kinds in the munitions factories of all the countries involved. Strikes had occurred in the workforces of all belligerent societies since 1915, but now strikes skyrocketed everywhere in extent, intensity, and violence. Again, these social fractures affected all belligerents, but since the Entente governments were simultaneously facing exhaustion and mutiny on so many fronts, the situation was indeed dire. 

Under these conditions the entry and war mobilization of the United States, the fourth most populous country on the globe and the world's strongest economy, could hardly be anything but pivotal after June 1917.