The Generals' War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918 (Twentieth-Century Battles) - Hardcover

Zabecki, David T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253037018 ISBN 13: 9780253037015

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Known as the War to End all Wars and the Great War, World War I introduced new forms of mass destruction and modern technological warfare. When the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war in late 1917, the Germans turned their offensive efforts to the Western Front in an attempt to win the war in 1918. But as fresh American troops entered Europe, the strategic scales tipped against Germany.

Much of how World War I played out turned on the plans and decisions of the senior-most German and Allied commanders. The Generals' War explores the military strategies of those generals during the last year of the Great War. These six very different men included Germany's Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff; France's Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain; Great Britain's Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; and the United States' General John Pershing. Although history remembers none of them as great captains, these six officers determined for better or worse how World War I was fought on the battlefields of the Western Front between November 1917 and November 1918.

The Generals' War is a landmark exploration of the generalship that shaped the very framework of modern warfare as we know it today and provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis on the senior commanders of the Great War.

About this title

About the Author

David T. Zabecki (Lt. Gen. Ret) is author or editor of nine military history books, including The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the Operational Level of War, and the assistant editor of several military history encyclopedias. He is editor of Vietnam Magazine, the Senior Historian of the Weider History Group, the world's largest publisher of history magazines, and author of numerous articles, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries, all dealing with military topics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Generals' War

Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918

By David T. Zabecki, Spencer C. Tucker

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2018 David T. Zabecki
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-253-03701-5

Contents

Foreword by Anthony C. Zinni, General, USMC (Ret), ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Table, Maps, and Plates, xv, 
List of Abbreviations, xvii, 
1 Generalship in the Great War, 1, 
2 Future Shock on the 1914–1918 Battlefield, 11, 
3 The Strategic Situation at the End of 1917, 37, 
4 The Commanders in Chief, 47, 
5 The Yanks Are Coming, 75, 
6 Two Conferences in November 1917, 85, 
7 The Gathering Storm, 95, 
8 MICHAEL and GEORGETTE: Ludendorff versus Haig, 110, 
9 BLÜCHER and GNEISENAU: Ludendorff versus Foch and Pétain, 140, 
10 Operation MARNESCHUTZ-REIMS and the Second Battle of the Marne: Foch Wrests the Initiative, 165, 
11 Hamel to Mont St. Quentin: Haig Assumes the Offensive, 195, 
12 Closing to the Hindenburg Line: Foch Tightens the Vise, 216, 
13 The Allied General Offensive: Foch Moves In for the Kill, 231, 
14 Armistice and Occupation: 11 November 1918–28 June 1919, 277, 
15 The Fluctuating Verdict of History, 290, 
Appendix I: Biographical Chronologies, 317, 
Appendix II: A Note on General Officer Ranks, 333, 
Notes, 337, 
Bibliography, 371, 
Index, 389, 

CHAPTER 1

GENERALSHIP IN THE GREAT WAR

The truth is, no study is possible on the battlefield. One does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal, and to know it well.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Principles of War

The hour after an attack begins is a trying time at headquarters. There is nothing for a general officer to do but sit with folded hands. ... He had done everything he could before H Day, or if he has not, it is too late now. He can do nothing now until the first reports come in.

Lieutenant General Hunter S. Liggett, A.E.F. Ten Years Ago in France

No general, as the old saying goes, ever wakes up in the morning and decides he is going to lose a battle, or indeed a war. Yet for every general who loses a battle, he has a counterpart on the other side who wins the fight. This has been a constant of warfare, from long before Leonidas met Xerxes at Thermopylae in 480 BC to Norman Schwarzkopf 's encounter with Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm in 1991. World War I, however, is seen somewhat differently by history, or at least by popular history. From the four years of "mud and blood" carnage, the likes of which the world had never seen, the myth of "lions led by donkeys" still holds great sway one hundred years later. The troops on all sides were courageous and patriotic, but they were blindly led to the slaughter by heartless and incompetent "butchers and bunglers" who lived in châteaux, far from the front lines. The generals ate well and drank champagne while their troops lived in rat-infested trenches and endured unrelenting shelling from enemy artillery until they were committed to senseless frontal attacks, only to be massacred en masse.

World War I today is seen quite differently by the general publics of the four nations this study concerns itself with. The Great War exists only dimly in the American consciousness, even though the United States emerged from that war as one of the great powers of the twentieth century. Germans today also pay little attention to World War I, although the war does have somewhat greater resonance in France. In all three countries, there is far more interest in World War II, or in earlier conflicts, such as the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War. Accordingly, relatively few military historians in those three countries specialize in the 1914 to 1918 period. This is not the case in the United Kingdom. For the British, the Great War is still the war. The eleventh of November passes in Germany each year without the slightest recognition. In the United States, it has been transformed from Armistice Day into Veterans Day, a national holiday to recognize all veterans of all wars. In the UK and many Commonwealth countries, however, Remembrance Day is the most significant national observance of the year. For the British, the Great War still looms very large, and many British historians continue to write books and produce new research about it. It is important to keep in mind, however, that most British scholarship concentrates on the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

