French and British territorial gains at Arras, Chemin des Dames, and Passchendaele the previous year-- though modest, and achieved at a tremendous loss of life -- had shaken German confidence in its elaborate fortifications.
Any chance for a negotiated peace had evaporated in September 1917 when, in response to a scheme devised by Foreign Minister Richard von Kuhlmann to drive a wedge between the two, France had refused to cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany and Britain to yield on the restoration of Belgian sovereignty.
Strangled by a blockade which there was no hope of breaking, Germans at home were hungry, cold, and restless. Having conscripted all "untrained men of military age not employed in absolutely essential civilian callings," (Keegan, p. 393) the army was hurting for manpower "almost as acutely as for the bare necessities of life . . . Beardless youths and old men were being called up to flesh out the formations, and they did not mind it too much," since the small rations of meat they would receive three or four times a week would be a welcome supplement to their spare diets. (Marshall, p. 340)
Although the arrival of American troops was slower than had been anticipated -- by March 1918 only two hundred thousand were in France, and of these only sixty per cent were combat trained -- Ludendorff calculated they would become an overwhelming force by mid-year, and that he had only six months to win the war in the west.
Among other factors, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks in March boosted his prospects immensely. "From November 1, 1917, to March 21, 1918 . . . the German Eastern Front divisions fell from eighty-five to forty-seven and those in the west rose from one hundred forty-seven to one hundred ninety-one," a total of three-and-a-half million men, including one hundred thirty-six thousand officers. (Stevenson, p. 325)
While the British could deploy sixty-five divisions and the French one hundred and nine, both had reduced the strength of their divisions from twelve battalions to nine. Their respective field commanders, Douglas Haig and Henri Petain, had rejected a proposal to establish a joint reserve contingent of thirty divisions -- each stubbornly determined to retain operational independence.
When the French prevailed upon their partner to alleviate the fourfold disparity in front line coverage, Haig ordered his right wing commander Herbert Gough to redistribute his troops twenty miles southward, a maneuver which made Gough's Fifth Army -- already the weakest in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) -- exceedingly vulnerable. His problems were compounded by inadequate defensive preparation; along his third line, the ground was excavated only to a foot's depth, and wire entanglements and machine-gun nests were incomplete. Over eighty per cent of his battalions were positioned in the first and second battle zones where they were dangerously exposed to bombardment. (Keegan, p. 396)
"To make matters worse, February and March were unseasonably dry. Twelve miles of Gough's front, normally insulated by the flooding Oise, had become a somewhat muddy plain rather than an obstacle." (Marshall, p. 350)
Opposite him lay virtually impregnable German defenses: "massive, sophisticated, ten-mile-deep systems of interconnected and mutually supportive machine-gun pillboxes, moatlike traps for infantry and tanks, and artillery-proof bunkers, all guarded by shoals of barbed and razor wire." (Meyer, p. 596)
Innovative German tactics -- which had been evolving since the second half of 1917 -- had attained a level of deadly perfection in their complementary deployment of artillery and infantry.
