The Tragic Pursuit of Total Victory: Germany’s Unrelenting Offensive That Lost WWI

Expedient it was, but economizing on forces through strategic withdrawal and a defensive posture did not mean abandoning offensive spirit. Well-timed counterattacks remained a major feature of Germany’s defensive posture in the West in 1917, notably at Passchendaele (Third Ypres) and Cambrai. Meanwhile, the duumvirate continued to look ahead to 1918 and a massive offensive in which the tactical skills and conquering zeal of German soldiery would produce total victory.

Indeed, as early as January 1917, recalled Colonel Fritz von Lossberg, Ludendorff committed himself to defeating Germany’s enemies in the West through such an offensive. Its necessary preconditions included total mobilization of the economy (the ill-fated Hindenburg Program); extended conscription; Vaterländischer Unterricht, or “patriotic instruction,” whose goal it was to convince Germans that only one war outcome—decisive victory—was acceptable; and the silencing of “defeatist” elements in the Reichstag and elsewhere. Focused on the primacy of sacrificial effort and national unity, Germany’s preparations did not include a wholehearted embrace of Materialschlacht (material warfare) or of machinery as an arbiter of final victory.

In fact, while not demodernizing, the post-Verdun German army had clearly fallen behind the Entente forces in crucial weaponry such as motor transport, aircraft, and tanks. Resource constraints exacerbated by the Entente naval blockade, unrealistic industrial production goals, and three years of constant warfare all told on German economic productivity.

So too did Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s blithe dismissal of machines as determiners of victory. In one famous instance, Ludendorff dismissed tanks as psychological weapons, readily neutralized as long as German soldiers held their nerve and mastered their “tank-panic.” Such a view was consistent with his and Hindenburg’s belief in the decisiveness of intangibles like initiative and drive—the determined effort to take the fight to the enemy and conquer.

They codified their hyperaggressive posture in a January 1, 1918, directive on “The Attack in Positional Warfare.” A restatement of Germany’s offensive determination, it marked a return to grandiose campaigns fought on German terms. It was meant as well to reinvigorate morale at a time when nearly one in ten German soldiers sought to shirk duty as their units redeployed from service in the East to the West. Vigorous and violent action in 1918, Hindenburg and Ludendorff concluded, was the best and only way to redeem the dispiriting attritional exchanges of 1916 and 1917.

Total victory in the West was also needed to consolidate a burgeoning empire in Eastern Europe. Germany’s exploitation and evisceration of Romania and tsarist Russia in 1917 could only be preserved with the enforced acquiescence of France and Britain, now joined by the United States, brought into the war in April 1917 by the failed gamble of unrestricted submarine warfare. Having prevailed in the East, Hindenburg and Ludendorff envisioned an Ostimperium stretching as far as the Caspian Sea. When asked why he insisted on occupying the Baltic States, Hindenburg famously declared he needed them “for the maneuvering of my left wing in the next war.”

Such posturing was breathtaking in its audacity, but it needed victory in the West to give it permanence. It also entailed a paradox: To secure the East, Germany had to retain a million troops there, just when its warlords were seeking victory in the West—a victory intended to secure Entente compliance to this eastern imperium. Would the reduced means deployed to the Western Front in the winter of 1917-1918 nevertheless be adequate to the ends desired the following spring? No one knew for sure.

Furthermore, Germany had been unable to win in the West with the element of surprise in 1914, when war enthusiasm and national unity had been at their peak. How then was the army to win in 1918? Entente forces were tired but still resolute, and the American Expeditionary Forces, still trickling across the Atlantic, promised to become a flood by early summer. With an optimism born of desperation, Hindenburg and Ludendorff saw a window of opportunity that promised to remain open until the spring. By shifting forty-four divisions—nearly equal to three complete armies—from the Eastern Front to the West, they hoped to attain enough of an advantage to split the British and French armies in the area of the Somme, forcing the former to reel back toward the English Channel, leaving a shaken French army all alone to defend Paris.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to