Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax by Persico Joseph E

Author:Persico, Joseph E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307430922
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

LUDENDORFF’S SUCCESS ON the western front was mirrored in the Balkans. By May 7, the Central Powers had knocked an Allied nation out of the war. Romania surrendered. Her dreams of profiting from the war lay reduced to ashes. Instead of gaining territory, some 80 percent of the country fell under enemy occupation. Proportionate to population, the Romanians suffered the highest casualties of any belligerent: 219,000 dead, tens of thousands perishing in POW camps, and another 120,000 wounded.

For all the ground gained, one of Ludendorff’s two objectives had not succeeded: his troops had not smashed through to the coast to drive the British from the Channel ports. Still, the Allies had paid a stiff price to thwart him. Gough’s Fifth Army of fifteen divisions, which had guarded the hinge between British and French troops, was no more, with whole elements destroyed, the remnants handed to another force, and Gough sacked. The ports had been denied, but the way south was now open to sweep to the Marne and take Paris. The French capital may not have fallen to the Schlieffen strategy in 1914, but Germany was getting a second chance. With the head severed, the body must fall, Ludendorff reasoned, and the war would be won.

The people of Paris had recently received a foretaste of conflict firsthand. In a wood outside the city of Laon, the Krupp Works had unveiled its latest weapon, the “Paris gun,” a monstrous affair with a barrel rising to the height of a ten-story building. Two days into Ludendorff’s offensive, the first six Paris guns began lofting shells twenty-five miles into the atmosphere that in less than three minutes fell on the French capital, seventy-five miles distant. Over the next several weeks, the guns sowed panic in the capital. But the nightmare was short-lived. After only forty-five firings the colossal barrels were worn useless. Some 256 Parisians were killed, and the guns were more damaging to the city’s sense of security than to its survival.

Despite Ludendorff’s early momentum, Allied reinforcements managed to halt his armies before the Marne. The interval gave the Allies a breathing spell in which to correct a failing that had plagued them from the war’s outset. Since December 1916, Ferdinand Foch had been vegetating in semiretirement, the penalty for the staggering casualties his earlier leadership had cost France. Foch now had an unlikely champion, the usually domineering Douglas Haig. The German sweep and the threat to Paris had made abundantly clear to Haig that the defensive mind-set of the current French commander, Henri Pétain, was unsuitable. And so at a hurried meeting at Beauvais on April 3, the British, French, and Americans signed an agreement giving Foch “all powers necessary” to coordinate their forces. By April 14, the vague role of coordinator was dropped and Foch formally became Allied commander in chief on the western front. Haig had championed his rival for practical reasons. Spine had to be restored to the French Army if the German tide were to be reversed. And Foch, whatever his other failings, had a backbone of steel.

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