Grasping the futility of extended bombardments that announced impending attacks, Lieutenant Colonel Georg Bruchmuller rejected them in favor of using aerial reconnaissance and photography to register guns on firing ranges prior to bringing them to the front. The ensuing barrage, lasting hours instead of days, came as a complete surprise, and involved an enormous, crushing deluge of shells fired at short, medium, and long range. Beyond the front line, a heavy reliance on tear gas and phosgene -- a lethal combination, as the former poison would compel soldiers to rip off their masks to rub their eyes and thus succumb to the latter -- avoided cratering the ground over which the infantry would be advancing. (Meyer, pp. 629-630)
In the vanguard would be "Hutier" storm troopers, infiltrators named after General Oskar von Hutier. Detachments of six to eight men, they were trained to take advantage of whatever cover they could find, scramble to keep pace with the creeping barrage that was their shield, slip around enemy strongpoints, and penetrate the territory ahead with unprecedented speed. Officers were to exercise initiative, boldness, and flexibility in deciding on the spot how far and how fast to move. In their wake followed larger, more heavily armed units charged with seizing the bypassed emplacements and constructing defensive works. (Meyer, pp. 596-597, 630)
Judging that "the BEF was so placed that it had little back country in which to retreat," Ludendorff, after much procrastination, finally settled on the sector near St. Quentin, site of the old Somme battlefield, for the opening salvo of his "Operation Michael," and the doorway for a drive up the line of the river toward the sea. It was an inspired choice. Twenty-one divisions from Hutier's Eighteenth Army and sixteen from Georg von der Marwitz's Second Army would fall upon Gough's undermanned and overextended eleven-and-a-half divisions. On Gough's left, eight divisions of Julian Byng's Third Army would be hit by double that number from Otto von Below's Seventh Army. (Marshall, p. 343)
It was Germany's last great gamble, after which it had no more cards to play. Like a bloodied boxer in the final round, Ludendorff was risking all of his remaining strength on a knockout punch; if the offensive failed, he said, "Germany must go under." (Hochschild, p. 318)
The storm broke on the morning of March 21 -- a blistering five-hour barrage of flame, steel, and gas poured from sixty-four hundred guns, after which German storm troopers rushed forward shrouded in fog. Not only were defenders along the thinned front blinded by this stealthy fifth column, attackers probing the middle ground for breakthrough points were screened from flanking fire. (Marshall, p. 353)
"The fog, the soul-shattering power of the artillery, and the speed with which the storm troopers followed the creeping barrage -- all of it combined to produce a rout." (Meyer, p. 632) Brigade headquarters, battery positions, and road intersections collapsed under the shellfire. (Marshall, p. 354) The first line defenders were quickly overrun, and killed, captured, or chased to the rear.
Further north, a German envelopment threatened the security of Byng's Third Army. Advised of the pincers about to ensnare Byng, which would leave his own left flank dangling, Gough ordered a ten-mile withdrawal to the only natural defense available to him, the north-south line of the River Somme at its intersection with the Crozat Canal. (Meyer, p. 633) The BEF had suffered its first true defeat since the inauguration of trench warfare three and a half years earlier. (Keegan, p. 400)
Resuming his almost unimpeded march at sunrise, Hutier pushed across the river, broke loose into open country northwest of St. Quentin, and drove Gough further into disarray and retreat. It was a rare feat on the Western Front: keeping a major offensive moving through a second day. (Meyer, p. 635)
The next morning, March 23, found the British on the verge of ruin. "Eight of the divisions with which Gough had begun the battle were in shambles. Hutier's troops were west of the Somme, gobbling up mile after mile." As it disintegrated, Gough's left wing lost contact with Byng's right -- exposing the latter's flank and extending the line he had to defend. (Meyer, p. 635)
That same day a series of mysterious explosions rocked the heart of Paris. Within hours the source was discovered. "An enormous new cannon called the Kaiser Wilhelm was firing eight-inch shells from freshly conquered territory more than seventy-five miles from the capital. Between its March debut and August, it would fire two hundred eighty-three rounds, kill one hundred civilians, destroy property at random, and accomplish nothing." (Meyer, p. 637)
