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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
G.J. Meyer
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January 25 - February 29, 2024
On May 31, for the first and last time in the war, the dreadnoughts of the British Grand Fleet and Germany’s High Seas Fleet met in battle.
Rawlinson and Haig never resolved their differences; rather, they opened the battle without coming to an understanding on what they were trying to do or how it should be done.
his serene confidence that the machine gun, “a much-overrated weapon,” could be overcome by men on horseback.
The number of casualties had reached sixty thousand, and almost twenty thousand of them were dead. It was the worst day in the history of British warfare. (England’s casualties at Waterloo a century earlier had totaled eighty-four hundred. A generation later, at the Normandy invasion, the British and Americans together would be in combat for twenty days before their dead, wounded, and missing totaled twenty thousand.)
His was one of the good deaths of 1916; it is impossible not to feel grateful that Franz Joseph did not live to see what the rest of the war would bring.
He argued, in short, that Russia would be worse off with Romania as an ally than if Romania stayed out of the war. The tsar ignored Alexeyev.
In their haste and confusion some of them attempted to surrender to one of the few Russian units in Dobruja—their own allies, who were distinctly unamused.
A September 15 assault by eight British divisions on the Somme included the battlefield debut of the tank.
Absurdly, in their final forward plunge the British commanders had pushed their line downhill from a freshly captured ridge to the low ground beyond. The only result was that thousands of troops would, for no good reason, spend a miserable winter entrenched in cold, deep mud dominated by enemy guns.
Meaningless as it was, the last assault of 1916 brought an ominous if largely unnoticed foreshadowing of the year that lay ahead. As they moved forward to the trenches from which they would once again have to throw their flesh against machine guns, the French troops began to bleat like sheep. The sound echoed all around. Baaaa, baaaa— the one pathetic form of protest available to men condemned to die. More than the fighting, more than any piece of ground won or lost, this was the sign of what was coming next.
The kaiser asked Holtzendorff for his view. “I will give Your Majesty my word as an officer,” the admiral replied, “that not one American will land on the Continent.”
Not one country attempted to meet its expenses or even reduce its deficits through increased taxes.
It is estimated that the war ultimately cost $208 billion—this at a time when skilled workers were paid a few dollars a day. The final bill was $43.8 billion for Britain, $28.2 billion for France, and $47 billion for Germany. In each case, the result was the same. The wealth of all the belligerent countries was drastically reduced.
The withdrawal was code-named Alberich, after a maliciously tricky dwarf king in German (and Wagnerian) mythology.
Boys born in 1899 were drafted ahead of schedule—though they proved, upon reporting for training, to be alarmingly malnourished.
And—no small matter, as it turned out—he had a pleasing skull. Lloyd George was a believer in phrenology, the then-popular pseudoscientific discipline based on the idea that character and destiny are revealed in the shape of one’s head. He considered the contours of Nivelle’s head and saw victory there.
People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.
The results of all the propaganda would be tragic. By raising the stakes of the war beyond the limits of reason, the propagandists ensured that whichever side lost would feel terribly, irredeemably wronged. And that whichever side won would find it difficult to deal rationally with the populations it had defeated.
The six weeks leading up to the Nivelle offensive brought two of the most world-changing events since the French Revolution. The Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries came to an end, and the United States entered the Great War.
The reply that he sent was magnificently absurd in its irrelevance to the situation: “I order that the disorders in the capital, intolerable during these difficult times of war with Germany and Austria, be ended tomorrow.”
The greatest blunder was Germany’s handling of its relations with the United States during the first three months of 1917. It began with the decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, but that set in motion a whole series of subsequent mistakes that proved to have terrible consequences. Those mistakes culminated in an American declaration of war that more competent German leadership might very well have averted.
Then, after days of dispute, Zimmermann again came to the rescue of the Entente. Questioned by reporters—he was unique among German officials in his willingness to talk with the press—he blithely declared that of course the telegram was authentic. Of course he had sent it. Why not? he asked innocently. Obviously he had not intended it to be used unless and until the United States declared war.
On April 2 Wilson delivered the speech, never to be forgotten, in which he told Congress that war was unavoidable because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The House approved a War Resolution with 373 members in favor, fifty opposed. On April 4 the Senate approved the same resolution eighty-two to six. And on April 6 the United States declared war on Germany.
“Age-old subduers and punishers,” Trotsky called them.
Later, however, when he sent a representative into the Cossack lands to demand submission, the unfortunate emissary was put into a sack and thrown into the River Don.
By 1917, when they were called upon once again to put down popular uprisings, many of them had had enough. They stood aside and allowed the revolution to proceed. Of all the signs that Nicholas II and his whole system were finished, this was the clearest.
