The German 1918 Offensives

A Case Study in The Operational Level of War

David T. Zabecki

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415356008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134252244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the first study of the Ludendorff Offensives of 1918 based extensively on key German records presumed to be lost forever after Potsdam was bombed in 1944.

In 1997, David T. Zabecki discovered translated copies of these files in a collection of old instructional material at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He presents his findings here for the first time, with a thorough review of the surviving original operational plans and orders, to offer a wealth of fresh insights to the German Offensives of 1918.

David T. Zabecki clearly demonstrates how the German failure to exploit the vulnerabilities in the BEF's rail system led to the failure of the first two offensives, and how inadequacies in the German rail system determined the outcome of the last three offensives. This is a window into the mind of the German General Staff of World War I, with thorough analysis of the German planning and decision making processes during the execution of battles. This is also the first study in English or in German to analyze the specifics of the aborted Operation HAGEN plan. This is also the first study of the 1918 Offensives to focus on the 'operational level of war' and on the body of military activity known as 'the operational art', rather than on the conventional tactical or strategic levels.

This book will be of great interest to all students of World War I, the German Army and of strategic studies and military theory in general.

1 Introduction
Why do we still bother with World War I?

With regard to operational history, it becomes too easy to lose sight of battles and campaigns as means to higher ends and to overlook alternative paths not taken which might have led to very different outcomes.¹

Colonel Richard M. Swain

“Why bother with World War I? What’s the point?” I frequently get this question from junior officers, and quite often from more senior ones. Why indeed? In the broader context, of course, there is very little question about the historical significance of World War I. The war marked the death of an entire way of life in Europe, and the true beginnings of the modern era. When World War I ended, four of the world’s five great empires were dead, and the fifth was mortally wounded. The war marked the start of the shift of global power from the center of Europe to America and Russia on the flanks. In his 2001 book, Forgotten Victory, Gary Sheffield called the Great War “the key event of the twentieth century, from which everything else flowed.”²

Yet despite its social, political, and economic significance, popular history has given the military aspects of World War I a very bad reputation. The conventional image of that war is one of a senseless blood bath—a dull and grinding war of attrition conducted by incompetent, even criminally stupid generals, without a trace of strategic thought or tactical innovation. Thus, many today believe that World War I has nothing to teach the modern soldier, especially in comparison to World War II, with its fast-moving armored and airborne divisions. Any detailed study of World War I seems largely irrelevant by comparison.

Much of the existing image of World War I is based on the vivid descriptions of contemporary poets and popular writers, many of who experienced directly the horrors of the Great War. The writings of Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer), Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth), and especially C.S. Forester (The General) have left a lasting imprint on the popular mind, and to some extent have influenced the scholarly mind as well. With few exceptions, the most notable being Germany’s Ernst Jünger (Storm of Steel), the World War I writers and poets cast their own experiences in a largely anti-heroic light, which profoundly influenced the way people looked at war in general for the remainder of the 20th century.³ As Professor Brian Bond has pointed out, the literary writers either ignored, or failed to address convincingly, the larger historical, political, and strategic questions of the war. What was it about and why was it fought?⁴

The observations of the military historians and theorists who wrote during the 1920s and 1930s were even more critical of the Great War’s significance and conduct. In his 1987 book, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918, Tim Travers identified two basic British schools of thought that had emerged by the 1930s. Although Travers referred specifically to the evaluation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), his model applies to the historiography of the entire war.⁵

The “Internal Factor,” or “Mud and Blood” school of thought, holds that the slaughter on the Western Front was caused by the incompetence of the generals, with their bloody-mindedness, their physical and intellectual distance from actual front-line conditions, and their Victorian-era insensitivity. Among the most influential books of this school are Liddell Hart’s The Real War and Lloyd George’s War Memoirs. More recent contributions from this school include John Ellis’ Eye-deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, and Lyn Mac- Donald’s They Called It Passchendaele and To the Last Man: Spring 1918. The approach of this school is appealing because it is easy to understand in human terms. It is also far too simplistic, too pat. The notion that Germany, Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia all simultaneously produced complete higher-officer corps full of idiots requires too much of a stretch.

The “External Factor” school blames the Western Front deadlock on a combination of inexperienced staff officers, the technical difficulties of mastering new technology, the impressive tactical fighting ability of the Germans, and the interference of political leaders in strictly military affairs. The significant contributions from this school include the fourteen volumes of the British official history edited by Sir James Edmonds, and John Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier. But the arguments of this school are overly simplistic as well, and serve as apologists for the genuinely incompetent commanders the war did produce.