"In the Flesquieres salient, the one last linchpin of Byng's hold on the forward ground, the six battalion commanders of the Royal Naval Division decided on their own that the hour had come either to withdraw or lose everything. They got out on March 24, and with that mooring gone, Byng's army hastily relinquished the cratered ground so hard-won in the 1916 Somme battles. To Ludendorff's eyes it must have appeared that the game was almost over." (Marshall, p. 357)
But then he made a critical error. He had expected to achieve his deepest penetration on the British left, against Byng. "But because the greatest success had been won at the outset on the extreme right of the British line, where it joined the French south of the Somme, it was in that sector that the German High Command decided to make the decisive effort . . . The order marked an abandonment of the strategy of a single, massive thrust, and the adoption of a three-pronged advance in which none of the prongs would be strong enough to execute a breakthrough." (Keegan, pp. 403-404)
Moreover, Ludendorff's armies lacked the structural capability to consummate the campaign. Approaching Amiens, they were stalled by the obstacles of the old Somme battlefield: abandoned trenches, broken roads, and treacherous craters. They possessed neither the tanks nor armored cars that might facilitate their progress; without access to rubber, their few motor vehicles rolled on steel tires that quickly chewed up any viable roadways. (Meyer, p. 638) Astonished to find their opposite numbers abandoning huge stockpiles of food, liquor, and wool and cotton clothing, German soldiers were too easily tempted to halt, plunder, and gorge themselves. (Keegan, p. 404)
On March 26, at the height of the crisis, with the Germans sixteen miles from Amiens -- the strategic prize where not only the region's transportation arteries but also the British and French sectors converged -- the Anglo-French political and military leadership convened at nearby Doullens. Haig abandoned his steadfast resistance to any dilution of his authority and agreed to serve under the command of French Chief of Staff Ferdinand Foch, who would be "charged . . . with the co-ordination of the action of the British and French armies." (Keegan, p. 403)
Haig's motives were obvious. Foch's new role would enable him to exert control over Petain and "permit a more thorough and systematic sharing of Allied resources that, under current circumstances, could only benefit the British." (Meyer, p. 640)
As Mauritz's Third Army, supported by nine of Below's divisions, prepared for the climactic assault on Amiens, Petain detached the French Fifth Army from Champagne, and sent it to the scene. The Germans had moved too far and too fast; their troops were exhausted, and starved of food and ammunition. Thrusts north and south of Amiens -- by Marwitz at Albert and Hutier at Noyons -- were rebuffed. (Marshall, p. 360) The British Australian Corps mounted a counterattack outside Amiens on April 4; the next day Ludendorff, conceding that, "The enemy resistance is beyond our powers," dropped the curtain on Operation Michael. (Keegan, p.404)
"The Germans had captured twelve hundred square miles . . . more than a thousand guns, and mountains of supplies." They had inflicted two hundred thirty thousand casualties on the enemy, but had incurred an equal amount themselves. They had lengthened their line by fifty miles, moved into a huge but worthless new salient, and left behind the strongest infrastructure on the Western front. "They had to start from scratch on ground where they had no finished defenses, no support system, no anything." (Meyer, p. 642)
Hardly discouraged, Ludendorff turned to the second phase of his grand offensive, a strike against the British in Flanders, code-named Operation George, also known as the Battle of Lys or Fourth Ypres. When Ludendorff found he had only eleven intact divisions on hand instead of thirty and consequently contracted the intended front from thirty miles between Lens and Ypres to twelve between La Bassee and Armentieres, one of his staff officers caustically substituted the diminutive appellation Georgette. (Marshall, p. 363)
After a five-hour Bruchmuller barrage of crushing intensity, on the morning of April 9, shrouded in heavy fog, nine German divisions fell upon four Portuguese divisions serving with the British. As the fog wafted away and the Portuguese saw what was coming, they threw down their arms and fled, some as far as Le Havre, where they sat out the rest of the war. "By evening, the Germans had reached the Lys River, five miles inside the British front around Neuve-Chapelle, and were well on their way to Armentieres." (Marshall, p. 364)
Georgette's main objective was Hazebrouck, a railway hub which if captured would jeopardize the BEF's supply lines and channel ports. On April 10 the Germans widened the battle, sending five divisions against five brigades north of Armentieres. "By nightfall they had occupied the old British defensive system all the way from Givenchy to the last road juncture four miles south of Ypres. Even so, at a terrible cost, the pivotal flanks south of Givenchy and north of Hollebeke had held firm." (Marshall, pp. 364-365)
