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

Exhaustion and a sense of betrayal soon infected the army, a mood caught after the war by Erich Maria Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front. In its pages, a disillusioned Paul Baumer intoned: “It’s dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country it’s better not to die at all.” Such statements, near heresy in 1914, accurately captured the sentiment of many a German soldier in the late spring and summer of 1918. Another evocative depiction of this mood can be seen in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film Westfront 1918, in which a German soldier named Karl returns home on leave only to find his wife relieving her loneliness in another man’s arms, and his mother, weakened by hunger, suffering in a bread line. Feelings of home front hopelessness aggravated the impact of physical exhaustion and the loss of friends and comrades at the front.

Increasingly, many German soldiers turned to shirking, downing their rifles and hiding in attics and other havens behind the lines. That July, Ludendorff recorded an “increasing incidence of unauthorized leave, acts of cowardice and refusal to follow orders in the face of the enemy on the western front.” A low estimate for these shirkers was three-quarters of a million, but perhaps as many as a million men found reasons to evade frontline action, not out of disloyalty or cowardice but because they considered their efforts wasted in a war now irretrievably lost.

Of course, many German soldiers continued to fight and die under very disagreeable conditions, but they did so for little outward purpose and with no favorable end in sight. In this context, demoralization was the rational response of men who had given their all, only to discover the odds at which they fought had grown too long.

Signs of war exhaustion were there for Hindenburg and Ludendorff to see, but the generals refused to entertain them. They could not say they were not warned. Suspecting that his reports of frontline exhaustion were being toned down before they reached the duumvirate, Colonel Albrecht von Thaer journeyed in early May to headquarters to report in person. Hindenburg listened silently to Thaer’s description of soldier breakdowns and weakening morale but dismissed them as localized. Most other reports he received, he assured Thaer, spoke of “very good” and even “splendid” morale. Comforting Thaer, Hindenburg told him that the confident climate of OHL, the German high command, would mend his frayed nerves.

Thaer’s audience with Ludendorff was even more unsettling. Ludendorff dismissed as “prattle” Thaer’s description of weakening morale and inadequate replacement soldiers. More honestly, perhaps, Ludendorff growled: “What would you have me do? Pursue peace at any price?” Ducking responsibility, Ludendorff declared the army needed tougher commanders, not changes in strategy. Having staked everything on their men’s tactical prowess and conquering zeal, Hindenburg and Ludendorff denied the reality staring them in the face: that they had driven their army past endurance.

Ludendorff’s personal wake-up call, which he described as the “Black Day of the German Army,” came on August 8, 1918, at Amiens, when German units gave up en masse after a punishing Entente combined-arms assault. As his army staggered under coordinated Entente attacks, Ludendorff became unnerved.

Previous signs of mental debility included his morbid attachment to the body of a beloved stepson, killed in the offensives Ludendorff himself had orchestrated. In July he had openly and harshly criticized a suggestion made by Hindenburg regarding a counteroffensive during the Second Battle of the Marne: a shocking breakdown in self-discipline. Staff officers witnessed in disbelief the scene of their bourgeois chief of staff snapping impertinently at their beloved field marshal, a man senior to him in age, rank, and social status.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to