One hundred years on, British military historians continue to grapple with questions: Why was the First World War such a gridlocked bloodbath? Did it have to be that way? Could it have been fought differently? And if so, why wasn't it? For many years, two basic schools of thought dominated, and in the past thirty-five years or so a third school has emerged. The internal factors school emphasizes the structural weaknesses and the inbred culture of the Edwardian army, which produced incompetent and callous commanders and poorly trained staff officers. The external factors school focuses on things that generally were beyond the control of the BEF, including the exponential expansion of the British army during the war, new war fighting technologies that no one could ever have anticipated, political interference, and a very tough opponent that fielded one of the best armies in history. The recent and third school attempts to strike a balance by integrating both the internal and external factors and also stresses the defects in prewar British military doctrine, especially a lack of understanding of combined-arms warfare. Much of that third school model can also be applied to the experiences of the French, and especially to the Americans.

Nonetheless, the internal factors school continues to have a great deal of resonance in British thinking. Yet, for all the appealing and apparent clarity of the "butchers and bunglers" view, it was not nearly that simplistic. World War I was a war unlike any other ever fought. It was a war of "future shock." Newly emerging technologies in weaponry, communications, and later mobility rendered all the old tactics and mechanics of war fighting obsolete. All the past experience, doctrine, and theory no longer worked. Nor did the new dynamics of war fighting remain static between 1914 and 1918. They evolved quite rapidly, constantly changing the harsh realities of the battlefield. Thus, the senior military leaders on all sides, including the Germans, spent most of the first three years of the war trying to keep up with and come to terms with the new technologies — how most effectively to use them and how best to counter them in the hands of the enemy. As historian Tim Travers put it so aptly, "The story of the Western Front was really the attempt of senior officers to come to mental grips with a war that had escaped its preordained boundaries and structures." Unfortunately, when you are in the middle of fighting a war, trial and error is the only viable mechanism for such a process.

By the start of 1918, many of the most important lessons had been learned and internalized, albeit at a terrible price. However, none of the separate national armies — German, French, British, American — learned exactly the same lessons at the same pace. And for all its emotional appeal, the "Château General" fable does not quite hold up to close scrutiny. Because of the relatively primitive communications systems of the time, the higher the level of command, the farther back from the front the commander had to be to exercise effective command and control across the span of his front. That, of course, changed as communications technologies improved during the course of the war, but the communications systems of 1918 were still very primitive compared with those of 1939–45. Nonetheless, seventy-eight British, seventy-one German, and fifty-five French generals were killed in action or died of wounds during the Great War. Historian Richard Holmes estimated that some three hundred British generals were wounded in action.

This, then, is a study of World War I senior-level generalship in 1918 on the Western Front. The starting point for any such analysis must be a working definition of generalship itself. The art of generalship — and it is very much an art rather than a science — involves far more than the command of large formations of troops. It also has to do with forming, organizing, equipping, and training an army; transporting forces to a theater of operations and sustaining them logistically throughout their deployment; collecting, processing, and analyzing intelligence on the enemy; planning operations and committing the forces to battle; and directing and coordinating their actions once committed. The classic German military theorist Major General Carl von Clausewitz grouped these diverse activities of generalship into two primary categories: preparation for war and the conduct of war proper: "The knowledge and skills involved in the preparation will be concerned with the creation, training, and maintenance of the fighting forces. ... The theory of war proper, on the other hand, is concerned with the use of these means, once they have been developed for the purpose of war. All that requires from the first group is their end product, an understanding of their main characteristics." Clausewitz went on to argue that very few generals are equally skilled in both broad categories. History bears him out.

There is no such thing as a wartime general who does everything perfectly all of the time. Generals are flesh-and-blood human beings. They all at one point or another rate some degree of legitimate criticism for their actions and decisions. But such judgments always are made after the fact. Most of us cannot possibly imagine what it is like to be responsible for the lives of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of one's own countrymen or to have to make decisions under extreme pressure, in the environment of the fog and friction of war, with partial, incorrect, or even intentionally deceptive information upon which to base those decisions. And even if the general does everything right, his troops will still wind up suffering casualties while killing and wounding huge numbers of the enemy. It is just this mass expenditure of human life in war that results in the tendency to classify generals into neatly self-contained categories: heroes (cult generals such as World War II's Erwin Rommel), villains (World War I's "butcher and bunglers"), or fools (World War I's "donkeys"). Virtually no World War I general is today considered in the hero class. Yet every battlefield general in history can be included simultaneously in all three of those categories to one degree or another. As the distinguished historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant once noted, "History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances."

Specifically, the focus of this study is on the operational level of war, that level between the tactical and the strategic. While strategy focuses on winning wars at the national level and tactics focuses on winning battles and engagements on the battlefield, the operational art deals with the design, management, synchronization, sustainment, and command and control of campaigns that connect tactical results to strategic objectives. Prior to the nineteenth century, during the era of much smaller armies, a distinct set of military activities above the tactical was known as "grand tactics." But the mass armies that first appeared during the Napoleonic wars and the range and lethality of weaponry that increased rapidly throughout the 1800s presented entirely new and different military problems and required completely different ways of thinking about warfare. The body of military theory that emerged from that process came to be known as "the operational art." At the start of World War I, the concepts were still imperfectly understood, although the Germans were the most advanced in this process.

