The Ludendorff Offensives of 1918: Part I—The Decision for a Last Gamble

The Attack by Felix Schwormstadt

 

In the fall of 1917, General Erich Ludendorff, the de facto operational commander of the German Army, began planning his 1918 campaign. Despite his successes in the past year—in particular, effectively taking the Russian Army off the board—long-term prospects were not good. The Central Powers were looking increasingly shaky and the Kaiser's army was bleeding away with forecasts for potential replacements trending sharply downward. The other principal enemies since the war's outbreak, France and Britain, of course, were facing the same pattern of losses and declining manpower. They, however, were about to tap into a nearly fathomless reservoir of new soldiers. Since April, the United States of America had been raising and training a huge army across the Atlantic, and it would be arriving in great numbers by mid-1918. 

Ludendorff—blind both to the declining situation on the German home front and to the massive casualties that would certainly ensue from aggressive operations —chose to mount a major offensive campaign, gambling that he could force the Allies to the peace table before the Americans became a factor. His calculations showed he would have a short-term slight advantage in the spring. Russia's revolution and collapsing war effort would free up German units in the east. Forty-eight divisions could be transferred to the Western Front, increasing German strength to 191 against 178 Allied divisions. On this small margin would the good general risk the fate of the German Empire.

We know now that Ludendorff's gambit came up short. He chose to slug it out with Field Marshal Douglas Haig's British Army (at least in his original formulation). What unfolded was a series of five loosely connected offensives that were neither mutually reinforcing nor based on sufficient logistical support. Furthermore, they would draw in larger French forces and an earlier-than-anticipated American infusion of Doughboys and Marines. At their end, with a sixth—and hoped-for decisive—operation cancelled, the Ludendorff Offensives would leave Germany with a more exposed army in the field and fewer cards to play in the diplomatic game. The great gamble had failed. 

But before proceeding with a discussion of how that came about, let's look at Ludendorff's decision to mount the springtime assaults from another angle.

Did Ludendorff Squander a Diplomatic Opportunity?

By late 1917, the war of attrition was succeeding—but in an equal-opportunity manner. All the countries in the war since 1914 were simply running out of bodies.

Consequently, the anticipated flood of American troops projected to arrive in 1918 and 1919 exercised a hypnotic power over both sides. The French, still recovering from the army discontent following its failed Nivelle Offensive, were going to wait for the Americans. And, late in the year, even General Haig decided it would be imprudent to restart the Flanders offensive before the Yanks arrived.

On the other side, Hindenburg and Ludendorff faced a dilemma, after what seemed to them to be a pretty successful 1917—Russia and Romania were out of the war, Italy very nearly the same after the Caporetto disaster, and the U-boat war still appeared promising. Also, their armies had savaged the French in the 1917 spring offensive and, despite their own heavy casualties, had held off the British attacks in Flanders.

However, they faced the same demographic issues as their longtime opponents and saw no way to counter the millions of Americans about to start arriving.

Eventually, despite the infusion of troops made possible by the ending of the war on the Eastern Front, they were inevitably going to be badly outnumbered on the Western Front. They faced three options:

1. Use the troops available from Russia (about one million men) to DIG IN and wait for the Allies to attack them. This they viewed as just postponing the inevitable.

2. NEGOTIATE A SETTLEMENT. This option meant they would likely have to give up much of their occupied territory in Western Europe, but possibly not as much as in the east. In hindsight, it's clear their “worst case” outcome of a settlement in January 1918 would have been nothing as severe as what the Treaty of Versailles yielded. The royals who commanded armies, Crown Princes Wilhelm and Rupprecht and Duke Albrecht, supported this approach—they had more finely tuned political sensibilities than the career military. The generals, though, found it unpalatable to turn things over to the diplomats, and they had lost touch with their home front, where politicians were losing their ability to maintain order and the citizens were going hungry.

3. GO ON THE OFFENSIVE and try to force a request for terms from the French and British before the Americans arrived in force. This was the choice they made, and what resulted was the series of offensives known collectively as the Kaiserschlacht.

Targeting the British

The next big decision was whom to target. Given his finite resources, Ludendorff recognized that he could not attack everywhere at once on the Western Front. One obvious line of thinking is that to defeat a coalition one should focus on one  member and defeat it before turning on the second, now lacking any support from its ally. But whom to attack? At a war conference in Mons on 11 November 1917, Ludendorff explained his answer:

The situation in Russia and Italy will make it possible to deliver a blow on the Western Front in the New Year. . . about thirty-five divisions and one thousand heavy guns can be made available for one offensive. . . Our general situation requires that we should strike at the earliest moment...before the Americans can throw strong forces into the scale. We must beat the British.

But why the British rather than the French? First, it was the numerically smaller of the two main allies. Also, as historian General David Zabecki points out, an added advantage to attacking the BEF was the lack of rear area depth in the sector, with the British front lines averaging only 90 kilometers from the Channel coast. On the other hand, France had proven in the 1914 Marne campaign that it could retreat deep into the nation's heartland if it was pressured.

Where to Attack?

In preparation for the great German offensive of 1918, Ludendorff met at Mons on 11 November 1917 with the chiefs of staff and the principal operations planners from the army groups and the German High Command (OHL). They identified several potential attack scenarios but could not decide on one. Ludendorff ordered the planners to develop fully the plans for several different courses of action, with the final decision to be made at a later date. The two most viable options at that point were Operation GEORG, to be executed in Flanders by the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, and Operation MICHAEL, to be executed against the British southern wing in the Somme.