The past thirty years have seen the emergence of a third school of thought, which Travers calls the “Realists.” The writers of this school take a more balanced approach to the study of World War I. The general thrust of their argument holds that the clash between old ideas and new weapons and technology, combined with the huge scale of the war and a lack of combined arms coordination, caused serious tactical and operational problems on all sides. While the new technology was an external factor, the inability to integrate the new weapons was an internal flaw.

In The Killing Ground, Travers also describes the paradigm shift from muscle-powered warfare to machine-powered warfare that is perhaps the most recognizable characteristic of World War I. It was a paradigm shift that occurred so fast that most military commanders and staff officers were unable to come to grips with it within the course of the war. Moreover, it was a shift that occurred unevenly, and this more than anything else caused the deadlock on the Western Front.

The two basic elements of combat power are fire and maneuver. Throughout military history the two have been locked in a constant struggle for dominance. Rarely has one gained the upper hand, or held it for very long. Yet by 1914 firepower technology was far ahead of mobility technology. Machine guns and rapid-firing artillery had truly mechanized firepower by 1914, but battlefield mobility was still based primarily on human and horse muscle power. This would begin to change by 1918, with the emergence of combat aircraft, the tank, and increased use of motor vehicles; but for most of World War I firepower retained the upper hand.

The writers of the Realist school point out just how difficult it was for even the most talented and intelligent of the Great War’s military planners to come to grips with these changes that came on a “future shock” scale. They also argue that by 1918 the tactical and technical solutions were starting to emerge. World War I ended in exhaustion before the new solutions could be brought to fruition, but they formed the seedbed for the mobile tactics and operations of World War II.

One of the strongest and most concise arguments for the significance of World War I in the history of warfare can be found in Jonathan Bailey’s 1996 pamphlet The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare. Bailey argued that between 1917 and 1918 “a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) took place which, it is contended, was more than merely that; rather it amounted to a Military Revolution which was the most significant development in the history of warfare to date, and remains so.”⁶

Bailey built a strong and logical argument to support this seemingly radical thesis. He drew a sharp distinction between a revolution in military affairs and a military revolution. According to one definition, an RMA is “a discontinuous increase in military capability and effectiveness arising from simultaneous and mutually supportive change in technology, systems, operational methods, and military organizations.”⁷ A military revolution, according to Bailey, “embodies a more fundamental and enduring transformation brought about by military change.”⁸ The key distinction is that a military revolution introduces an entirely new concept in warfighting, rather than just quantum improvements in current ways of operating.

Bailey argued that the period on the Western Front from 1917 to 1918 introduced such a military revolution that brought about the birth of the modern style of warfare, “with the advent of three dimensional artillery indirect fire as the foundation of planning at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.” The result was something fundamentally different and new in warfare—operations in three dimensions and in depth.⁹

Essentially then, Bailey argued that the World War I paradigm shift was far more extensive than the muscle to machine shift described by Travers. Bailey suggested that the 1917–1918 shift to the modern style of warfare was so revolutionary that the subsequent introductions of armor, air power, and information-age technology have amounted to no more than complements to it. These advances have been incremental, technical improvements to the efficiency of the conceptual model of the modern style of warfare.

Bailey also argues it was the indirect fire revolution that grew out of the experimentation in the years just prior to World War I that made possible the conceptual leaps to three-dimensional warfare and deep battle. The supporting technologies of 1917–1918, however, were not up to the potentials of the indirect fire model. Specifically, transportation capabilities were inadequate for artillery to move forward rapidly and be re-supplied over rough terrain, and communications were inadequate to maintain decentralized command and control of the fire plan once an operation started. As a consequence, contemporary popular wisdom accepts that artillery dominated the battlefield in World War I. Few really understand, as Bailey argued, that artillery fire was the key to maneuver rather than the agent of stalemate. The technical solutions to these problems emerged in the years between the World Wars and proved themselves on the battlefields of World War II and since. As Bailey noted, “Clearly between 1914 and 1918 something of extraordinary historical profundity and enduring military significance had happened.”¹⁰

According to Bailey, the RMA we are experiencing today is essentially an echo of World War I and hardly revolutionary by comparison. Key elements of today’s RMA include: precise standoff strikes; real-time Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I); information operations; and non-lethality. In 1917–1918 terms these would have been called: accurate indirect fire; improvement in command and control and intelligence; the means of acting upon it; and the munitions and techniques of neutralization and suppression.¹¹

Other works from the “Realist” school include Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory: The First World War Myths and Realities; Shelford Bidwell’s and Dominick Graham’s Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War 1904–1945; Bruce Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics; Jonathan Bailey’s Field Artillery and Firepower; Rod Paschall’s The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917–1918; Bill Rawling’s Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918; and my own Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruch-müller and the Birth of Modern Artillery.

