Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory in the Great War

HISTORY: With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918By David Stevenson Allen Lane, 688pp. £30

IN THE SPRING of 1918, after more than three years of gruelling and often calamitous trench warfare on the Western Front, Britain and France were facing a disastrous situation. No end to the war was in sight, hundreds of thousands of young men were dead or mutilated, and the territorial gains made since the beginning of the campaign were negligible.

Moreover, the Allies were confronted with a strategic nightmare: despite the American entry into the war in 1917 the US forces on the ground remained comparatively small, the Italian army had been routed by the Austrians and Germans during the Battle of Caporetto, and Russia had dropped out of the conflict after the revolution that toppled the Romanov dynasty. The Central Powers now controlled central and eastern Europe, and the strongest adversary of the Allies, Germany, was therefore able to move more than 40 divisions to the Western Front. Yet less than a year later, on November 11th, 1918, the war ended with a decisive Allied victory.

How this extraordinary reversal of fortunes was possible is the central question addressed in David Stevenson’s new book on the final 12 months of the “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century. Stevenson, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, is well placed to write such a book, being widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the first World War. But this is not the only reason why his new analysis of victory and defeat in 1918 will receive much attention. While the Great War is hardly a neglected subject, its final phase has not previously been the subject of a single-author study that gives equal attention to both sides of the conflict. This book fills that void.

Drawing on archival research in several countries, Stevenson explores the events and decisions that led to Germany’s defeat in 1918, analysing the reasons for Allied success and the collapse of the Central Powers. The strength of the book lies in his ability to weave together astute analysis of the antagonists’ abilities and weaknesses, from food supply to finance, strategy to technology, and logistics to morale. Cultural historians of the Great War may feel that the book is too top-heavy, focusing on strategy and generals while the soldiers and lower-rank officers doing most of the actual fighting remain largely nameless and faceless. But Stevenson nonetheless delivers on his promise to write a definitive account of the military history of the Great War’s endgame.

Paradoxically, he traces Germany’s ultimate defeat to the stunning initial success of Gen Ludendorff’s great spring offensive of 1918, which tested the British army to the limits of its capacity. Following the US’s entry into the war the German high command, under Ludendorff and Hindenburg, felt that it had to seize the initiative before sizeable US reinforcements could arrive, making use of the temporary numerical advantage triggered by Russia’s exit from the war. Supported by huge artillery attacks and aided by fresh divisions freed up from the Russian campaign, the Germans advanced more quickly between March and July than at any time since the Battle of the Marne, leading to Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s famous “with our backs to the wall” order to his troops to fight to the last man.

Ultimately, however, this quick advance proved to be the German army’s undoing. A point too little appreciated about the first World War is that the slaughter, so often attributed exclusively to trench warfare and the strategy of attrition, was actually at its worst when either side embarked on an offensive strategy, thus making themselves vulnerable to their enemies’ firepower.

Hopelessly overstretched and with supplies outpaced by the rapidly advancing infantry troops, the Germans lost many of their best men and officers during the spring offensive. Consequently they were ill prepared for the Allied counter-offensive that began in the summer and overran some of the Germans’ key strategic positions. By mid August the Allies had recaptured most of the territories conquered by the Germans during their advance, undermining the morale of the German soldiers, who had thought that victory was almost in reach. Had the Germans remained in their well-equipped defensive positions, Stevenson argues, the equally worn-out Allies would have had a much more difficult time beating them.

The spring offensive was, however, not the only reason for the victory of the Allies: they also benefited from substantial advantages in natural resources and industrial production, notably after the US’s entry into the war, without which an Allied victory would have been highly unlikely.

In the end the Allies won a decisive victory on the battlefield but shied away from conquering Germany. Historians have argued endlessly about whether this decision, made so as to end the conflict as soon as possible and avoid further military losses, was the right one. The “incomplete” victory of 1918 contributed to a postwar climate in which many Germans subscribed to the stab-in-the-back myth or the idea that Germany was undefeated on the battlefield but betrayed by revolutionaries at home. An Allied march on Berlin would have prevented the emergence of that powerful myth, as it did in 1945, but Stevenson does a good job of explaining that the desire to end the war overrode all other considerations in late 1918.

For those interested in the strategic and logistical background to Allied victory in the Great War, this book is highly recommended. Told with verve and analytical vigour, Stevenson’s book is a compelling and authoritative study of one of the most significant turning points in 20th-century military history.

Robert Gerwarth is director of University College Dublin’s Centre for War Studies; ucd.ie/ warstudies