[0:00]In November 1918, the German Army was beaten and Germany in the grip of revolution. Less than a year earlier, though, Germany and its allies controlled most of Eastern Europe, had defeated Russia and out-numbered the British and French in the West. So, why did Germany lose the First World War?
[0:21]The German Empire entered the First World War in August 1914, with the most powerful army in the world. But by November 1918, it had been forced to sign an armistice on allied terms, and a revolution had replaced the empire with a republic. The explanation for Germany's defeat in the last year of the war is not as simple as a numbers game. Yes, the allies had more men and more money, and the longer the war lasted, the more likely it was that the allies could win, all things being equal. But nothing in history is inevitable, and all things were not equal. Germany lost its chance to win a quick victory in 1914 when the French won the Battle of the Marne. But the central powers may have had a chance to avoid total defeat. As historian Holger Afflerbach put it, "It was impossible for Germany to win the war (after 1914), but it required very grave mistakes to lose it."
[1:16]Both the allies and Germans made good and bad decisions that shaped the war's outcome. But only Germany's decisions lay within its control, and it was by far the strongest member of the central powers. So that's why we'll focus on them to explain Germany's defeat in 1918. Germany's famous war plan in 1914, the Schlieffen Plan, might have been its best chance to win the war against a more powerful enemy alliance. But as 19th-century Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder admitted, in war, nothing is certain. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." The German High Command learned that lesson the hard way in August and September 1914. German planners and commanders pushed their men past their limits, expected too much from the army they actually had, neglected logistics, and made critical operational mistakes. Coupled with a desperate and effective reaction by the French at the Marne, the result ensured the war would not be over quickly. To make matters worse for the Germans, they drew Britain into the war by violating Belgian neutrality. The wild gamble had gone wrong. France was still fighting, and now Britain was too, leaving the Central Powers to face the unhappy prospect of a long war. Still, the Central Powers weren't necessarily doomed to total defeat, even if outright victory was unlikely. Some historians argue they might have forced some sort of compromise peace even against stronger enemies, if it weren't for more risks and mistakes they made from 1914 to 1917. The High Command failed to effectively reassess its strategy after the defeats of 1914 and develop a coherent plan to win, or at least force acceptable peace terms. The army wasted precious manpower in the failed Verdun Offensive and the flawed defensive tactics on the Somme in 1916. Planners were unable to maintain food production to compensate for the effects of the allied blockade. Germany failed to properly manage its alliance. Austria-Hungary and Germany didn't always coordinate their military operations, and Kaiser Karl even tried to start peace talks without the Germans knowing. Germany's system of governance was also ineffective. The Kaiser had an important role in the system, but was weak. The military eventually took over, but didn't know how to run the economy or politics and interfered with those who did. And another huge gamble that blew up in their faces was the renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, which failed to knock Britain out of the war and brought the United States in. Now that's not to say that Germany didn't have some successes. They, with Austro-Hungarian help, inflicted devastating defeats on Russia and Serbia in 1915, Romania in 1916, and Italy in 1917. They managed with far fewer resources to produce enormous quantities of weapons, to develop new ways of producing fertilizer, and convinced the Ottomans and Bulgarians to join the Central Powers. The Allies, of course, also made mistakes. Inefficient use of their greater resources, disastrous offensives in Lorraine and East Prussia in 1914, Gallipoli and Champagne in 1915, on the Somme in 1916, and in Flanders and on the Chemin des Dames and in the Kerensky Offensive in 1917. The difference was that as the weaker belligerent in a long war, Germany had no margin for error, and every mistake it made brought it closer to defeat. The same was not true of the Allies. Their prospects for victory once the US joined in 1917 were intact, while the German High Command admitted in late 1916, it could not defeat the Allies on land in the West. So Germany failed to win a quick victory in 1914, then saw its chances for avoiding defeat further reduced by mistakes in the following years. But then the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 gave Germany one last chance for avoiding defeat. And so Germany gambled once again. In December 1917, the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia agreed to an armistice, and eventually signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. With Russia out of the war, Germany now in control of vast territories in Eastern Europe, and American troops not yet in France in large numbers, Berlin had one last chance to influence the outcome of the war. As German divisions moved from east to west in early 1918, the High Command prepared one more great gamble, and many in the allied camp feared defeat. British Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey reported the worries of General John Du Cane. "Du Cane envisions the possibility of the French army being smashed and cut off from us, the enemy demanding as a condition of peace the handing over of all the ports from Rouen and Havre to Dunkirk, and, in the event of a refusal, the remorseless hammering of our Army by the whole German army." He considers that, if we wanted to go on with the war, we should have to face the prospect of a million prisoners in France. Some Germans had questioned what the coming offensives could achieve, like social democrat politician Philipp Scheidemann. "Suppose we were to take Calais and Paris. Suppose such a breakthrough were completely successful, would that mean peace? We have overrun entire states, we have chased hostile governments from the land and yet we still have no peace."