The German 1918 offensives as a model

World War I also witnessed the first truly modern appearance of the Operational Level of War, which is the central topic of this book. It is not the primary objective of this study, however, to speculate on ways in which the Germans could have won World War I, or even could have achieved some sort of a battlefield victory in 1918. Rather, the primary objective is to use German offensive operations and planning in 1918 as a laboratory to examine and analyze the Operational Level of War. In the course of this analysis, alternative courses of action will be considered as a means to explore the flaws in German operational planning and execution.

The central purpose of the German military effort between March and July 1918 was Erich Ludendorff ’s attempt to stage a knockout victory in the west. In four of the five offensives the Germans launched, however, impressive tactical gains failed to lead to operational results, much less strategic success. In the fifth operation, the Germans failed to achieve even tactical success. After the failure of Operations MICHAEL and GEORGETTE, the subsequent offensives were supposed to set the conditions for the planned but never launched Operation HAGEN. Operationally, first MICHAEL, then GEORGETTE, and then HAGEN were supposed to knock the British out of the war, which would then lead to the strategic result of an Allied collapse in the west before enough fresh American forces could arrive to tip the strategic balance.

Ludendorff ’s ultimate strategic objective, however, was to achieve a decisive and unconditional military victory over the Western Allies, rather than establish a position of relative strength from which to negotiate a conclusion to the hostilities that would be favorable to Germany on the balance sheet. Most historians agree that such a decisive military victory was far beyond Germany’s capabilities and resources in 1918. This, perhaps, was the fatal flaw or “disconnect” between the strategic and operational levels that doomed Ludendorff ’s offensives from the start. With more realistic strategic objectives and better operational design, however, Germany just might have been able to conduct a series of operationally successful campaigns and end the war in a far better strategic position than it actually did.

The tactical outcomes of Ludendorff ’s offensives are well known. The objective here is to compare the results with the plans and the process at the operational level, to identify the flaws, and to explore possible alternatives. This study attempts to answer the following questions:

1. What were the German planners and decision makers thinking, and what did the operations orders say?
2. How did the execution vary from the plans, and what impact did this have in the short and long term?
3. Given that the operational objectives did not support the strategic realities of 1918, could the German strategic and operational objectives have been modified to improve the chances of success?
4. Did the operational design maximize the tactical realities of 1918?
5. Why did each (and all combined) of the Ludendorff offensives fail to set the conditions for HAGEN?
6. Were the failures ones of planning or of execution?
7. What were the objectives and details of the HAGEN plan?
8. With the proper conditions, could HAGEN or any of the other offensives have succeeded—and if so, how?
9. At the operational level, what lessons did Germany learn or mis-learn from 1918?

Question Number 7 is especially intriguing. To the best of my knowledge, no scholarly study has ever been made of the HAGEN plans.

Scope and methods

This book focuses on German offensive operations and planning on the Western Front from November 1917 through July 1918. The discussion includes the Eastern Front, defensive operations in 1918, and overall operations in 1914–1917 only insofar as necessary to explain the plans and actions of the Ludendorff offensives. I have conducted the analysis from the point of view of the Germans. I have, of course, considered a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Maps
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary of Acronyms and Military and Foreign Terms
• 1. Introduction: Why Do We Still Bother With World War I?
• 2. The Operational Art
• 3. The Tactical Realities of 1918
• 4. The Strategic Reality
• 5. The Operational Decision: 11 November 1917 to 21 January 1918
• 6. Operations MICHAEL and MARS: 21 March to 5 April 1918
• 7. Operation GEORGETTE: 9–29 April 1918
• 8. Operations BLÜCHER, GOERZ, and YORCK: 27 May–5 June 1918
• 9. Operations GNEISENAU and HAMMERSCHLAG: 9–15 June 1918
• 10. Operation MARNESCHUTZ– REIMS: 15 July–3 August 1918
• 11. Operations HAGEN and KURFÜRST
• 12. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography