Why Germany lost the war

Germany lost the First World War because it could not decide it quickly, and it could not win a long war of exhaustion against a coalition with more men and resources. Defeat on the Marne in 1914 condemned it to a war on two fronts, the naval blockade starved the country, and the great battles of attrition bled the army white. Unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war. In the spring of 1918 Ludendorff staked everything on offensives in the west, and when they failed the Allies drove the Germans into retreat, Germany’s allies laid down their arms and revolution broke out at home.

A war on two fronts and a plan that failed

The German war plan assumed that in a war on two fronts Germany would first quickly crush France, outflanking its fortified frontier through Belgium, and only then turn against Russia. In September 1914 the French and British stopped the Germans on the Marne, and on 9 September the armies of the German right wing began to retreat. The plan for a quick defeat of France had collapsed. The Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, was removed from command, and Germany was condemned to the long war on two fronts that its staff officers had feared most.

After the race to the sea an unbroken line of trenches ran from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Moltke’s successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, believed that Germany could not defeat all its enemies at once, and waged a war of attrition. In such a war men and resources counted. Depending on the tally, Germany mobilised between 11 and 13.25 million soldiers during the war, but Russia alone mobilised between 12 and 15.38 million, and France between 7.94 and 8.41 million.

Blockade and hunger

From the first months of the war the British fleet cut Germany off from overseas trade. On 2 November 1914 the Admiralty declared the whole North Sea a military area, and the Order in Council of 11 March 1915 provided for stopping goods going to and from Germany. The Germans presented their own submarine war against British shipping as a response to this blockade.

The blockade cut Germany off from food imports. The state took over the purchase and distribution of grain and built a system of ration cards and allocations, run among others by the future chancellor Georg Michaelis. In the winter of 1916–1917 the potato crop failed and city dwellers had to live on turnips. The period went down in history as the “turnip winter” (Steckrübenwinter). At times rations fell to 1,000 calories a day, and people looked for food on a black market that few could afford.

According to various estimates the blockade killed between 0.3 and 0.76 million people. The German wartime health office gave 763,000 victims of hunger and disease, and a study of 1928 gave 424,000. The blockade continued after the armistice, and the last restrictions were lifted only on 12 July 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed.

Attrition

In February 1916 Falkenhayn launched the offensive at Verdun, which was meant to bleed the French army white. The plan failed: the Germans did not take the heights above the Meuse, and they themselves suffered losses comparable to those of the French, some 333,000–355,000 men against 377,000–400,000 on the French side. In the summer the British and French attacked on the Somme, and in the east the Brusilov Offensive shattered the Austro-Hungarian front. On the Somme the Germans lost from some 450,000 to 600,000 men. As German studies admitted, by the end of the battle what remained of the old infantry, trained in peacetime, had bled to death.

On 29 August 1916 the Kaiser dismissed Falkenhayn, and the supreme command was taken over by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff (the Third OHL). As early as 31 August they demanded a drastic increase in the production of weapons and ammunition, known as the Hindenburg Programme. It was meant to double the output of ammunition and treble that of guns and machine guns, and the Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916 imposed compulsory labour on all men aged 17 to 60. The economy was to be directed by the War Office under General Wilhelm Groener. The hasty implementation of the programme, however, caused a severe coal shortage and serious transport problems, and at first arms production did not rise significantly.

The army found it ever harder to replace its losses. In the spring of 1917 the Germans withdrew to a new, shorter defensive line, which the British called the Hindenburg Line. By the end of the war between 1.77 and 2.04 million German soldiers had died.

The United States

Submarine warfare was supposed to be the way out. On 31 January 1917 Germany notified the United States that from 1 February its submarines would sink ships without warning in zones around Britain, France and Italy, including those under neutral flags. Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff promised that in this way he would force Britain to make peace within five months. On top of this came the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret offer of alliance to Mexico against the USA, published in the United States at the turn of February and March. On 6 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson signed the resolution of Congress and the United States entered the war against Germany.

