With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918

By David Stevenson 

 Belknap Press; First Edition, 2011

Reviewed by Len Shurtleff

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Though With Our Backs to the Wall is a book about how and why the Entente powers and America defeated Germany and its allies in World War One, author David Stevenson builds his case carefully by analyzing the Western Front deadlock of 1914–1917 along with the military and non-military factors that resulted in victory. Though he focuses on the Western Front where the outcome was eventually decided, he does not neglect subsidiary fronts in Poland and the Baltic, Italy, the Balkans, and the Middle East, as well as the home fronts of the various belligerents. 

In summary, Stevenson sees the Western Front armistice of 11 November 1918 coming as a result of  Ludendorff's loss of nerve in the face of Bulgarian collapse and Foch's converging offensives. By then,  the German Army was clearly running out of men even faster then the Entente, whose human  reserves were stretched to the limit. The Allies were blessed with much more surefooted leadership than the battered German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. By the summer of 1918 the economic and  political circumstances in all the Allied countries, including Italy, were far stronger than between  Germany and its allies. The Entente democracies proved far more resilient than the autocratic  societies of the Central Powers. Austria-Hungary was starving and beset with national separatism. Bulgaria was starving, its army barefoot as winter approached. In Ottoman Turkey, domestic conditions were chaotic and supplies for its armies catastrophic. The victors had clearly reaped the  benefits of a revolution in war production led by France and Britain, shared in by Italy, and financed  by American loans and raw materials. Their management of the war effort was superior in almost  every aspect in that the Allies built a superstructure of national and intergovernmental institutions  that while not perfect far outstripped anything Germany and her co-belligerents achieved. Most  important among many tactical and strategic innovations was the appointment of an effective and  talented generalissimo, Ferdinand Foch. 

At the same time, Ludendorff was crippling the  German Army through a series of desperate spring 1918 offensives designed to end the war before American troops arrived in force. These, while  tactically brilliant, were strategically pointless. Ludendorff succeeded only in killing his final reserves of infantry and extending his lines to indefensible lengths as the German home front disintegrated into political chaos. Reinvigorated by their successful defense and reinforced by fresh drafts  from England and America, the Allies  counterattacked and drove the fatally weakened Germans back to their own frontiers. In every aspect  from domestic politics to production, through sea  power, road, and rail logistics to command  intelligence, equipment, and frontline strength, the  victors in 1918 had the edge, and this gave them  victory. This author also wrote the notable work Armaments and the Coming of War, 1904-1914.