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

In September 1916, newly minted Supreme Army Commander Paul von Hindenburg and his deputy chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, toured the front lines at the Somme and Verdun. After that journey, a subdued Hindenburg worriedly noted that his soldiers “hardly ever saw anything but trenches and shell holes…for weeks and even months.” He confessed he “could now understand how everyone, officers and men alike, longed to get away from such an atmosphere.” In these dispiriting conditions, soldiers had “to renounce that mighty spiritual exaltation which accompanies a victorious advance…. How many of our brave men have never known this, the purest of a soldier’s joys.”

Accustomed to a war of consequences, if not always decision, on the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, Hindenburg may well have seconded Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener’s famous declaration that, with respect to combat on the Western Front, “This isn’t war.” Rather than free flowing and glorious, combat on the Western Front had become oppressive and joyless. In the aftermath of the Schlieffen Plan’s failure and the indecisive “race to the sea” in 1914, remorseless attritional warfare in France and Belgium served to weaken German vigor. Confined to underground bunkers or exposed to merciless storms of steel rained down on them by opponents who could afford to throw a greater weight of shells, Germany’s soldier-heroes wasted away.

A simple balance sheet showed that continued attritional exchanges would drain Germany of men and materiel before they drained Entente forces. The twin bloodlettings of Verdun and the Somme ended up costing Germany nearly three quarters of a million men killed or wounded. Taken together, Ludendorff confessed, they came close to destroying the army in 1916.

Annihilation bred alienation. German soldiers openly referred to Verdun as a “regular hell” whose horrific persistence generated indiscipline, demoralization, and increased rates of desertion. Despite his public description of Verdun as the “beacon light of German valor,” Hindenburg privately recognized that the results did nothing to redeem the enormous exertions and sacrifices of his army. Yet despite their reservations about its grinding effects on German troops, Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued to believe they could master the Western Front, thereby producing total victory for the Second Reich.

They believed so because to admit otherwise was to tacitly admit defeat. Like Hindenburg’s predecessor, Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the general staff, they not only believed they were fighting for the very existence of Germany as a strong and independent nation-state but also to preserve the Prussian military elite’s dominance over German society. They further saw the Western Front as a test of personal as well as collective worthiness.

For the bourgeois Ludendorff, by achieving total victory he could prove himself worthy of aristocratic distinction—and be recognized, celebrated, and ennobled as one of Germany’s all-time military heroes. Mastering the Western Front was for him the ultimate personal and professional challenge, a fact reflected in his memoirs when he referred to preparations for the spring offensive of 1918 as “the biggest task in history.”

Hindenburg as well was driven by self-image, a predictable trait for a man who proudly traced his lineage to the Teutonic knights of the Middle Ages and who was immoderately fond of posing for martial portraits. For him, the only conceivable path to victory was complete trust in the nerve and spiritual unity of his men.

“Great is the task that still confronts us,” he declared to The New York Times in March 1915, “but greater [still is] my faith in my brave troops.” Patriotic postcards repeated his stirring aphorisms like Einig im innern, sind wir unbesieglich: that, as long as Germans remained united in spirit, they could not be vanquished. More than mere slogans, these words signaled Hindenburg’s absolute commitment to victory—one that he believed could only be achieved by military means.

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