Submarine warfare did not break Britain. In April 1917 the U-boats sank more tonnage than in any other month of the war, but convoys proved the answer. Meanwhile America was building an army. In April Congress passed conscription, under which some 2.8 million men were called up by the end of the war, and on 26 June 1917 the first soldiers of the American 1st Division landed in France. In the summer of 1918 as many as 10,000 a day were arriving, and by November there were nearly two million of them there. In July, thanks to General John Pershing’s Americans, the Allies regained numerical superiority in the west.

The last gamble of 1918

Russia’s exit from the war gave Germany a last chance. On 3 March 1918 Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest, and through the winter the Germans moved divisions west. According to the British official history the number of German divisions in France and Belgium rose from 150 in November 1917 to 192. About a million soldiers nevertheless remained in the east to guard huge conquests. Ludendorff wanted to decide the war before masses of American troops reached France.

Operation Michael, launched on 21 March, was the greatest German success on the Western Front since 1914. After a hurricane bombardment storm troops broke through the British lines, and within sixteen days the Germans advanced more than 60 kilometres and took some 75,000 British prisoners. But they did not split the Allied armies and did not take Amiens. The crisis led the Allies at Doullens to entrust General Ferdinand Foch with coordinating their armies, and in April Foch became their commander-in-chief.

Further blows fell on the Lys in Flanders, where Field Marshal Douglas Haig called on his troops to fight “with our backs to the wall”, and on the Aisne, from where the Germans reached the Marne on 30 May. French reserves and the first American divisions, among others at Belleau Wood, barred their way to Paris. On 15 July Ludendorff struck on both sides of Reims in his last great offensive, but the French knew the day and hour of the attack. On 18 July Foch launched a counter-offensive against the western flank of the German salient, and in the Second Battle of the Marne the initiative passed to the Allies for the rest of the war.

The offensives failed for several reasons. The Germans had no mobile forces, such as cavalry, to exploit breakthroughs quickly, and the storm troops could not carry enough food and ammunition. Their gains took the form of salients that lengthened the front and were hard to defend, and hungry soldiers in many places stopped to plunder British supply dumps. The Germans lost most in their best assault divisions, which they had nothing to replace with. From 21 March to 18 July their losses amounted to between 688,000 and some 800,000 men, and unlike the Allies they no longer had the means to replace the fallen.

The Hundred Days

On 8 August the British and French attacked at Amiens. The British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson, with the Canadian Corps and the Australian Corps as its main force, advanced in fog, without a preliminary bombardment, with more than four hundred tanks. By evening the Allies had advanced 12–13 kilometres and taken some 15,000 prisoners. Ludendorff called the day “the black day of the German Army”. He heard that whole units had surrendered to single horsemen, and that retreating soldiers shouted “strike-breakers” at those going up to the front. On 14 August the Crown Council at Spa recognised that the war could not be won militarily, but resolved to seek peace only at a “suitable moment”.

Foch gave the Germans no rest. Haig concluded that instead of battering through ever stronger defences, the Allies had to strike in a new place, and Foch planned a series of attacks along the whole front. On 12 September the Americans eliminated the Saint-Mihiel salient, and on 26 September the offensive between the Meuse and the Argonne began. On 27 September the British and Canadians forced the Canal du Nord before Cambrai, and on 28 September the Belgians, British and French regained the ground at Ypres in a single day. In the battles of the Hindenburg Line the British armies, with Australians, New Zealanders and two American divisions, captured the strongest German position on the Western Front.

The Allies were winning because they had learned to fight differently. At Amiens surprise, fire without registration of the guns, masses of tanks, aircraft and carefully prepared logistics made it possible to break the front within a few hours. The same method, with surprise instead of a bombardment lasting days, a creeping barrage and masses of tanks, had already been shown by the counter-offensive on the Marne on 18 July, and before that by General John Monash’s Australians at Hamel. The main role in the victorious autumn fell to the British and French armies, but the offensive on the Meuse drew in dozens of German divisions.