[6:44]Most Germans, though, held out hope that victory was still within reach. On March 21st, 1918, the German Army launched the so-called Kaiser's battle or Operation Michael against the British Fifth Army. More than 70 divisions supported by 6,500 guns sliced into 34 British divisions in an attempt to split the two allied armies. German forces pushed back the British, took 75,000 prisoners and achieved unheard of advances in the west since 1914. Ludendorff explained that he would set objectives as the attacks progressed. "In Russia we always merely set an intermediate objective, and then discovered where to go next." But by April 5th, the German drive had run out of steam, and the British, with French help, managed to stabilize the situation. The German High Command then unleashed a series of follow-up offensives against both British and French sectors. Operations Georgette in April, Blücher-Yorck in May, Gneisenau in June, and Friedensturm in July. In the end, these last ditch attacks all made serious dents in allied lines, but they did not result in the capture of any significant strategic objectives, and they didn't force the British and French to ask for peace terms. The Western Front was not Russia, and the Allies managed to pull their reserves to stabilize the front with General Ferdinand Foch taking overall command. The French then launched a major counter-offensive in July, which began to turn the tide for good. The British followed with their own attack on August 8th, a day Ludendorff called The Black Day of the German Army. From then on, the Allies advanced without stopping during the so-called 100-Days Offensive, and while the German army still fought back, it was a beaten force. The Allies also achieved crushing victories over the Ottomans, Bulgarians, and Austro-Hungarians in the closing phase of the war, meaning that even if Germany could somehow hold out for longer in the West, it was completely unable to defend itself in the South and Southeast. In October, Ludendorff told Berlin to ask for an armistice, since the war was lost, and the fighting came to an end November 11th, 1918. So, what happened in that critical period that resulted not in the German victory General Du Cane and others feared, but in a clear military defeat? The German offensives from March to July broke their own army without gaining a decisive victory. In March and April alone, they lost 280,000 casualties. By the end of July, the figure was 977,000, and the killed and wounded were disproportionately from Germany's best units, including the famous stormtroopers. German soldier Frederick Meisel described the heavy losses. "French shells began to hit to the right and left of us, leaving human forms writhing in agony. Our advance came to a stop and soon the French drumfire engulfed us, the air was filled with gas and flying pieces of steel. I reached for my gas mask, pulled it out of its container - then noticed to my horror that a splinter had gone through it leaving a large hole.
[10:18]Germany needed 200,000 replacements every month, but each month only saw 70,000 recovered wounded, and an average of 25,000 new recruits. These losses caused overall German strength to fall from 5.1 million men in March to just 4 million men six months later. Meanwhile, the Allies were growing stronger even without Russia. The British released reserves they'd held in Britain, and by the end of the year, nearly 2 million Americans were in France. Even if the Americans played a lesser role in combat, their presence was important. German rifle strength had out-numbered the allies by 1.57 million to 1.35 million in April, but by November, there were just 866,000 German riflemen facing 1.49 million allied. German commanders also kept shifting priorities once each drive ran out of momentum. If the Germans had taken rail hubs like Amiens or Hazebrouck, they could have seriously threatened allied logistics. Major Wilhelm von Leeb was critical of the army high command or OHL. "OHL has changed direction. It has made its decisions according to the size of territorial gain, rather than operational goals." The Germans had effective stormtrooper infantry tactics and innovated artillery tactics thanks to artillery officer Georg Bruchmüller, but they couldn't turn them into a campaign-winning strategy. The Allies, on the other hand, adapted and collaborated. When the German offensive threatened allied positions, the British government released reserves from the home front. The Americans, who had insisted until now on keeping their army together, agreed to lend out some of their divisions to the French and British. The French transferred forces to the British to stop Michael in March as well. British commander Douglas Haig, who'd until now opposed being under French command, agreed to serve under French General Ferdinand Foch, who took over as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. And the Allies were better at the most modern form of warfare, combined arms warfare using the latest industrial weapons on a mass scale. Germany had invented all sorts of new weapons technology from poison gas to flamethrowers, but the Allies beat the Germans at their own game. They had 800 tanks in the field, while the Germans had about 20, had 4,500 aircraft to the Germans' 3,700, 18,000 guns to Germany's 14,000, and 100,000 motor vehicles to move supplies, of which the Germans only had about 30,000. France alone produced about 50% more planes than Germany in 1918. They caught up to the Germans in terms of the quality of heavy artillery and surpassed Germany in artillery pulled by tractors, and available shells per battery. Historian David Stevenson summed up the shift. "The Allies won the technological race, and overtook their enemies not only in numbers but also in fighting power. In the process they pioneered the characteristic forms of later twentieth-century warfare." Although the German Army was beaten, it was still fighting in Fall 1918, and allied planners fully expected to fight on to complete victory in 1919. Instead, Germany suffered a devastating collapse in morale that ended the war sooner. Even before the spring offensives began, many German troops had lost hope, and this only got stronger as 1918 went on. Up to 180,000 German troops deserted en route to France or while on leave in 1918. When they advanced in the field, some infamously stopped to plunder allied supplies, but they also began attacking their own supply trains for food. British military intelligence also noticed the change based on prisoner interrogations. "The belief is prevalent among officers and men that Germany cannot now win the war." After the offensives failed, surrenders became common, including groups or even whole units. This wave of surrenders accelerated until the November 11th Armistice, as the army continued to slowly disintegrate. In just the last three months of the war, nearly 400,000 German troops surrendered. By some counts, almost as many French troops had surrendered in the entire war. Many within the rank and file became convinced that fighting no longer served Germany's interests, just those of the High Command, the monarchy, and war profiteers, the so-called Schwindler. "The main thing is that the Schwindel and the killing stop. It doesn't matter to us, if we end up German or French." Others were more likely to surrender because they felt disoriented as units suffered such heavy losses that they lost cohesion and group loyalty. Overall, the army suffered a nominal loss rate of 140% in just over eight months. So if a unit had 1,000 men in January 1918, by October, including all the new recruits and replacements who joined in that time, a total of 1,400 men were wounded. And commanders often threw the remnants of depleted units together, instead of building them back up with replacements. Unit cohesion suffered even more because the military regime shuttled hundreds of thousands of men between the field army and industry as short-term priorities changed. At the same time, soldiers, sailors and civilians inside Germany had had enough as well. Workers suffering from malnutrition and war-weariness went on strike, and navy sailors mutinied rather than sail out for a final suicide mission against the more powerful Royal Navy. Public anger turned against the Kaiser and the military, who'd led them into the war, and a full-fledged revolution in early November forced Wilhelm to abdicate and flee to the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the Allies renewed their propaganda efforts on the home front, better managed relations with labor unions, and took advantage of the morale boost from American troop ships arriving in France to make sure that even fragile states like Italy held on. Of course, millions of Germans, military and civilian, wanted to keep fighting, but millions did not, and that tipped the balance. As the crisis deepened, Germany's top generals at first insisted victory was just around the corner. In the late summer, they panicked and admitted defeat, a cycle they repeated more than once in the second half of the year. In mid-August, Ludendorff and Hindenburg informed the Kaiser and Chancellor Georg von Hertling that Germany could not win the war. Ludendorff then changed his mind on this question, but after the collapse of Bulgaria in late September, he announced on October 3rd that Berlin had to seek an armistice, since the war was irretrievably lost. He also told Hindenburg that he had no confidence in the troops, since in his view, they'd been infected by socialism. The German High Command had led the army into disastrous offensives and now undermined what was left of morale by admitting defeat so suddenly. Historian David Stevenson summed up the impact. "The German Army, for all its virtuosity, was let down by a failure of generalship." So, 1918 saw the German Army defeated in the field and a general German collapse in morale. But it also saw the failure of German wartime politics. From 1916, the German military established an informal dictatorship, and it turned out to be pretty bad at governing. Different interest groups among the German civilian and military elites struggled to give the war a coherent meaning, and none of them really succeeded. The army high command generally saw no political solution to the war, and so insisted on and mistakenly believed in their own military superiority until it was too late to avoid defeat.
[18:14]They still insisted on annexing Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of France until summer 1918. Ludendorff and Hindenburg even forced foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann to resign when he said that the war could not be decided by military means alone. These rigid objectives were at odds with Germany's allies like Austria-Hungary, who wanted peace as soon as possible, starting in 1916. The Allies coordinated far better, aligning their positions on Alsace-Lorraine, the breakup of Austria-Hungary, and the League of Nations, even though, of course, some of this consensus would break down after the war. And although Germany won in the East in 1918, the High Command kept hundreds of thousands of German troops tied up occupying the territories they'd forced Russia to give them, leaving fewer resources for the campaign in the West. In the turmoil of the former Russian Imperial territories, the German authorities weren't even able to extract the food that they needed from the lands that they'd conquered, even after the so-called bread peace with the new Ukrainian state. These policies were at odds with the desire of most regular Germans for peace, like this soldier in Fall 1918.
