One Hundred Days - 5: The Last Weeks for Germany

Lille was liberated by British forces on 18th October

Of all the blows suffered by Germany between July and November, the breaking of the Siegfried Zone was the most shattering, militarily. At the end of September denial still flickered among a few in the German hierarchy, but most realised their military position was now hopeless. Plans to prolong the war until 1919 had been replaced by the desperate objective of lasting out to strengthen the negotiating position of the German politicians. Hindenburg and Ludendorff shifted position to make strident demands that peace negotiations should be accelerated. On 28^th September, the Kaiser sacked the recently appointed Chancellor, von Herzig, and his foreign minister. Prince Maximilian von Baden – a 51 years old aristocrat and self confessed liberal democrat – was handed the poisoned chalice, amid military despair and civil unrest.

At their first meeting, on 3^rd October, Hindenburg and Ludendorff informed von Baden that a debacle was imminent, owing to Allied tank strength and the weakness of German reserves. The Prince immediately cabled a note to President Wilson, accepting Wilson’s Fourteen Points* and pleading for a just peace. Wilson replied, seeking clarifications of Germany’s intentions and, as the days passed anxiously, von Baden conceded further on previous soundings and offered withdrawal of the Army behind German Borders. Wilson’s final reply on 14^th October refused any unhindered German withdrawal without an armistice on the Allies’ terms. In effect, Germany now had to surrender or be crushed.

On the evening of 10^th October, Foch’s forces were pressing on the Germans from all sides. Haig was with the British 1^st, 4^th and 5^th Armies on the outskirts of Le Cateau – scene of Smith-Dorrien’s 2^nd Army Corps heroic stand in August 1914 (see Post 8/12/2014). Pershing and Gouraud were threatening the great German railway junction ay Longwy in the south; and Germany’s main northern centre at Lille was now menaced by a pincer movement by advancing British, French and Belgian forces. Ludendorff’s last ditch plan was to put most of his resources into the defence of Longwy in the south and Lille in the north. This meant that other places – for so long key strongpoints of the German occupation – fell with relatively little resistance. Mangin’s army pushed forward between the upper rivers Aisne and Oise, and across the Gobain massif. Haig advance east in the centre towards Valeniciennes, and on 17^th October the Germans evacuated Douai – a moment of great significance. King Albert, commanding the Belgian, Plumer’s 2^nd British and Degoutte’s 6^th French armies, began to move rapidly across Belgium. By 16^th October they were along a line well to the east of Ypres and Diksmuide – from Ostend on the coast, through Bruges to Harlebeke on the river Lys. All these troops were now in open country, and the Germans had neither time nor resources to build defensive positions.

With Plumer in Harlebeke and Horne in Douai, Lille was threatened from the north and the south west, and was untenable. Following a further breakthrough at the canals junction at Pont-à-Vendin, south of the city, the Germans retreated, and Lille was liberated amid joyous scenes on 18^th October. To the south, Mangin continued; having taken Laon on 13^th October, he pushed the Germans further back. Paradoxically, their lines were now becoming so shortened they were able in several key points to increase their resistance as they fell back, and the fighting was still fierce.

Now Lille had fallen, Haig had his long dreamt of opportunity to plan an advance into Belgium. He knew he would face determined defences in Valenciennes and in the Mormal Forest, and decided to bypass them, forcing a ten mile passage in the gaps between; past Maubeuge and into southern Belgium and its symbolic town of Mons. Haig made his move on 17^th October. Centred on Le Cateau, he advanced with Rawlinson’s 4^th; Byng’s 3^rd and part of Hornes 1^st armies on a thirty miles front from Bohain to Denain. The German defence was strong and they fought bravely against superior forces, but by 23^rd, Haig had converged on the gap that he wished to force. On that day he launched his last full scale action of the war on a fifteen miles front.

