America's Greatest Blunder by Burton Yale Pines

Author:Burton Yale Pines
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9891487-1-9
Publisher: RSD Press

Germany’s Generals Roll the Dice

The approaching gusher of arriving Americans riveted Germany’s attention. Its generals needn’t be an Einstein (then a thirty-eight-year-old physics professor in Berlin) to do the math. To the German High Command it made little difference under what flag the arriving doughboys fought, what uniforms they wore or who commanded them. The searing Allied arguments over doughboy amalgamation were of no concern to the Germans. Only one thing counted: the numbers. And they were moving inexorably (in the purest meaning of that word) against Germany, shipload by shipload, something Allied propaganda aimed at Germany began trumpeting. There was creeping realization in the High Command that time had become Germany’s main enemy. If its army ever expected to crush the Allies, march into Paris as it had in 1871 and impose a punitive peace, Germany must strike soon. Or, failing that, even if the German Army sought nothing more than the kind of offensive gains that would give Berlin leverage at a peace conference, then it also must strike soon, before a critical mass of AEF soldiers arrived, were trained and headed for the Western Front. At a crucial High Command meeting in November 1917, head of operations Major Georg Wetzell put it very bluntly: Germany had “to deliver an annihilating blow...before American aid [could] become effective.”

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s pair of top commanders, agreed. They ordered work to begin on plans for what the German press later called Kaiserschlacht, or the Kaiser’s battle, a series of offensives for spring 1918. It was a roll of the dice (in John Keegan’s words) which would send into battle almost every last bit of their manpower reserves, playing what some of their staff said was Germany’s “last card.”2 Writing thirteen years later, B.H. Liddell Hart called it “a race between the effect of Germany’s blow and the arrival of American reinforcements.”3 And it became a race whose risk and consequences of failure were vastly greater than Hindenburg and Ludendorff ever could have reckoned. As history records, it was to be an all-or-nothing gamble.

On Germany’s home front too, time seemed to be running out. Fast evaporating was any patience with the war. Food (including the unappetizing turnip, typically fodder for animals) was being rationed tighter and tighter; so were coal and wood for heating and cotton and wool for warm clothing. Goods grew so short they almost disappeared. Before the war, each week a German on average was eating 2.3 lbs of meat; in late 1917 it was but 0.3 lbs. Such skimpy diets were leading to malnutrition and, worse, to pneumonia and tuberculosis, pushing up the death rate among women and children more than fifty percent above pre-war levels. Laborers, because of the battlefield’s enormous manpower demands, were growing so scarce that the government, in effect, drafted all German males age seventeen to sixty to work in factories and fields if they weren’t already in the army. Women too were pulled into the workforce. These conditions, predictably, triggered labor discontent, strikes and even food riots.

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