[19:26]"Why didn't we dispatch a peace note when our offensives had their greatest success? No! Now, when we are taking it on the chin, they want to make peace again. Just like in December of 1916." On the home front, the military leadership consistently turned to coercion as a tool of governance against strikers and other unhappy citizens.
[19:57]Austria-Hungary did the same, constantly seeking to root out disloyal Slavs, executing thousands of its own Ukrainian citizens on suspicion of having Russian sympathies, and moving seven divisions to the interior to keep order against roaming deserters. Germany also failed to react to crises and supported its Allies in 1918. Austria-Hungary was suffering from extreme hunger in the Austrian half of the empire, but what little food the Central Powers did get from Ukraine went mostly to Germany. Ludendorff famously had a breakdown when the Bulgarian Front collapsed, since by gambling everything on the west and leaving large occupation forces in the east, Germany had nothing left to support the Austrians in Italy or the Bulgarians in the Balkans. The Allies, on the other hand, had leaders who were flawed, but more legitimate and more representative of the men in the front lines and the people in the factories at home. President Wilson's message that the war was a crusade of democracy was more effective as a result. They also used their command of the sea and good relations with neutrals like the US until 1917, and Argentina to help feed and fund the war effort, and, for example, support Italy and France in their worst moments of economic and military crisis. The German Empire waged a war of risks from 1914 to 1918, a war that ended in bitter defeat. Berlin took these risks because it was the weaker side, but none of them could stave off total defeat. The final gamble in Spring 1918 also ultimately failed. The High Command had no strategic goals, the army was beaten in the field by a superior enemy, the generals admitted defeat, and the other Central Powers collapsed. The home front collapse did indeed help end the war, but given the army was beaten, in retreat, and disintegrating due to poor morale, there was no stab in the back, as Ludendorff and the Nazis later claimed. That myth, however, would help convince many Germans they'd never lost, with deadly consequences for the next World War. In 1945, however, the Allies didn't stop before the German borders to avoid the mistakes of 1918. In early 1945, the Allies set their eyes on the Rhine in Western Germany, and the Red Army was gearing up for their Berlin Operation. The Battle of the Rhineland would be the last set-piece battle in the West, and the Battle of Berlin, the last one in the East. Millions of allied soldiers stood at the ready to bring the Third Reich to its knees, and the last German reserves would have to defend it. If you're curious about these two often-overlooked battles of World War II, we produced two documentary series that together run for more than eight hours. In Rhineland 45, we cover the battle for the Lower Rhine from the Reichswald at the Dutch-German border until the Allied crossing of the Rhine that involved the biggest single-day paratrooper landing of the entire war. In 16 Days in Berlin, we document the entire two-week battle of Berlin day by day. Both documentary series were filmed on original location, feature expert guests like Ian from Forgotten Weapons or David Willie from the Tank Museum, and they show the Second World War in an uncompromising way that wouldn't be possible to show on YouTube. So where can you watch 16 Days in Berlin and Rhineland 45? On Nebula, a streaming service we built together with other creators. On Nebula, we don't have to worry about the algorithm or advertiser guidelines, and the viewers there support us directly, simply by watching our videos, which, by the way, are ad-free and usually uploaded earlier than on YouTube. If you head over to nebula.tv/thegreatwar and sign up, you can save 40% on an annual subscription right now and watch 16 Days in Berlin, Rhineland 45, or our brand new Nebula original series Red Atoms about the Soviet nuclear program. And that's not all. Apart from a growing number of Nebula originals, your subscription now also includes classes. In our newest class, I teach you everything about producing a real-time history documentary and give you a glimpse behind the curtains of our production methods. That's nebula.tv/thegreatwar for 40% off on annual subscriptions and supporting us at real-time history directly. As usual, you can find all the sources for this video in the description down below. If you want to watch some other First World War analysis videos, check out the recent videos we posted about the downfall of the Imperial Russian Army, or another one about the Battle of Cambrai where Germany learned the wrong lessons about tank warfare. If you're watching this video on Patreon or Nebula, thank you so much for the support. I'm Jesse Alexander, and this is a production of Real-Time History. The only history channel that is also sick of the Schwindlers on YouTube.