The only area where dramatic advances were not made was in the Argonne, where Pershing’s 1^st USA Army was mired in attritional struggles against well set defensive positions throughout the forest. This was ironic, given Pershing’s earlier stance and comments (see Post 15/9/2018). His own army was now in a position similar to that of the inexperienced British army at the Somme in 1916. The Germans held out until the end of the month, but inevitably conceded ground as, elsewhere, the wider front crumbled. The Germans were being corralled into the flat plain around Liege, where they would be trapped unless they retreated across their own borders. If the Americans completed their mission, it seemed likely the German army would be split into two large groups, with the southern armies being pushed out of Lorraine.

Prinz Max von Baden.
A brief and unhappy stint as the
Kaiser's last Chancellor.

By the end of the month, defeat was very close. Realising the impossibility of avoiding it, Ludendorff resigned on 26^th, leaving it for others to sort out his mess. His successor was von Groner, who was a staff officer rather than a field General, and could do nothing to alter the tide of events. He found himself sharing his HQ at Spa with Kaiser Wilhelm, who was finding the civil unrest in Berlin too hot for his liking.

Foch was now ready to make his final moves. On 1^st November, Pershing and Gouraud finally broke out of the Argonne. Foch unleashed the new American 2^nd Army, under General Bullard, across the Woeuvre plain, driving the planned wedge between the two halves of Germany’s armies. Haig’s final moves began on 4^th November along a thirty miles front. He swept up Valenciennes, and surged forward with gains all along his lines. The defence was still strong, but the Allies were not to be denied. Thirty two weakened German Divisions were crushed and a further 20,000 prisoners were taken.

On 6^th November the separate halves of the Germany military machine were in flight, heading for their own borders.

*As set out in Wilson’s famous speech to Congress in January 1918 – See Post 3/1/2018

The Capitulation of Germany's Allies: 2 - Bulgaria and Turkey

King Ferdinand I. A member of the
Saxe-Coburg dynasty, he spent
from 1918-48 in exile
in Coburg, Germany

The entry of Bulgaria to the war in 1915 had been prompted by opportunism and the ambition of its Germanophile King Ferdinand - mainly revenge on Serbia for the losses incurred in the Second Balkan War of 1913. It was followed shortly by the overrunning of Serbia, but since this time - from the Bulgarian standpoint - things had been largely at a standstill. Its more longstanding territorial aspirations against the Ottoman Empire were frustrated by the unnatural alliance with Turkey as another Central Power. Its armies, with some German support, sat behind seemingly impregnable mountain positions. The people bemoaned the deprivations of a war where the Germans exacted the high price of their support in food crops.

Turkey, and the rump of its Ottoman Empire, was crumbling at an alarming rate.

Bulgaria.  Bulgaria’s fragile resolve was tested in late May 1918 through a spirited offensive by Greek troops from Salonika along the river Vardar.

Shortly after this, the French replaced General Guillaumat as Commander-in-Chief for the front with the vigorous General Franchet d’Esperey – a hero of the Marne 1914. He set about preparing the front for action, even though at this stage the world’s eyes were on the German offensives in France. There were a few flurries of action, particularly in Albania where Bulgarian and Austrian forces made inroads to the Italian sector, but then the whole front settled back to its uncomfortable status quo. Political leadership changes in Sofia were little more than tacit recognition of the general discontent, and a new Prime Minister, Malinov, was unable to secure better terms from the Germans, or to pave the way for peace negotiations with the Allies.

As events developed in the Allies favour on the western Front, d’Esperet judged the time right to launch assaults on the Bulgarian lines. Perhaps the most notable of these was the progress of the five Serbian and South Slav Divisions. Harbouring years of hatred and three years of festering grievances over Bulgaria’s entry to the war, they fought as men possessed through near impossible conditions to advance forty miles in eight days. The key to the whole campaign was the city of Uskub (today Skopje – the capital of the still disputed area of Macedonia) . By 26^th October Uskub had fallen and the Bulgarian armies were split into two groups, retreating in almost opposite directions. There was now no hope, and on the evening of 26^th a Bulgarian staff officer carried a white flag into the British HQ. On 28^th a delegation of senior Bulgarian politicians and military accepted Franchet d’Esperey’s terms of surrender – to evacuate all occupied areas, and to put all of their military equipment and transport at the disposal of the Allies. The Allied Governments ratified the surrender, and at noon on 30^th September a separate armistice was signed.