The French were everywhere stymied. Nivelle kept scheduling and canceling and rescheduling attacks by his Mass of Maneuver. The strain of having to prepare again and again to die unnerved the waiting troops.
On the following day Lenin arrived in Petrograd from his long exile in Switzerland; Ludendorff, hoping to foment further disruption inside Russia, had approved his travel by rail from Switzerland via Frankfurt, Berlin, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Upon his arrival the Bolshevik leader began maneuvering his followers into an antiwar stance calculated to take advantage of public discontent.
When he abolished the death penalty for desertion, a million soldiers threw down their weapons.
At 3: 10 A.M. on June 7, after a week of bombardment by the heaviest concentration of artillery seen on any front up to that time (Plumer had a gun for every seven yards of front), the mines were detonated. All nineteen went off nearly simultaneously, sending the entire ridge into the air. Tremors were felt in London—Lloyd George himself heard a faint boom while working through the night at 10 Downing Street.
Thus ended the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres. In three and a half weeks Haig’s troops had advanced two miles—not much more than half of his objective for the first day.
The conclusion was so blindingly obvious that only Plumer and his staff had seen it: the German system could be outsmarted with attacks that stopped upon capturing the easy ground and never went far enough to trigger a counterattack. Cumulatively, a series of such attacks might drive the Germans backward out of their defenses and into a war of maneuver that they lacked the manpower to survive.
And so ended 1917. On the Western Front, the year had taken the lives of two hundred and twenty-six thousand British, one hundred and thirty-six thousand French, and one hundred and twenty-one thousand German soldiers. And still the stalemate continued.
he asked what its strategic objective was supposed to be. “We make a hole and the rest will take care of itself,” Ludendorff replied. “That’s how we did it in Russia.” It was not an answer that many strategists, thinking calmly, would have found satisfactory.
He was “one of those strange figures in history whose personalities have had more effect on the course of affairs than their deeds.”
His limp left arm was regularly wrapped in the body of a freshly killed hare to warm it.
On March 28, having no way of knowing that the emergency was coming under control, he had gone to see Foch and invited him to use the American troops in any way he wished. From that day the Americans were in the fight.
It happened to be Ludendorff’s fifty-third birthday, and the kaiser was at German headquarters. He gave a little speech celebrating this latest triumph—so he saw it—and extolling Ludendorff’s brilliance. He honored the general by presenting him with a little metal statuette of—Kaiser Wilhelm II!
At the midlevel of Pershing’s officer corps were men who would be giants of another, later war: Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and George Patton.
The British were pioneers, creating women’s branches of their army, navy, and air force in 1917. Female officers were called “administrators” rather than given military rank.
When the Bolsheviks took power late in 1917, equal pay and rights for women became the law of the land. The final irony is that civil rights in Russia soon became once again meaningless for women as well as for men.
The Allied side too (with the Americans in the fight, the term Allies becomes appropriate as a substitute for Entente)
Something new made its appearance on the Western Front during this period: the first cases of the Spanish influenza that would spread around the world and in eleven months kill more people than the war itself.
Anzac and Canadian corps, which after four years of hard fighting remained so potent that Haig turned to them repeatedly as a battering ram with which to smash the German line. A strong case can be made that these were the best fighters of the war, their divisions the most effective on either side. This was made possible partly by John Monash, partly by his Canadian counterpart, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie.
On September 27 the kaiser—a “broken and suddenly aged man,” according to one officer, but doing everything possible to salvage something of his inheritance—signed a proclamation of parliamentary government, a thing that, as he knew, every one of his forebears except his own father would have considered an abomination. His signature was the strongest imaginable evidence of how desperate the German leaders now understood their situation to be. It was also, sadly, a way of maneuvering the liberals and socialists in the Reichstag into taking a share of the blame for the disaster that was
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On October 23 the Germans were shocked to receive a third note from Wilson, who was now only two weeks from the congressional elections. “If the Government of the United States must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany,” the president declared, “…it must demand not peace negotiations but surrender.”
When news of Ludendorff’s departure was announced in Berlin movie houses, audiences cheered. Germany had become so dangerous for him that he slipped away in disguise and soon was in exile in Sweden.
On October 27 a fourth German note went to President Wilson. It was a capitulation, stating almost abjectly that Germany “looked forward to proposals for an armistice that would usher in a peace of justice as outlined by the President.” In other words, the Germans were now prepared to have the president tell them what the terms of peace would be, though they assumed that those terms would correspond to the Fourteen Points. For nine long days Wilson did not deign to reply. While Berlin waited, the Americans captured the city of Sedan and severed the Germans’ last north-south rail line in
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Pershing was even more demanding, laying out terms far more punitive than anything suggested by the others.
Soon after being informed of this, told by Hindenburg that his safety could no longer be assured, Wilhelm abdicated. He crossed the border into Holland, where the queen had agreed to accept him.
