Dimitri’s Reviews > With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 > Status Update

Gneisenau whithered at the Oise thanks partly to a French counterattack with 163 tanks. in the East, a 5th of the German forces participated in the drive for strategic materials such as Finnish nickel (they helped keep Helsinki white) Manganese from the Caucasus and Baku oil, though the Ukrainian breadbasket only ever fed the occupation army.

By June, hurried preparations & enemy intelligence (shorter spring nights meant less concealment) wrote the law of diminishing returns, & the first wave of Spanish influenza voiding whatever reliable manpower calculations existed for Germany. The post-Michael offensives couldn't benefit from Russian transfers. Past March the Eastern Front dwarfed all other commitments, to protect the imperium won by Brest-Litovsk.

The Germans may have created for themselves with Blücher-York a sack from which they could retreat nor advance...unless they could take Reims to supply it, 40 miles from Paris, which stiffening resistance made impossible by June. The US 3rd & 2nd Division proved their mettle at Chateau-Thierry (31/5) & Belleau Wood (6/6). Panic Plan Z considered: the evacuation of the BEF & abandonment of the Channel ports.

In short, Mission creep set in in Ludendorff's mind, widening and changing objectives until there was no end in sight: Reims, the Marne and beyond...

"It is difficult not to see here a fundamental misjudgement which squandered resources while the hourglass sand ran out. The German Army for all its virtuosity was let down by a failure of generalship."

The Germans were incapable of holding onto their freshly overrun territory for the reason of simple statistics so familiar to casualty list writers in the optimistic days of summer 1914; the return to open warfare had upped the attrition even beyond Somme or Ypres levels: by the end of April, the count stood at 700.000.

Because the Germans started to stagger again on the splindly legs of their logistics. British MG's hidden in bushes & buildings behind the lines shredded the morale of men who'd already been on the push since Michael.

Mount Kemmel even saw the first tank-on-tank battle in an effort to dominate the threatened Ypres.

But despite all the friction and retreats, the British and French held their bulges, jointly.

Haig's "Backs to the Wall" speech was issued here on the Lys; the uncharacteristic bombast was probably emotional blackmail for French reinforcements; he got 12 divisions for Flanders, almost as much as guarded Paris, in spite of unaccounted units in the German Order of Battle., while Plumer ran a tactical retreat around Ypres, bitterly evacuating the ground gained in 1915-17 and forever contested since, because....

"Stand Fast" in the West went beyond a High Ground Fetish. Not atypical, a strategic target had economical value. The Bruay-Béthune coalfields, roughly two thirds of which were in German hands, had given 70% of France's pre-war supply. British aleviation efforts were a snake devouring its tail: British ships burned British coal while transporting more British coal and more British miners in uniform across the Channel

The prospect of another "Portugal" was indeed alluring. With a little help of the April fog, they had chased two out of three divisons of uninspired Lusitanians straight across the Lys, for the biggest daily gain of the war. At Ploegsteert and Messines, the British again saw many of their bloddiest wrestled gains of 1915-1917 swiftly reversed in a reprise of foggy Michael.