Bulgaria’s precipitate collapse unnerved badly the German High Command. Ludendorff hoped initially that the great General Mackensen (See Post 3/7/2015) could hold the Allies back with a defensive line on the Danube, but he had only a small force, fully occupied in Roumania, leaving the Serbians and Slavs free to move west in the liberation of the Balkans. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria abdicated on 4^th November, exiled until his death in 1948.

Sultan Mehmed VI. The
Last Ottoman Sultan

Turkey. A previous post (See 30/8/2018) described how Turkey’s goose (sic) had been cooked on the capture of Damascus by Allenby’s forces and Feisal’s Arabs on 1^st October. By late October Allenby was in Northern Syria, cutting the Turkish rail connection to Baghdad, and Marshall’s Mesopotamian army was converging with Allenby towards southern Turkey. With the capitulation of Bulgaria, October also saw the Allies approaching from the west of Constantinople. Turkey was not yet surrounded – support might still arrive via the Caucasus and occupied south Russia across the Black Sea – but the position was hopeless. The old Ottoman Emperor, Mehmed V, had died in July. His brother and successor – Mehmed VI – was less prepared to be a puppet of the young Turks leadership and he insisted on a way out of the crisis. The pro-German Enver Pasha had to resign as leader on October 10^th. The new leadership and reshuffled cabinet shared the Sultan’s realistic appraisal of the situation, as their enemies approached from south, east and west. Like the Austrian Emperor, they first appealed to President Wilson to broker an armistice. When no response was forthcoming, their Plan B was to release from prison General Charles Townshend, who had been held since the fall of Kut in 1916 (see Post  1/2/2016). Townshend was sent as an emissary to the Royal Navy’s Aegean

The Armistice of Mudros 30/10/1918

HQ on Mudros island to request an armistice on behalf of Turkey. On 30^th October that armistice was signed by the Turkish delegation arriving at Mudros. The terms were similar to those of the Bulgarian truce. They included the re-opening of the Dardanelles straits and the Black Sea. Victory in south eastern Europe and the Middle East was complete.

Buchan summarises: “The surrender of Turkey brought to an end the hope of the Teutonic League of using gains in the East to redress the balance in the West. It shattered the whole fabric of policy built up laboriously during the past four years between the Baltic and the Indian Ocean. It left Germany with no crutch to lean on but her Western armies” (Buchan. A History of the Great War. Vol IV p360)

The Capitulation of Germany's Allies: 1 - The End for Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary. The unsustainable empire of 1914
shown in today's money.

The great swathes of Eastern Europe occupied by Germany and her allies not only created an enormous buffer zone to the east of Germany’s border, but also provided essential food and raw materials for the German war effort. Since Bulgaria’s entry war in 1915 – swiftly followed by the occupation of the Balkans (see Post 29/9/2015) there had been no real threat to the communications between Germany in the west and Turkey’s (now shrinking) Ottoman Empire in the east, despite Roumania’s brief ambitious flickering in1916.

Now, as the one hundred days on the Western Front unfolded, all was about to change. Austria-Hungary’s last major front in Italy was far from secure, although nearly impregnable in its northern and western reaches in the mountains. Allenby and the Arabs had opened up northern Syria (See Post 30/8/2018) and General Marshall’s British forces were pushing into north Mesopotamia. The largely forgotten front at the Salonika beachhead now stretched for more than 200 miles to the Adriatic coast of Albania. The Allied forces comprised a multinational force of 26 Divisions. From Salonika at its eastern end, Greek, British, French, Serbian, South Slav and Italian troops lined up against modest Bulgarian forces but formidable geographical barriers. The Commander-in-Chief was now General Franchet d’Esperet, previously the French 5^th Army commander, and another hero of the first Battle of the Marne (See Post 13/12/2014).

