World War I, 1914-18
2.6. The Beginning and the End
and operations but economics and politics as well. Thanks to his extensive reading in the military literature, Bloch knew as much about weapons as most o cers did, but still he missed some of the most important technical innovations such as the advent of heavy artillery and mechanization. He also underestimated the ability of the modern state to dominate its citizens; yet his main prediction of a long war of attrition with all the attendant consequences, down to the ultimate collapse of entire countries, did come true. By contrast, Corbett’s greatest insight was his realization that sea power, used less to ght climactic battles than to keep communications lines open, would be decisive.
Had it not been for sea power, Britain could not have come to the aid of France, and Germany, whose resources were greatly superior, would probably have won the war within a matter of months, as happened in 1870–71. Likewise, had it not been for sea power, no British or French aid could have reached Russia, which might have collapsed earlier than it did. A fortiori, it would have been impossible for the United States to bring its superior resources to bear even to the rather limited extent it did so while the war lasted.
Conversely, it was only sea power, this time in the form of submarines, that could have prevented that development from taking place. Sea power also permitted France and Britain to open up numerous secondary fronts in places as far apart as Macedonia, Gallipoli, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, though some would say that doing so did more to disperse resources than to produce victory.
More importantly, it enabled them to maintain communications with their empires from which much of their raw materials (including oil) and some of their manpower came. Had it not been for this factor, Allied trucks might have been equipped with steel tires as were German vehicles.
In early 1918, with Russia compelled to sign a separate peace and Italy having su ered a heavy defeat at Caporetto, it looked as if the Central Powers had nally reached the point where victory was within their grasp. On both sides, the war industries turned out equipment at a previously unimaginable rate. Having been armed
by countless new weapons and having learned to wage modern technological war, the armed forces themselves would have routed their 1914 predecessors almost as easily as if the latter had consisted of colonial levies. Still, the factors that for three years prevented a breakthrough on the all-important Western Front remained. The great German o ensives of spring 1918 were the most successful since 1914, yet they failed to knock either France or Britain out of the war. Meanwhile, fresh American forces were arriving, and by the time of the armistice there were more than a million doughboys in France. Partly because their commander, General John Pershing, refused to scatter them among the British and the French forces, and partly because of inexperience, their contribution to the actual ghting was limited,56 but it was the promise of many more to come that convinced Ludendor the war had to be brought to an end.
Perhaps the really surprising thing about all this is that, when the end came, it happened, almost simultaneously, on all fronts. As late as July 1918, the German armies were again on the o ensive, moving toward Paris, and by means of the so-called Paris gun, with its seventy-mile range, Germany was able to threaten the city as it had not done since 1914.
Then, in August, the tide turned. On the eighth of the month, “the Black Day of the German Army,” coming under attack by British tanks near the city of Amiens, the defending forces broke and ran.
They rallied in the end, but by that time they had lost seventy- ve thousand men, and of those no fewer than thirty thousand were prisoners—a proportion that had been unheard of previously, at least on the Western Front. Thereafter the Allies advanced steadily, although there would be no decisive victory and, on the German side, no sudden collapse.
Instead it was the allies of Germany that went under rst. The Austrian-Hungarian army, the Bulgarian army, and the Ottoman army were all defeated within a period of less than three weeks. It was as if a chain reaction of falling morale and alarm had been set loose. Bulgarian troops believed that their country’s alliance with
Germany was only e ective for three years and was about to lapse.57 With Turkey defeated in Syria, it was thought Bulgaria could not hope to hold out, and with Bulgaria defeated, Austria- Hungary would surely collapse. Finally, with Austria-Hungary gone, Germany would be deprived of its last remaining ally.
Yet even as the crow ies, the distance from Syria to Berlin is over two thousand miles, much of it through rugged Anatolia and Bulgaria, presenting any number of favorable defensive positions. At the time of the armistice, one of the original members of the Entente, Russia, lay in the dust. By contrast, Germany still retained control over parts of France, almost all of Belgium, and huge parts of Eastern Europe including Poland, the Baltic countries, and the Ukraine. Yet from one moment to the next the ght went out of the Oberste Heeresleitung like air escaping from a pricked balloon.
When Foch, many years previously, wrote that no battle could be lost until the commander conceded it to be lost, perhaps he had more right on his side than some subsequent critics of his cared to admit.