19.6: The Late War

World War I was fought primarily in Europe, along the Western Front that stretched from the English Channel south along the French border to the Alps, and on the Eastern Front across Poland, Galicia, and Russia. It was a “world” war for two reasons.

• Hundreds of thousands of troops from around the world fought in it
• Military engagements occurred in the Ottoman territories of the Middle East, in Africa between European colonial armies, and in Asia. (Japan even supported the Entente war effort by taking a German-controlled Chinese port, Tsingtao.)

The United States was a latecomer to the fighting due to the domination of "isolationist" sentiment. Most Americans believed that the war was a European affair that should not involve American troops. However, the U.S. was an ally, and provided both military and civilian supplies to the British, along with large amounts of low-interest loans to keep the British economy afloat. In 1917, the German military leadership under the Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg recognized that the nation could not sustain the war much longer. So, the German generals decided to use their new submarines, the U-Boats, to attack any vessel suspected of carrying military supplies to the British or French. When ships carrying U.S. civilians were sunk in 1917, American public sentiment finally shifted and the US declared war on Germany in April.

The importance of the entrance centered on the US' gigantic industrial capacity, dwarfing all of the great powers of Europe put together, and millions of fresh troops that could be called up or drafted. Germany had been totally committed to the war for almost three years, and its supplies (money, fuel, munitions, food, and people) were running very thin. Most German civilians still believed that Germany was winning. But, as the carnage continued on the Western Front, the German general staff knew that they had to achieve a strategic breakthrough.

By 1918, it was clear to the German command that they were losing. When the US entered on the side of the British and French, it became impossible to sustain the war. One last desperate offensive might bring the French and British to the negotiating table. In the spring of 1918, German forces staged a major campaign that broke through the western lines, coming within about 40 miles of Paris. But, much like Napoleon experienced in the previous century, German troops had outpaced their supply lines. They lost cover, and had to face the combined reserves of the French, British, and Americans. Another attempted offensive in July failed, and the Entente powers began to push the German forces back.

Meanwhile, criticism of the Kaiser appeared for the first time in the mainstream press, and hundreds of thousands of workers protested the worsening economic conditions. In late September, the head of the German General Staff, Ludendorff, advised the Kaiser to sue for peace. A month later, the Reichstag passed laws making the government’s ministers responsible to it instead of the Kaiser. Protest movements spread across Germany and the rapidly-collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire, as nationalist movements declared independence in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans.

On November 11, 1918, a voluntary commission of German politicians led by the German Socialist Party (SPD) formally sued for peace. The Kaiser snuck away in a train to Holland, where he abdicated. The top generals of the German General Staff, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, did their best to popularize the idea that Germany “would have won” if not for sabotage perpetrated by a sinister conspiracy of foreign agents, communists, and Jews. In fact, if the commission of German politicians had not sued for peace when they did, French, British, and U.S. troops would have simply invaded Germany, and even more people would have died.