World War I

A

2

Failed German Offensive

On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff launched his great attack. The objective was to capture the French city of Amiens before proceeding to Paris. He had amassed 190 German divisions in France and Belgium, against 60 British and 99 French divisions. However, on the front where the first blow fell, opposite the British Third and Fifth armies in the Somme region, the German manpower superiority was even higher and was backed by an artillery ratio of nearly three to one (see Somme, Battles of the).

The Fifth Army held the right flank of the British front, where the British and French forces joined. Ludendorff intended to break through at this junction, to separate the British from the French, and to roll up the whole British army north to the sea. Under the shock of the new tactics, the British Fifth Army virtually dissolved. Hutier's 18th Army, making the best progress, broke clear through into open country. If Ludendorff had concentrated all his reserves to exploit the gap Hutier had opened, the plan might have succeeded. Instead, he launched three separate new attacks.

The Allied high command was in near panic. Pétain told Haig that if the German attacks continued, he would have to abandon contact with the British and fall back to cover Paris. Ludendorff, however, had already missed his moment of opportunity. His troops were reaching the end of their endurance, and fresh British and French reserves were arriving. Slowly the German momentum died. As a decisive effort, the offensive failed. It had merely gained ground. On April 4 and 5, Hutier launched one final thrust toward Amiens, creating a salient (outwardly projecting battle line). Australian troops east of Villers-Bretonneux stopped them.

A

3

Allied War Council

An Allied conference on March 26th at Doullens, France, had established French general Ferdinand Foch as commander in chief of all Allied forces on the western front. Soon afterwards, General Pershing finally agreed to allow American troops to join British and French forces in small formations. Pershing had originally insisted on keeping American troops together rather than dividing them amongst the British and French armies. His decision was a great boost to Allied morale.

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The Allies also created a supreme war council to coordinate their strategy on all fronts. The council consisted of the prime ministers of Britain (David Lloyd George), of France (Georges Clemenceau), and of Italy (Vittorio Orlando). A high-ranking military adviser assisted each leader. President Wilson of the United States sent a representative, but not as a formal member of the council, because the official U.S. view was that the United States was an Associated rather than an Allied Power. The Supreme War Council permitted a much greater degree of policy coordination than had existed before, although the Allied Powers continually had sharp differences of opinion over the proper conduct of the war.

A

4

Germany's Final Offensives

Ludendorff continued his attempts on the western front, although his resources were diminishing. During the spring, he had lost almost 350,000 men and had inflicted roughly equal damage. In that same period of time, almost 180,000 U.S. troops arrived in France.

Nevertheless, when Ludendorff launched another offensive in May, it was a shock to the Allies. The Germans moved along the Aisne River between the cities of Reims and Soissons. Heading directly for Paris, they broke through the front of the French Sixth Army and rolled forward all the way to the Marne River, only 130 km (80 mi) from the French capital.

To widen the Marne salient created by the Amiens offensive, Ludendorff began an offensive on July 15 on both sides of Reims, known as the Second Battle of the Marne. It met a new French defensive tactic: The French had set up a line of lightly manned trenches that gave the false impression of real obstacles. The Germans wasted most of their artillery fire on these so-called fake trenches and then advanced in an uncoordinated fashion against the fully manned trenches that had been untouched by the shelling. They came under heavy French and American fire and were thrown back with heavy casualties. Two U.S. divisions, which were numerically stronger units than British, French, or German divisions, helped halt the offensive in the vicinity of Château-Thierry.

A

5

Allied Counteroffensives

On July 18 the Allies launched a powerful counteroffensive, which included U.S. divisions, against the western flank of the Marne salient. Successive assaults eliminated the German protrusion at the Marne by early August. The next Allied counterstroke involved eliminating the salient at Amiens, where the first German attack had driven so deeply into the Allied front. On August 8 the British Fourth Army delivered the main blow of the counteroffensive on both sides of the Somme River. More than 500 Mark IV tanks, which had a much more powerful engine and much greater maneuverability than the earlier models, led the attack. The infantry jumped off behind a brief artillery barrage, which gave it the element of surprise that had been lacking in earlier offensives. Under the impact of the attack, the German army fell back.

That day, German morale and discipline dissolved. Ludendorff wrote that it “was the black day of the German army.” The German army, like the French in 1917, contained men who argued that the war had nothing to do with the real interests of the rank and file. German troops were becoming depressed and insubordinate.

During the rest of August, a series of Allied attacks continued to reduce the Amiens salient. By the first week of September, the Germans were back on the line from which they had launched their great offensive in March. In order to launch a general counteroffensive, the Allies needed to remove the Germans from their salients. Those areas interfered with the Allies' use of railway lines running parallel to the front. The railway lines had to be reopened to traffic so that the Allied forces could move from one part of the line to another as circumstances required.

September 12, 1918, was the beginning of the end for the German armies in the west. The recently created U.S. First Army assaulted a small salient in the area of Saint-Mihiel, southeast of Verdun. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel was the first appearance of a U.S. force large enough to be called an army. General Pershing had insisted that a separate U.S. army be created and put under his own command. Pershing had overridden Foch, who wanted to keep feeding U.S. divisions into French or British armies. At Saint-Mihiel, the U.S. generals and staffs proved their ability to handle an army-sized operation successfully.

A

6

Victorious Allied Offensive

The Allied general offensive started on September 26. Its strategic objectives were the two key railroad junctions of Aulnoye and Mézières. At these points, the trunk lines from Germany joined the main lateral rail line behind the German front. If Aulnoye and Mézières were taken, the Germans could neither supply their forces nor withdraw in good order. Foch’s plan was for a pincer movement with an American offensive in the east through the rugged Meuse-Argonne sector (in what became known as the Battle of the Argonne) and a British advance north toward the city of Lille. After October 10, two U.S. armies were in action: the first under Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett and the second under Lieutenant General Robert L. Bullard.

Although both the American and British advance were much slower than expected, the two armies did regain territory that had long been held by the German army. This development, coupled with the news that Bulgaria had surrendered, prompted General Ludendorff, in a fit of panic, to demand on September 29 that the German government initiate armistice negotiations before Allied forces broke through the German lines.

B

Collapse of the Central Powers

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