This analysis, therefore, will concentrate on the six senior-most Western Front battlefield commanders of 1918, those generals in charge of the operational level of the war:

* Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, chief of the general staff of the German Field Army (Feldheer)

* General of Infantry Erich Ludendorff, first quartermaster general of the German army

* Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch, general-in-chief of the Allied armies

* Marshal of France Philippe Pétain, commander in chief of the French Armies of the North and Northeast

* Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force

* General of the Armies John "Black Jack" Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force

Despite today's broad rejection in most academic circles of the "Great Man" school of history, these six generals had the biggest influence on the outcome of the campaigns of 1918 and, ultimately, of the war. Each naturally was a creature of his own national army and the culture of that institution. But in the end, it was those senior-most generals who made the decisions, and it is impossible to understand the Western Front in 1918 without studying them.

The study of 1918 must start in November 1917, when two meetings, one on the German side and one on the Allied, set the stage for the final twelve months of the Great War. The Allied Rapallo Conference of 5–7 November resulted from the Italian disaster at the Battle of Caporetto two weeks earlier. The problems encountered in the redeployment of British and French troops from the Western Front to shore up the Italians exposed a clear need for some sort of inter-Allied coordinating body, which the Allies still did not have after three years of war. The resulting Allied Supreme War Council was a political body rather than a combined military command structure, but it was the first step that ultimately led to the establishment of such a command and the appointment of Foch as the Allied generalissimo in the spring of 1918.

Meanwhile, the Germans on 11 November convened a planning conference at Mons, Belgium, under the leadership of Ludendorff as first quartermaster general. Time was not on Germany's side. The Allied naval blockade had pushed Germany's civilian population to the brink of mass starvation. The United States had entered the war on the Allied side that April; American troops were now starting to flow into Europe, and it was only a matter of time before they would tip the manpower balance decisively in favor of the Allies. But Russia had recently dropped out of the war, and the Germans had a very narrow window of opportunity to transfer a large number of divisions from east to west, giving them a temporary but very real superiority in the correlation forces. If the Germans could mass their forces at the right time and place and hit the Allies fast and hard enough, they just might win the war on the battlefield before the Americans could make a difference. The purpose of the Mons Conference was to decide where, when, and how to strike.

As 1918 progressed, the endgame of World War I increasingly became an operational-level struggle between Ludendorff and Foch. The key points that will emerge from a close study of the Western Front in 1918 include the following:

* World War I was a twentieth-century war fought by nineteenth-century men. From the most senior field marshal to the most junior platoon leader to the privates on the front lines, they all had to climb a very steep learning curve, and they had to climb it rapidly. By 1918 they were finally learning how to fight this new form of war.

* The fighting from March to November 1918 consisted of two large-scale campaigns. Between 21 March and 17 July, the Germans conducted five massive offensives against the Allies and had planned in detail a sixth, which they never got the opportunity to launch. From 18 July to 11 November, the Allies assumed the offensive and finally brought the war to its conclusion.

* The decisive period of 1918 was not the last 100 days, when the Allies were on the offensive following the 8 August British attack at Amiens, but rather the 118-day period from 21 March to 17 July, when the Germans were on the offensive. When the Germans failed to take the critical British rail hubs at Amiens and Hazebrouck in March and April respectively, the operational balance tipped against them. When Ludendorff ordered his forces to continue south from the Vesle River on 28 May, the German army quickly exceeded its operational as well as its strategic culminating point, and Germany lost the war on the battlefield. It would, however, take more than five additional months of fierce fighting for the Allies to bring the war to a conclusion.

During that period, the Germans had no reasonable hope of turning the situation around.

* Although Ludendorff arguably was the most brilliant tactician of the war, he had a special blind spot for the operational level and virtually no understanding of the strategic. The five German offensives of 1918 did not constitute a coordinated, integrated, and sequentially phased operational campaign but rather five huge, costly, and largely unconnected tactical actions. After the failure of the first offensive in March 1918, each subsequent offensive was a reaction to the failure of the one before it.

* Rail lines were the key to the 1918 campaigns. The Allies and especially Foch continually targeted the German rail network. The Germans, although generally sensitive to their own rail network, failed to focus sufficiently on the significant vulnerabilities in the shallow and fragile Allied rail system. When the third German offensive in May pushed from the Chemin des Dames ridge south to the Marne River, the Germans were left holding a large and ultimately indefensible salient that had no major rail lines leading into it. The outcome was inevitable.

* Rather than attacking vital Allied vulnerabilities, Ludendorff repeatedly tried to win with force-on-force attacks. Although the Germans did have a temporary force superiority early in 1918, it was not large enough for that kind of strategy.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253037018
• ISBN 13: 9780253037015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 440