The First World War

by John Keegan

Once committed to hostilities, America’s extraordinary capacity for industrial production and human organisation took possession of the nation’s energies. It was decided at the outset to raise the army to be sent to France by conscription, overseen by local civilian registration boards. Over 24 million men were registered in 1917–18 and those deemed most eligible – young and unmarried males without dependants – formed the first contingent of 2,810,000 draftees. Together with those already enrolled in the regular army, the National Guard and the Marines, they raised the enlisted strength of the United States ground forces to nearly four million men by the war’s end.

The political collapse of Russia had released from the Eastern Front fifty divisions of infantry which could be brought to the west to attempt a final, war-winning offensive.

It was a grave deficiency that the German army had no tanks.

the terrible toll of the civil war which was beginning to spread throughout Russia proper.19 That war would last until 1921 and take the lives, directly or indirectly, of at least seven and perhaps ten million people, five times as many as had been killed in the fighting of 1914–17.20

The counter-offensive was to result in a Bolshevik victory in the civil war, a victory brought about not despite the Allies’ eventual commitment to the Bolsheviks’ enemies but because of Germany’s positive decision to let Bolshevism survive.

By this time, only an hour after the German infantry had left their trenches for the assault, almost all the British positions in the Fifth Army’s Forward Zone, twelve miles wide, had been overrun; only behind the obstacle of the ruined town of St Quentin was a stretch of line still held.

As evening fell on 21 March, the BEF had suffered its first true defeat since trench warfare had begun three and a half years earlier. Along a front of nineteen miles, the whole forward position had been lost, except in two places held heroically by the South African Brigade and a brigade formed of three battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment, and much of the main position had been penetrated also. Guns had been lost in numbers, whole units had surrendered or fled to the rear and heavy casualties had been suffered by those that did stand and fight. In all, over 7,000 British infantrymen had been killed but 21,000 soldiers had been taken prisoner.

A German army unable to make good its losses was now confronted by a new enemy, the US Army, with four million fresh troops in action or training. More pertinently, its old enemies, the British and French, now had a new technical arm, their tank forces, with which to alter the terms of engagement. Germany’s failure to match the Allies in tank development must be judged one of their worst military miscalculations of the war.

By the first week of November, therefore, the German empire stood alone as a combatant among the war’s Central Powers.

There was hard fighting at the rivers and canals, casualties rose – among the penultimate fatalities was the British poet, Wilfred Owen, killed at the crossing of the River Sambre on 4 November – and the war, to the Allied soldiers battling at the front, seemed to threaten to prolong. Behind the lines, in Germany, however, resistance was crumbling.

The terms of the armistice had been presented to them by Foch, and stark they were. They required the evacuation of all occupied territory, including Alsace-Lorraine, German since 1871, the military evacuation of the western bank of the Rhine and of three bridgeheads on the eastern bank at Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne; the surrender of enormous quantities of military equipment, and the internment in Allied hands of all submarines and the capital units of the High Seas Fleet; the repudiation of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, under which the Germans occupied their conquered territories in the east; the payment of reparations for war damage; and, critically, acceptance of the continuation of the Allied blockade.99 The continuation, as events would determine, eventually ensured Germany’s compliance with peace terms even harsher than those of the Armistice to be imposed at the Versailles conference.

Hunger, even more than the threat of a full-scale invasion, was the measure that would eventually bring the German republic to sign the peace treaty on 23 June 1919.

Two days earlier the High Seas Fleet, interned at the British anchorage at Scapa Flow, had been scuttled by its crews in final protest at the severity of the proffered terms.

There was historic irony in the Kaiser’s naval officers choosing a watery grave for his magnificent battleships in a British harbour. Had he not embarked on a strategically unnecessary attempt to match Britain’s maritime strength, fatal hostility between the two countries would have been avoided; so, too, in all possibility, might have been the neurotic climate of suspicion and insecurity from which the First World War was born. The unmarked graveyard of his squadrons inside the remotest islands of the British archipelago, guarding the exit from the narrow seas ...

As in France and Britain, the figures, if calculated for the contingents most immediately liable for duty by reason of age, display an even heavier burden of loss. ‘Year groups 1892–1895, men who were between 19 and 22 when war broke out, were reduced by 35–37 per cent.’108 One in three. Little wonder the post-war world spoke of a ‘lost generation’, that its parents were united by shared grief and that the survivors proceeded into the life that followed with a sense of inexplicable escape, often tinged by guilt, sometimes by rage and desire for revenge.

The Second World War was the continuation of the First, and indeed it is inexplicable except in terms of the rancours and instabilities left by the earlier conflict.

Principle perhaps was at stake; but the principle of the sanctity of international treaty, which brought Britain into the war, scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection.