Castles of Steel (151 page)

The American army did not defeat the German army in 1918, nor was it the fighting ability of American soldiers that persuaded the German government to seek an armistice. Casualty figures best reveal who fought the Great War: 1.7 million French soldiers died, as did 1.7 million Russians, 1 million from the British empire, 460,000 Italians, 340,000 Rumanians, Belgians, and Serbs, and 116,000 Americans. And on the other side, 2 million Germans, 1.5 million from Austria-Hungary, 350,000 Turks, and 95,000 Bulgarians. Essentially, it was not important how well the new American army fought; what was decisive was that these enthusiastic, green American soldiers were pouring into Europe in a massive, endless torrent. Their arrival had the same demoralizing effect on the German Supreme Command as on the average German soldier. In four years of war, Germans had defeated the Russians and the Rumanians and had held at bay the combined armies of the French and British empires, But now they were confronted by an entirely new enemy with (for practical purposes) unlimited resources. This dire situation was a direct result of the colossal misjudgment made by Germany’s military and naval leaders in authorizing unrestricted submarine warfare. Ultimately, the American army came to France, not just in spite of the U-boats, but because of them.

“You don’t know Ludendorff, who is only great at a time of success,” Bethmann-Hollweg once told a colleague. “If things go badly, he loses his nerve.” This characteristic was strikingly apparent on July 18 as Foch stunned German Supreme Headquarters with his first powerful counterattack. Hindenburg proposed a maneuver to deal with the French offensive. “Then, all of a sudden, General Ludendorff joined in the conversation,” said a staff officer who was present. “He declared that anything of that sort was utterly unfeasible and must therefore be forgotten as he thought he had already made abundantly clear to the field marshal. The field marshal left the table without a word of reply and General Ludendorff departed, clearly annoyed and scarlet in the face.” The confrontation resumed later that day. “This is how we must direct the counterattack; that would solve the crisis at once,” Hindenburg declared.

“At this General Ludendorff straightened up from the map and with an expression of rage on his face turned towards the door letting out one or two words like ‘Madness!’ in profound irritation. The field marshal followed and said to him, ‘I should like a word with you.’ ”

After the “Black Day” of August 8, Ludendorff ricocheted among panic, indiscriminate rage, and cheerful, irrational optimism. Alarmed, his staff arranged for a psychiatrist to visit. At the end of his interview, Dr. Hocheimer told Ludendorff that he was “overworked” and that his “drive and creative power had been damaged.” Ludendorff nodded, agreeing with this analysis. On August 14, only six days after the “Black Day,” Ludendorff and Hindenburg met the kaiser, Chancellor von Hertling, the crown prince, and the thirty-year-old Austrian emperor, Karl, at the Hôtel Britannique in Spa, Belgium. Karl had come to announce that Austria could not continue the war through the winter; “We are absolutely finished,” he said. But Ludendorff, overruling the idea of absolute finality, proposed, instead, “gradually paralyzing the enemy’s will to fight by a strategic defensive,” a policy and a phrase that, the German historian Fritz Fischer has pointed out, contain “almost incomprehensible contradictions.” In essence, Ludendorff was admitting that the war could not be won, but asserting that if a defensive front could be maintained, Germany might still be able to keep Belgium and Luxembourg, and Austria might salvage her multiethnic empire. To achieve this “strategic defensive,” Ludendorff demanded help to bolster the Western Front; Emperor Karl, diverted from his original purpose, found himself promising to send Austrian divisions to France. Hindenburg closed the conference by saying, “I hope that we shall be able to make a stand on French soil and thus in the end to impose our will on the enemy.” A different appraisal of the situation came a few days later from army group commander Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who wrote to Prince Max of Baden, “By the mistaken operation beyond the Marne and the series of heavy reverses which followed—absolutely fatal both materially and morally—our military situation has deteriorated so rapidly that I no longer believe we can hold out over the winter. It is even possible that a catastrophe will come earlier.”