On April 11, with the British contesting, but gradually yielding, field after field, Messines Ridge was lost when its defenders were either shot or ran out of ammunition. (Marshall, p. 365)
Haig's order that day would be derided in the trenches but celebrated on the home front: "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, we must fight to the end." (Meyer, p. 652)
On April 12 Ludendorff got within five miles of Hazebrouck before his progress was barred by any and all combatants the British could throw into the fray: the Australian First Division, the Fourth Guards brigade, pioneers, and even a battalion of cyclists. (Marshall, p. 365)
The next day, probing for weak spots, the Germans attacked on the northern edge of the Ypres salient, where the British defenses were thin. Sir Herbert Plumer refused to sacrifice his men to glorify pointlessly heroic gestures. Disregarding Haig, he ordered a withdrawal, relinquishing all the ground at Passchendaele which had been so dearly purchased in 1917. But he inflicted a heavy toll on the enemy and shortened and strengthened his line sufficiently to prevent a collapse. (Meyer, p. 653)
Ludendorff was desperate to acquire something of value to justify the carnage and the carving out of another exposed salient. On April 25 his forces stormed the strategic height of Mont Kemmel, swept away its French defenders, and opened a path to Mont des Cats; its possession would have compelled the British evacuation of the Ypres salient and the Yser position. (Keegan, pp.405-406) But Ludendorff, wary of unexpected successes, had ordained a halt, and so the Germans remained in place all day, failing to exploit one of their best opportunities of that fateful spring; that evening the British came forward from the rear and sealed the gap. (Meyer, pp. 655-656)
On April 29 Ludendorff made one more try, sending his Fourth Army and all available reserves against Cassel, a town overlooking the port of Dunkirk. It was another bloody fight, it gained nothing, and it brought Georgette to an end. (Meyer, p. 656)
"World War I witnessed no nobler or more decisive stand than that of the BEF in front of Ypres in April 1918. There were no church bells to peal. Plumer's army little knew what it had achieved." (Marshall, pp. 366-367)
Still hopeful of a death blow in Flanders if he could lure its defenders to another theater, Ludendorff now turned his attention southward -- where "the grain of the country offered an axis of advance down the valley of the Oise toward Paris, only seventy miles distant." Between it and the German armies stood the Chemin des Dames ridge, on which Nivelle's offensive had broken the previous May, and a line commanded by one of Generalissimo Foch's most ardent disciples, General Denis Duchene. Contemptuous of Petain's elastic defense-in-depth tactics, Duchene crowded his men into poorly-prepared entrenchments close to the front and positioned them north of the Aisne River, with their backs to the water. (Meyer, p. 662)
At four A.M. on the morning of May 27, trailing a four-hour bombardment of two million shells fired from six thousand guns, "fourteen divisions of storm troops with seven more in close support attacked behind a wall-solid creeping barrage . . . By midday they had advanced five miles and . . . were across the Aisne . . . and by nightfall across a second river, the Vesle." (Meyer, pp. 663-664)
"The tide rolled on toward the Marne, spreading to gather in the pivotal rail and road hub at Soissons. Twenty-four hours after the guns spoke, the Germans were twenty miles past their departure line and well on their way to Paris." (Marshall, p. 370)
But Soissons would not suffice. Until Reims -- thirty miles east -- fell, the Germans would be expanding into a salient that, "while growing bigger at the bottom, had a dangerously narrow mouth and only one vulnerable lifeline." (Meyer, p. 664)
But then, just as the Germans appeared unstoppable, on June 1, the American First and Second Divisions -- the latter including a brigade of the U.S. Marine Corps, the army's most professional element -- linked up with French units and met the enemy at Chateau-Thierry. "It was the Americans' first major engagement," and it brought the Germans to a standstill. The commander at Reims disobeyed his superior's order to abandon the city, stayed in place, and stopped the Germans there as well. (Meyer, p. 672)
Checked at Chateau-Thierry, the Germans wheeled to the village of Vaux, which lies astride the Paris-Metz road. Further to the north, they burst into the Belleau Wood, where General James Harbord was bringing forward his Marine Brigade to relieve the embattled French. (Marshall, p. 379) When withdrawing French soldiers urged Captain Lloyd Williams to follow them, his response would enter Corps mythology: "Retreat? Hell, we just got here." (Keegan, p. 407)