Almost from the start, Ludendorff leaned toward the southern option. In describing the deliberations at the Mons Conference, he later wrote:

It would seem that an attack near St. Quentin. . . offers promising prospects. After reaching the line of the Somme between Péronne and Ham it might be possible, by resting the left flank on the Somme, to advance the attack still farther in a northwestern direction, and thus eventually roll up the British front. For the success of this operation it would be especially necessary to render useless the various rail centers by means of long range artillery and bombing squadrons.  That would create difficulties for the timely arrival of the enemy's strategic reserves. 

The final decision came at a planning meeting at the Aresens field headquarters on 21 January 1918. It was to be MICHAEL, but GEORG, the Flanders assault, was kept on the back burner as a deception for the time being but also as a contingency for a future initiative.

German Artillery—Critical for the Attacks

The Promise of New Methods

Underlying Ludendorff's thinking was his belief that the German Army had developed a tactical package that would create a major breach in the enemy front and allow following troops to wage a decisive campaign of maneuver—“Roll[ing] up the British front"—in his words.

The German infiltration tactics of 1918 can be summarized under four headings: innovative artillery preparation; the combined-arms assault or storm battalion; rejection of the linear advance in favor of bypassing enemy centers of resistance; and attacks to disorganize the enemy rear area.

The key was artillery. Col. Georg Bruchmüller, an obscure officer retired for nervous problems in 1913 but recalled to duty for the war, developed German artillery techniques to a fine art by the time of the Ludendorff spring offensives of 1918. The essence of the Bruchmüller artillery preparation was a carefully orchestrated, short but intense bombardment designed to isolate, demoralize, and disorganize enemy defenders. Georg Bruchmüller avoided area targets, concentrating on such key points as artillery observation posts, command posts, radio and telephone centers, rearward troop concentrations, bridges, and major approach routes. He carefully pinpointed all these targets on aerial photographs. The result was to knock out enemy communications and isolate forward units.

At the Receiving End—A British Dressing Station,
Spring 1918 by Henry Tonks

The huge number of guns available to Ludendorff allowed for a short bombardment of incredible ferocity, which it was hoped would also provide a degree of surprise to the battle. Rear areas, headquarters, and the enemy artillery would first be deluged with shells in an attempt to disrupt the command and communication system and to eliminate the main weapon of response. Then the guns would be turned on the zone defenses of the defenders in an attempt to stun them just in advance of the main infantry assault.

The effect was increased by surprise. At the start of the German offensive on 21 March 1918, Bruchmüller began his bombardment with ten minutes of gas shells to force the British to mask, followed by four hours and 25 minutes of mixed gas and high explosives. The preparatory fires shifted back and forth so that the British did not know when the artillery was actually lifting for the infantry advance. Meanwhile, automatic rifle teams moved as close as possible to the British positions during the bombardment. When the Germans did advance, they moved behind a rolling barrage further enhanced by intense fog. The combination of surprise, brevity, intensity, and carefully selected targets was unique.

The new methods worked for the most part. On successive occasions, Ludendorff's artillery blasted a hole in the British or French line and employing stormtrooper tactics broke out into open country, occasionally securing advances of 40 or 50 miles. All this confirmed the value of the stormtroop method in the opening phase of battle. Slowdowns, however, would occur in the later stages of all the spring offensives. German infantry losses, especially among the specially trained assault forces, were massive.

French reinforcements—a bit slow with MICHAEL, more promptly with GEORG—were decisive. With the battlefront constantly moving targets for the artillery were much harder to locate and Bruchmüller's sophisticated methods proved less effective and relevant. Supply columns were outrun, and—as is well documented—discipline broke down with the infantry.

How order broke down within the German ranks is one of the revealing "human" stories of Ludendorff's offensives. Elite stomtrooper Ernst Jünger described how this started to come about in his battlefield classic Storm of Steel: 

We strode down to the valley, which was still taking a pounding from our artillery, and began by inspecting a dugout that had apparently only recently been abandoned by British officers. On a table sat a huge gramophone, which Haller straight away set going. The cheery melody that purred off the roll had a ghostly effect on both of us. I threw the box on the ground where it scraped on a little longer, and then fell silent.

The dugout was the height of luxury, even down to a little open fireplace with a mantelpiece with pipes and tobacco on it, and armchairs pulled round in a circle. Merry old England! Of course we didn't stint ourselves, but helped ourselves to whatever we fancied. I took a haversack, undergarments, a little flask full of whisky, a map case and some exquisite little items from Roger & Gallet, no doubt keepsakes from some romantic leave in Paris. We could see that the inhabitants had left here in a hurry.

An adjacent space harboured the kitchen, whose supplies we stared at in wonder. There was a whole crate of eggs, which we sucked on the spot, as eggs were little more than a word to us at this stage. On shelves along the walls were stacks of canned meat, tins of delicious English jam, and bottles of Camp coffee, tomatoes and onions; everything to delight an epicure's heart.

Such episodes recurred up and down the great advances in March and April for the German Army. Troops, having suffered months of low rations, unselfconsciously stopped to gorge themselves when they came across the plentiful British stocks. When alcohol was also available, the air of festiveness that inevitably broke out soon shifted in spirit as the soldiers grew surly and unwilling to resume their duties. Sergeants and junior officers like Jünger reported hundreds of cases of such indiscipline. The breakdown was shocking to the generals, who realized the effect of all these episodes on the advance would be cumulative and serious.

Ludendorff, of course, was not thinking of such breakdowns in his plan when he set the date to launch MICHAEL as 21 March 1918—the day trench warfare would end on the Western Front.

This Sunday we present Part II in this series on the Ludendorff Offensives, Operation MICHAEL, The Shock

Sources:   A complete list of the sources I drew upon for this series will be presented at the end of its final part. MH