The German army was melting away. In the Hundred Days Offensive, from 8 August to 11 November, the British took 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns, and the French 139,000 prisoners. German divisions were weakened by losses and influenza, and more and more soldiers avoided combat. The military archivist Erich Otto Volkmann estimated that as early as the spring of 1918 between 800,000 and a million soldiers were refusing to obey their superiors’ orders. Prisoners taken after 15 July no longer believed in the promised victorious peace.

The collapse of the allies and the home front

In the autumn the whole bloc of the Central Powers was falling apart. On 15 September the Allies broke through the front in Macedonia, and the Vardar Offensive shattered the Bulgarian army within two weeks. On 29 September Bulgaria signed an armistice at Salonika, the first of the Central Powers to do so. The Ottoman Empire was cut off from Germany by land, and Austria-Hungary was exposed from the south. The Turks had already been routed in September by General Edmund Allenby at Megiddo, and on 30 October the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros. The Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated at Vittorio Veneto together with the Habsburg monarchy, which on 3 November signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti.

The defeat of Bulgaria and the attacks in the west settled the matter. On 29 September at Spa Hindenburg and Ludendorff demanded an immediate request for an armistice, and the Kaiser agreed to an appeal to Wilson and to a parliamentary government. The new chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, thought the haste a mistake, but gave way, and on the night of 3–4 October sent a note to Wilson. The exchange of notes dragged on through October. In the middle of the month Ludendorff wanted to fight on again, and after his order rejecting Wilson’s note of 23 October the Kaiser accepted his resignation on 26 October.

Meanwhile the admirals, without the government’s knowledge, were preparing the High Seas Fleet for a last battle, but the sailors had no intention of dying on a “death voyage”. On 3 November in Kiel a patrol fired on a procession of sailors and workers, and the next day the city was in the hands of soldiers’ councils. Within days the revolution spread across the country and on 9 November reached Berlin. The chancellor announced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, power passed to Friedrich Ebert, and Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic. The same day Groener told the Kaiser that the army would no longer follow him.

At dawn on 11 November the German delegates, among them State Secretary Matthias Erzberger, signed the Armistice of Compiègne in Foch’s railway carriage. Within 15 days the Germans had to evacuate Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, hand over 5,000 guns and 25,000 machine guns, surrender their submarines and intern the best ships of the fleet. The naval blockade remained in force. The agreement did not settle frontiers, but it took from Germany the ability to resume the war.

The stab-in-the-back legend

The decision to ask for an armistice took by surprise politicians who for months had been told of imminent victory. On this ground grew the legend of the “stab in the back”: an army undefeated in the field had supposedly been betrayed by politicians and revolutionaries at home. As early as 1917 the far right saw the Reichstag Peace Resolution as the first step towards a “stab in the back” dealt to the army. On 1 October 1918 Ludendorff told his officers that the people who had brought about this situation should now “eat the soup they have cooked”. On 18 November 1919 Hindenburg testified before the parliamentary committee investigating responsibility for the war that, “as an English general has very truly said”, the German army had been “stabbed in the back”.

Historians unanimously reject this legend. It was Hindenburg and Ludendorff who on 29 September told the Kaiser that the war could not be continued, and demanded an armistice. The army had no reserves left, Germany’s allies were signing armistices one after another, and thanks to the Americans the Allies had numerical superiority in the west. Some historians also point out that the instruction to sign the armistice in practice came from the supreme command, and that Ebert’s new government merely confirmed it. Even so, the legend weighed on the Weimar Republic throughout its existence, and Adolf Hitler exploited this resentment on his way to power.

The debate today is about something else: what weighed most. Scholars agree that the blockade contributed greatly to the outcome of the war, but some of them hold that the armistice was forced above all by events on the Western Front. Historians also argue over whether the demand for an armistice was an outburst of panic by an overworked Ludendorff or a cold calculation to shift responsibility for defeat onto parliament. The German historian Wilhelm Deist wrote of a “covert military strike” (verdeckter Militärstreik). Most scholars agree, however, that by the autumn of 1918 Germany had lost the war militarily.