With the Germans stalled, the Marines attacked on June 6 -- artlessly at times, marching shoulder to shoulder through forests across rough, rocky terrain ideal for nesting machine-guns and concealing expert riflemen. A precarious toehold on the southern side of the wood could not be held against German reinforcement and resupply. But on June 11 the Marines drove back in after a massive artillery barrage and captured two-thirds of the disputed ground and three hundred Germans. Two days later Harbord's qualified marksmen repulsed a counterattack, and on June 25 cleared the entire wood of the enemy. The U.S. Second Division reclaimed Vaux for the Allies on July 1. (Marshall, pp. 384-385)
"The Marines had not won the war, but their brigade had stopped the Germans on the Paris road. . . . and decimated four enemy divisions in Belleau Wood." (Marshall, pp. 385-386) More significant were the two hundred fifty thousand Americans disembarking in France every month and their twenty-five organized divisions in or behind the battle zone. (Keegan, p. 408)
Thwarted again, Ludendorff initiated a fourth offensive, at the River Matz west of Soissons, with the goal of broadening the mouth of the salient in that direction. Once again the French commander had placed his main force on or near the forward line, where the German artillery devoured it. "Hutier's troops advanced six miles at the outset, demolishing three French divisions and taking eight thousand prisoners." Then, on June 11, as if from out of nowhere, the French, led by Charles Mangin, "the Butcher," emerged from a dense fog, caught the Germans on open ground west of Soissons, and repulsed them so violently that Ludendorff terminated the campaign. (Meyer, p. 673)
The inability of the Germans to sustain success was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Spanish influenza that would metastasize into a worldwide epidemic. Chronic malnutrition made them more susceptible to the disease; half a million would be disabled in June 1918, and two hundred thousand would succumb to it by the end of the war. (Meyer, p. 674)
A month of comparative quiet was interrupted on July 4 when, at the Battle of Hamel, John Monash, an Australian Jew and the first non-British commander of the Australian-New Zealand Corps (ANZAC), planned and executed one of the most remarkable operations of the war. Drawing on his organizational genius and his bridge and road-building experience, integrating as never before his machine-guns, artillery, aircraft, and tanks, Monash reached all of his objectives in ninety minutes, incurred minimal casualties, secured Amiens, and laid the foundation for further successes. (Meyer, pp. 674-675)
On July 15 Ludendorff committed his remaining fifty-two divisions to a fifth offensive at the Marne River. East of Reims General Henri Gourand, commanding the French Fourth Army, effectively employed an elastic defense-in-depth -- with the main line of resistance, the third, well to the rear -- to lure German infantry columns into an artillery firestorm and contain them.
But further west Henri Berthelot's Fifth Army fared not so well against Max von Boehn's Seventh Army, which achieved a deep penetration against the heavily manned high ground in the forward positions. The Germans got south of the river and drove a pocket four miles deep and nine miles long, although their effort to widen the salient westward into the Surmelin Valley was blocked by the valiant stand of the U.S. Third Division, which lost forty per cent of its strength that day. Realizing he was now merely wasting lives, Ludendorff ordered his armies to abandon the offensive and dig in. (Marshall, p. 398)
On July 18 Mangin sent twenty-three divisions, four of them American, in a heavy counter-stroke designed to cut the Soissons-Chateau-Thierry highway and choke off supply to the Marne salient. (Marshall, pp. 399-400)
The American First and Second Divisions were at the center of the attack, and the fighting was ferocious. Wrote one soldier: "Company and platoon commanders lost control . . . so thick was the going that anything like formation was impossible. It was every man for himself, an irregular, broken line, clawing through the tangles, climbing over fallen trees, plunging into the Boche rifle pits." (Meyer, pp. 676-677)
By 7:00 AM the Second Division had reached its first day's objective, the high ground around Vierzy. By noon the front of the German Ninth army was ruptured, the First Division having advanced four miles and bagged sixteen hundred prisoners and thirty cannon. (Marshall, p. 403)
"By day's end the Germans had managed to cobble together a defensive line some five miles back from where they had started, but fifteen thousand had been taken prisoner and they had lost four hundred guns." Ludendorff began transferring his army back across the river, while trying to salvage as many weapons and supplies as possible. (Meyer, p. 677)