The days were numbered for Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey – in fact they had less than the one hundred being endured by the Germans in the west.

Austria-Hungary. The Austria-Hungary Empire, created in 1867 and ruled with difficulty by the Habsburg Dynasty, had been in trouble since before the war. A largely unsuccessful war had brought it to its knees – militarily and in morale terms. Its armies’ greatest success had been in the German-led rout at Caporetto in late 1917 (See Post 13/11/2017). Then, the advance on the plains had been held at the River Piave in front of Venice and was in a precarious position (although the Italians were still weak after Caporetto and posed little offensive threat). As Germany’s longstanding and closest ally, the Austrian leadership was, however, put under pressure by Ludendorff to contribute to his Kaiserschlacht. Some Austrian troops were sent to the Western Front (for the only time in the entire war), but principally Ludendorff wanted them to advance in Italy to keep up the pressure on that front.

C-in-C Armando Diaz. More
human and more effective
than predecessor Cadorna.

The Italians, under their new Commander-in-Chief General Armando Diaz, became aware of Austrian movements all along their front in late May. Diaz made prompt and effective improvements to his defences, even though he had lost the British and French Divisions (and even some of his own troops) to the crisis of Kaiserschlacht in France. The Austrians’ aim was to sweep down from the higher ground they occupied in the north and west of the front, thereby isolating the coastal front at the Piave. The two Austrian army groups were led by the long suffering Boroevic (See Post 16/9/2017 and 13/11/2017) in the plains, and the hapless, deposed Chief of Staff von Hotzendorf. They disliked each other, and were badly divided in their tactics and communications. This contributed to a feeble implementation of an ‘Operation Michael style’ offensive in mid-June. Just before this, as some kind of harbinger, the Austrian Grand fleet had been effectively neutralized by the loss of its two dreadnought battleships to an Italian torpedo boat raid – a further embarrassing blow to depressed Austrian morale. True to form, Hotzendorff’s offensive from the mountains failed miserably, and with it went Austria’s last chance. Although Boroevic had more success initially, crossing the Piave in several places, poor back up and communications meant that his advance stalled. Within a few days Diaz’s planned counter-attack was ready, and by late June Boreovic was forced to retreat across the Piave river, and by July the Austrians were back beyond their starting lines. They had suffered 150,000 casualties and lost 20,00 prisoners, and Austria-Hungary was all but finished. 

Diaz decided, for his own reasons, not to pursue the enemy out of the country and further into the Alps at that point. Shrewdly, he developed his plans gradually until October, by which time Austria-Hungary was in even greater disarray. President Wilson had rejected emphatically a desperate appeal by Emperor Charles for peace negotiations in mid-September. Czechoslovakia; the South Slavs, and Croatia were issuing independent state claims. Hungary wanted a divorce. Diaz judged that the time was right to attack the last vestige of Habsburg power – the Austrian army in Italy. By means of three main assaults on the plains and through the mountains, the final campaign began on 23^rd October. It must be said that it faced fierce and determined initial resistance, but by 2^nd November the Austrian army was collapsing at all points.

Anticipating this, the government in Vienna had, on 27^th October, declared itself ready to agree to any conditions set by the Allies for an armistice and separate peace, regardless of Germany’s intentions.

Austrians arriving in Padua 4th
November 1918 to sign the Armistice

At 3pm on 4^th November an armistice was signed at Villa Giusti in Italy, ending all Austro-Hungarian hostilities. By this point, most of the empire was in open revolt. On 31^st October the Hungarian President, Tisza, was murdered in Budapest. Ironically, in July 1914, he had been the one person in Government who had argued against declaration of war on Serbia. He now paid the price for losing the argument. The Emperor Charles retreated to his palace and awaited his fate.