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

The enablers of this strategy were a self-styled breed of elite men: the storm troopers. Sometimes described as soldier-workers in an industrialized war, storm troopers actually constituted highly skilled and motivated teams of warrior-craftsmen. Rather than minions of military machines, they were the masters. What elevated them in Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s eyes was their ability to suppress the alienation of industrialized warfare, not by mastering machines but by mastering themselves. Their personal panoply of grenades, light machine guns, trench mortars, and flamethrowers merely served to accentuate, not actuate, their war-fighting spirit and skills.

To Germany’s warlords, violent offensive action in 1918 was needed not just to preserve victory in the East but also to reinvigorate Germany’s commitment to the war, both at home and at the front. In October 1917, Ernst Jünger, the archetypal storm trooper, encountered the first war-hardened noncom he could recall who showed shameless indifference in combat—a worrying sign, he wrote, of “erosion of the war ethos.” That same month Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria noted that units in his army were breaking down under the constant strain of defensive operations in the West.

Hindenburg’s message to the army late in 1917 indirectly referred to this growing war-weariness. “Take no thought for what is to be after the war!” the field marshal enjoined his troops. “This only brings despondency into our ranks and strengthens the hopes of the enemy.” Rallying the troops with commands Jünger’s fellow storm troopers would have reveled in, Hindenburg snapped: “Muscles tensed, nerves steeled, eyes front! We see before us the aim: Germany honored, free, and great!”

Recalling his soldiers’ mind-set late in 1917, Ludendorff revealed the tenor of his own thoughts when he wrote, “In the West the Army pined for the offensive” and that his soldiers “thought with horror of fresh defensive battles and longed for a war of movement.” The longing was Ludendorff’s own. Confronted by blasted landscapes and implacable enemies in the West, Ludendorff calmed his doubts by returning to what he did best: mastering a situation through command of tactics and operational minutiae. Moreover, no longer was he mastering minutiae in defense, as in 1917, but commanding elite storm troopers in relentless attacks.

Ludendorff, in other words, played to his strengths. No one worked harder than the “robot Napoleon” in preparing the German army for zero hour on March 21. Seventeen-hour workdays were routine for him as he moved hundreds of thousands of men and millions of shells into position. German strength in the West peaked at four million effectives as the army prepared its first major offensive there since Verdun in February 1916. If the battle was lost, it would not be from any lack of dedication or devotion to duty.

But Hindenburg and Ludendorff soon learned that even the furor teutonicus had its limits. During the opening stages of Operation Michael (the first of five “Ludendorff Offensives”), soldiers’ glory was indeed revived as seventy-one divisions in three German armies surged forward. Its shattering opening salvo, orchestrated by the maestro of German artillery, Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, included seven thousand guns firing a million shells. On witnessing this intense barrage, Jünger spoke of a front “wrapped in a sea of smoke and flame.”

The shells fell mainly on a British Fifth Army that was still recovering from the previous year’s slaughter at Passchendaele. Quickly exploiting a dazed and temporarily demoralized foe, German units surged forward and advanced fourteen miles in a single day—a feat not seen in the West since the early weeks of the war.

Initially these stunning results appeared to vindicate Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s pursuit of total victory. Caught up in the moment, the kaiser boasted that the war was over, with the English utterly defeated. He impetuously decorated Hindenburg with the Iron Cross with Golden Rays, known as the Blücher Cross, since only Prussian General Gebhard von Blücher had previously been honored with it. Basking in public glory, Hindenburg privately grumbled to his wife: “What is the use of all these orders? A good and advantageous peace is what I should prefer. It is not my fault in any case if the struggle ends unfavorably for us.”

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