"The balance of power had shifted." In March the Germans had had three hundred thousand more soldiers than the Allies, but between the start of Michael and the end of July more than a million of them -- including many prime youth trained as storm troops -- had been killed, wounded, or captured. Although the British and the French together had suffered commensurately, the Americans were more than making up for their losses and had boosted Allied numerical superiority to two hundred thousand. (Meyer, p. 677)
For two weeks the Germans staggered back, first to the Ourcq, and then to the Aisne-Vesle Rivers, where their French and American pursuers seized the high ground and trained their guns on Soissons. The deep enemy pocket had shrunk to a straight line running from Reims west to Soissons. And at every critical point, American units had spearheaded the recovery. (Marshall, pp. 411-412)
Meanwhile, in front of Amiens, Haig and Foch were concentrating "an enormous force of armour, five hundred thirty British tanks, seventy French, with the intention of breaking into the old Somme battlefield through the extemporized defenses constructed by the Germans after their advance in March and driving deep into their rear." (Keegan, p. 410)
Planned, organized, and executed by Monash -- whose corps had become part of a new British Fourth Army -- the blow was struck on August 8, when two thousand guns thundered. His infantry moved forward rapidly under cover of a perfectly timed creeping barrage and crossed the five-hundred-yard no man's land in less than one-quarter hour -- Canadians on the right, Australians in the center, British on the left. Surprise was complete. (Marshall, p. 414)
The Anzacs traversed six miles by 10:30 AM, nine miles by noon. In a shocking development, the Germans refused to respond to orders, even to stop and attempt to fight. Including six hundred fifty officers, they lost twenty-six thousand men that day, two-thirds of whom surrendered willingly, often in large well-armed groups. Ludendorff called it "the Black Day of the German Army." (Meyer, p. 680)
The next day, twenty miles south, the French First and Third Armies outflanked and isolated the garrison at Montdidier, which had no choice but to capitulate; vast stores of munitions and other materiel fell into Allied hands. (Marshall, p. 417)
At the eleventh hour, Marwitz was able to stabilize his Second Army. "He sealed a hole in his line with reserves and organized a counterattack that shrank the British gain to a few miles . . . The Germans were helped by the British and French infantry's lack of experience on the offensive" and by the unreliability of the British tanks, which broke down, became stuck in the muddy terrain, or were easily punctured or blown apart. (Meyer, p. 680)
The Germans were paying a dear price for their stubborn and courageous resistance. Their casualties in August totaled two hundred thirty thousand, of whom one hundred ten thousand were listed as missing, a euphemism for desertion. By September their division count on the Western Front was down to one hundred twenty-five -- compared to two hundred for the Allies -- of which only forty-seven were considered capable of combat. (Meyer, pp. 683-684)
"The war had come down to a rapid succession of hard Allied blows that the Germans could only do their diminishing best to contain." A breakthrough at Arras on August 26 compelled Ludendorff finally to retire to the Hindenburg Line, to give back all the territory he had grabbed in his five offensives since the start of the year.
Ludendorff's worst headache was not the British, nor the Canadians, nor the Anzacs; it was the huge American army General John Pershing had assembled south of Verdun, "opposite the tangled and waterlogged ground of the St. Mihiel salient, which had been in German hands since 1914." (Keegan, p. 411)
On September 12 this overwhelming force of one million Americans, one hundred ten thousand Frenchmen, three thousand artillery pieces, fifteen hundred planes, and unlimited ammunition achieved a near bloodless victory when it caught by surprise a rear guard covering the escape of eighty undermanned German divisions. In a single day, the U.S. V Corps, the French II Corps, and the U.S. IV and I Corps, attacking in a semi-circle west to south to east, liberated two hundred square miles of French soil and captured fifteen thousand prisoners and four hundred fifty guns -- at a cost of seven thousand casualties. (Meyer, p. 692)
On September 26, in response to Foch's inspiring cry, "Everyone to battle," the British, French, Belgian, and American armies sent their one hundred twenty-three divisions, with fifty-seven in reserve, against the Germans' last line of resistance, the Hindenberg Line, and their fifty-one battleworthy divisions. (Keegan, p. 412)