Emperor Karl returned to Vienna, and on September 10—“like lightning out of a clear sky”—reverted to his original intention and addressed an Austrian peace offer to the United States. It did no good; Secretary of State Lan-sing immediately rejected the note. On September 20, the Social Democrats in the German Reichstag demanded that Chancellor von Hertling ask for an immediate armistice on the basis of no annexations and the complete democratization of the German political system. On September 27, Bulgaria pleaded for an armistice, offering to demobilize her army and restore all conquered territory. Meanwhile, in the Hôtel Britannique at Spa, Ludendorff’s maps were pinned to the walls of his suite one floor above Hindenburg’s; there, on the afternoon of September 28, Ludendorff disintegrated. Trembling, he began to storm against the kaiser, the government, and the politicians in the Reichstag. His staff closed the door to muffle his ranting until he gradually subsided. At six that evening, still pale, Ludendorff descended to Hindenburg’s suite to explain his reasons for demanding an immediate armistice. He believed that in the west Germany would have to accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but that in the east the immense booty of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Soviets might still be kept. The next day, the kaiser, Chancellor von Hertling, and Foreign Minister Paul von Hintze arrived at the Britannique. Ludendorff, again in control, brusquely announced that an armistice must be concluded “at once, as early as possible”; it would be best to arrange it within twenty-four hours. The kaiser, Hertling, and Hintze were dumbfounded; the only way to end the fighting so quickly would be to surrender. Nevertheless, William agreed that Wilson should be approached about an armistice. For the seventy-five-year-old Hertling, this was too much: he resigned. On October 1, the kaiser asked his own cousin Prince Max, heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, to become chancellor and to seek an immediate armistice. Max accepted, but said that negotiations would take time; he begged for “ten, eight, or even four days before I have to appeal to the enemy.” Ludendorff, saying, “I want to save my army,” bombarded Prince Max with telegrams—six on a single day—and attempted to hurry the kaiser. “I am not a magician,” William testily replied. “You should have told me that fourteen days ago.” On October 4, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria abdicated and fled to Vienna. On October 5, Prince Max sent a note to Wilson via Switzerland, accepting the president’s Fourteen Points as a basis for negotiations. Lansing replied on Wilson’s behalf on October 8, demanding prompt German evacuation of all occupied territory in France and Belgium as a preliminary to an armistice and a guarantee of good faith. On October 12, Germany pledged do this. During these days, the Allied armies rolled forward all along the line in France and the Flemish coast. On October 17, Ostend and, on October 19, Zeebrugge were evacuated by the Germans after four years of occupation, forcing the German navy to blow up four U-boats and five destroyers that could not be made ready to sail.

Meanwhile, continuing war at sea threatened to upset the momentum toward peace. On October 4, the passenger vessel
Hirano Maru
was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 292 lives. On October 10, a twenty-two-year-old German U-boat captain torpedoed the Irish mail steamer
Leinster
and then torpedoed her again while she was sinking. Of the 720 people on board, 176 drowned, including women and children. On October 14, Wilson, through Lansing, demanded the end of the U-boat campaign and announced that neither the United States nor its allies “will consent to consider an armistice so long as the armed forces of Germany continue their illegal and inhuman practices. . . . At the very time the German government approaches the United States with proposals of peace, its submarines are engaged in sinking passenger ships at sea—and not the ships alone, but the very boats in which the passengers and crews seek to make their way to safety.” Balfour was more succinct: “Brutes they were and brutes they remain.”

Command of the German navy was now in new hands. On August 11, Admiral von Holtzendorff, suffering from severe heart disease, had been replaced as Chief of the Naval Staff by Scheer, who, in turn, handed over the High Seas Fleet to Hipper. Scheer promptly moved Naval Staff headquarters from Berlin to Spa; there, he could coordinate policy more closely with Ludendorff, whom he admired. Defying the reality that the war was almost over, Scheer refused to give up on the unrestricted submarine campaign and immediately demanded a preposterous crash program to build 450 new submarines at a rate of thirty-six a month. When Wilson insisted on termination of the unrestricted submarine campaign, Scheer and Ludendorff joined in fierce opposition. “The navy does not need an armistice,” Scheer declared on October 16, while Ludendorff said the next day, “To allow ourselves to be deprived of our submarine weapon would amount to capitulation.” The two warriors lost this battle. Prince Max, by threatening to resign, obtained an order from the kaiser and, on October 20, Germany renounced the submarine campaign against merchant shipping. Ludendorff later complained that this “concession to Wilson was the heaviest blow to the army and especially to the navy. The cabinet had thrown in the sponge.” On October 21, Scheer, angry at being overridden, recalled all submarines at sea and placed them at the disposal of the High Seas Fleet commander for action against Allied warships. After twenty-one months, Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaign was over.