Pershing had committed his Fifth Army to the impenetrable tunnel-like Argonne Valley, bounded on the west by thick forests and on the east by the impassable Meuse River. "The terrain was so repellent as to suggest that nature had designed it to serve as a barrier," covered as it was with ravines, hillocks, meandering streams, and dense trees and underbrush that reduced visibility to twenty feet. (Marshall, p. 433)
The Germans had added every conceivable man-made obstacle -- parallel and connecting trenches, concrete dugouts, fortified strongpoints, all supported by barbed wire and machine-guns. They occupied the high ground east of the Meuse and the sixteen hundred foot ridge on the opposite flank, from which dozens of heavy guns could rain death on the attackers. (Fleming)
Staff Colonel George C. Marshall managed the daunting logistics of transferring 400,000 soldiers from St. Mihiel to the Argonne in ten days; it gave the Americans an eight-to-one superiority at the outset, although before long the perverse topography and the Germans' shrewd and accurate siting of weapons evened the odds. The battle would last as long as the war, and with twenty-six thousand lives lost prove to be the bloodiest in American history. (Fleming)
In the center, the V Corps did not reach its objective, Montfaucon, until the second day. On the left, the I Corps was hit hard and stopped in the Argonne. "By nightfall the front was in a state of disorganization. Troops had lost their way; they couldn't follow their maps; the countryside was too broken. Messages went to the wrong point; supplies failed; artillery foundered in trying to get forward . . . Wrapped in perpetual gloom . . . units found their way by guess or dead reckoning. The enemy had every trail covered and every height crowned by a machine-gun nest." (Marshall, p. 436)
Routed by the Prussian Guards on September 29, imperiled west of the forest where the French had hardly gained a foot, immobilized by staunch opposition and massive traffic jams in his rear, Pershing called for a temporary suspension of the offensive on October 1. (Fleming)
On October 4 the First Division blasted a four-mile salient up the Aire River, but at such a cost -- ninety-four hundred men -- that after six days it had to fall back. (Fleming)
On October 8 a bold sideways attack from the edge of the salient by the 82nd Division drove the Germans from the forest. During this operation Corporal Alvin York and sixteen platoon members, working their way behind the enemy, were pinned down by machine-gun fire. With rifle and pistol York proceeded to kill twenty-eight men without missing a shot, and then, adding to his legend, rounded up one hundred thirty-two prisoners en route back to his unit. (Fleming)
The horrendous casualties obliged Pershing to cannibalize divisions newly-arrived in France, to deviate from accepted practice and send green men into battle alongside strangers. Over one hundred thousand stragglers had fled to the rear; in desperation he ordered any attempting to desert to be shot. (Fleming)
On October 16 a brigade led by Douglas MacArthur reached the crest of the forbidding Cote de Chatillon and held it against a ferocious counterattack. On its right the 32nd Division fought through murderous shrapnel and bullets to capture another key height -- the Cote Dame Marie. These were goals Pershing had set for the first day; instead they had consumed three weeks and one hundred thousand casualties. (Fleming)
On November 1 a rested and replenished First Army unleashed a thunderous predawn barrage. The I and III Corps attacked vigorously on the left and right flanks, but the main effort was a three-division smash up the center by V Corps spearheaded by the veteran Second Division and its Marine Brigade. Outflanked on the left and right by the Second Division's four-mile penetration, the Germans had no choice but to disengage and retreat. Their one hope of containing the American surge -- the Meuse River -- vanished when the Fifth Division rolled over open ground under fire and crossed the river at Dun-sur-Meuse. A crucial railroad link was now within range of American artillery. (Fleming)
Within hours the Americans were racing toward Sedan, site of France's ignominious surrender to Germany in 1871. After considerable controversy and confusion, during which some of his units crossed in front of and fired on each other, Pershing instructed them to halt at the gates of the city and allowed his ally to claim the symbolic prize. (Fleming)
All along the front, the fighting raged on an immense scale, with Allied dominance undeniable. Guns, tanks, and aircraft, rather than bodies, were hammering the Germans into submission. The French were stocked with six thousand medium and heavy guns, compared to three hundred in 1914. Twelve thousand tons of munitions were being fired every twenty-four hours. (Meyer, p. 694)
As early as September 28, at a meeting at their headquarters at Spa, Lundendorff had told Hindenburg that the war was lost, and the Germans must seek an armistice.