On October 17, at a conference in Berlin, Ludendorff suddenly denied that he had ever demanded an armistice within twenty-four hours and declared that Germany possessed sufficient strength to keep fighting. On October 23, Wilson added a new condition for peace: the kaiser’s removal. If the United States government “must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany,” the president said, “it must demand, not peace negotiations, but surrender.” Hearing this, William and his wife, Dona, approached hysteria. “The hypocritical Wilson has at last thrown off the mask,” William announced. “The object of this is to bring down my House, to set the monarchy aside.” The empress raged at “the audacity of the
parvenu
across the sea who thus dares to humiliate a princely house which can look back on centuries of service to people and country.” Ludendorff rebelled against Wilson’s military conditions, saying that they went far beyond the simple battlefield armistice he was seeking. On October 24, defying the authority of the chancellor, he issued a proclamation to the army, countersigned by Hindenburg. Wilson’s proposals, he declared, are “a demand for unconditional surrender [and are] thus unacceptable to us as soldiers.” Prince Max, enraged by this insubordination, again gave the kaiser a choice: Ludendorff or himself. On October 26, William summoned Hindenburg and Ludendorff to Bellevue Castle in Berlin. Speaking first to Ludendorff, William upbraided the general for countersigning a proclamation to the army that was in direct conflict with the policy of the chancellor and the government. Ludendorff immediately offered his resignation, which William accepted. Clicking his heels, the soldier who had dominated Germany for twenty-six months departed. Hindenburg subsequently offered his own resignation, but was curtly told, “You stay.” Afterward, William was happy. The “Siamese twins,” he declared, were now separated. Outside the castle, Ludendorff, furious that Hindenburg had not resigned with him, would not accompany the field marshal back to the General Staff building. “I refuse to drive with you,” he said. When Hindenburg asked why, Ludendorff replied, “I refuse to have any more dealings with you because you treat me so shabbily.”

On October 27, Germany accepted all of Wilson’s conditions. On Octo-ber 29, Austria-Hungary agreed to an armistice with Italy and, on No-vember 2, with the rest of the Allied powers. On October 31, Turkey left the war. That afternoon, Prince Max, stricken with influenza, was given a massive dose of sleeping drops and slid into two days of unconsciousness.

With the German empire in its death throes, two groups in the German navy, first the admirals, then the seamen, took matters into their own hands. The submarine weapon had been sheathed but the High Seas Fleet remained a powerful force. Enraged by the U-boat decision, Scheer and the Naval Staff decided to use the surface ships in one last offensive thrust, a bold variation on earlier unsuccessful attempts to lure the Grand Fleet over a U-boat ambush. The difference this time was that the Germans intended to fight a battle whether or not the U-boats had managed to reduce the Grand Fleet’s numerical superiority. Further, the German admirals did not care whether the High Seas Fleet won or lost; they cared only that it inflict heavy damage on the Grand Fleet. Hipper agreed with Scheer that “an honorable battle by the fleet—even if it should be a fight to the death—will sow the seed for a new German fleet of the future.” Besides preserving honor, a battle that inflicted severe damage on the Grand Fleet might also influence the peace negotiations in Germany’s favor.

The operation was set in motion on October 22 when Captain Magnus von Levetzow of the Naval Staff Operations Department came to Wilhelmshaven and orally gave Scheer’s order to Hipper: “The High Seas Fleet is directed to attack the English fleet as soon as possible.” Nothing was put in writing, for two reasons: first, Scheer wished to keep the plan secret from the British; second, knowing the impact the operation would have on armistice negotiations, he wished to hide it also from the German government in Berlin. Neither the kaiser nor the chancellor was informed. Scheer explained later that he had already mentioned to the kaiser that giving up submarine warfare meant that the surface fleet would again have “complete freedom of action.” The kaiser had not reacted and Scheer seized upon William’s silence as tacit approval. Subsequently, Scheer defended himself more boldly: “I did not regard it [as] necessary to obtain a repetition of the kaiser’s approval. In addition, I feared that this could cause further delay and was thus prepared to act on my own responsibility.” Prince Max said later that if he had known of Scheer’s plan, he would have approved it, but at the time he was given no chance to approve or disapprove. “I specifically reiterate that I did not recognize the chancellor’s competence over operational measures and for that reason I did not seek his approval,” Scheer declared.