On October 3 the Kaiser appointed as Chancellor Prince Max of Baden, a moderate, an advocate of a negotiated peace, and a symbol to the Allies that a liberal regime might be forthcoming. Prince Max dispatched a note to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson requesting an immediate armistice under the Fourteen Points he had issued in January. Wilson replied promptly, advising the Germans to confirm acceptance of these terms and their willingness to withdraw from all occupied territory. "Prince Max's government, encouraged, signaled its agreement." (Meyer, p. 697)
Then on October 10, a U-boat sunk a passenger vessel off the Irish coast, with the loss of three hundred lives. (Marshall, p. 443) Two days later the mail boat Leinster was torpedoed twice as it plied its usual course between Ireland and England; four hundred fifty perished, including one hundred thirty-five women and children. (Meyer, pp. 698-699)
Anti-German hysteria and the cold rage of vengeance undermined Wilson's conciliatory inclinations. Referring to the "arbitrary" power of Germany's military elite and the threat it posed for the world, "he declared that any armistice terms must be settled not with him, not even with the Allied governments acting jointly, but with the commanders in the field." (Meyer, p. 699)
"On October 23 the Germans were shocked to receive a third note from Wilson: 'If the Government of the United States must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany,' he declared, 'it must demand not peace negotiations but surrender.' " (Meyer, p. 699)
Prince Max went straight to the Kaiser and told him that either Ludendorff must go or he must look for another Chancellor. "Thereon Wilhelm sent for the First Quartermaster General and summarily dismissed him." Ludendorff donned a false beard and dark glasses and slunk away to Sweden, fleeing his country lest he lose his life. (Marshall, p. 447)
Every day, every hour, brought word of fresh disasters. Bulgaria had exited the war on September 30 when the Allies had cracked their stranglehold in Salonika. Allenby's advance into northern Palestine and vanquishing of the Turks at Megiddo silenced them on October 30. The Austrians suffered their last crushing defeat at Vittorio Veneto, and signed an armistice on November 3.
On November 9, with Berlin in turmoil and the moderate politicians threatened by street crowds incited by Bolshevik leaders Karl Liebknect and Rosa Luxembourg, Prince Max transferred the chancellorship to Majority Socialist Friedrich Ebert. Having clung for a week to the vain hope that his army would stand behind him and help to restore order, Kaiser Wilhelm finally submitted to the warnings of his counselors that civil war was imminent and abdicated the dynasty on November 10; he boarded a train for Holland where, at the Castle of Doorn, he would live long enough for Hitler to provide him a guard of honor. (Keegan, pp. 418-419)
Arriving at Allied headquarters in Comiegne on November 8, the head of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, had been instructed by his government to accept whatever terms were offered by Foch. They were non-negotiable -- German withdrawal to east of the Rhine within fourteen days; repudiation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and a return to the borders of August 1, 1914; the conveyance of five thousand artillery pieces, three thousand mortars, thirty thousand machine-guns, and two thousand aircraft; and surrender of Germany's possessions in Africa. Erzberger, who would later be assassinated for his betrayal of the Fatherland, had no choice but to accept, following the expiration of the Allies' three-day grace period. (Meyer, pp. 703-704)
"It was over. The armistice went into effect at eleven A.M. on November 11." (Meyer, p. 704)
Something on the order of nine-and-a-half men were dead: four million from the Central Powers, almost a million more than that on the Allies' side. Those numbers do not include the more than fifteen million wounded, or the nearly nine million who had become prisoners or war. "Nor do they include the numberless millions of civilians who died in every imaginable way." (Meyer, p. 705)
Among the many epitaphs rendered upon this holocaust, the one inscribed by prolific British journalist, novelist, historian, and propagandist, John Buchan, who lost his brother and half of his closest friends, seems as profound as any: "There are far more dead than living now."
REFERENCES
Fleming, Thomas. "Meuse-Argonne Offensive of World War I." Military History, October 1993.
Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.
Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
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