Germany started the First World War (1914-18) with the belief its armed forces could win a quick and decisive victory over France and then Russia. The reality turned out to be much more complicated as more countries became involved in a global war that lasted five years. An alternative title to this article, of course, could be How the Allies Won the War. Undoubtedly, the Allies fought with courage and resolution to defeat Germany, but it is also true that Germany was often its own worst enemy. In the end, justice was served, and the aggressor nations lost a global conflict that caused around 16 million deaths and an even greater number of wounded.
The reasons Germany lost WWI include:
- Germany's allies were much weaker militarily than those on the opposing side.
- Germany's Schlieffen Plan for a quick victory in 1914 was seriously flawed and badly executed.
- Germany was obliged to fight on two fronts for four years: East and West.
- The Allies were able to absorb, resist, and push back the German invasion.
- Germany never established a full war economy.
- The Allied naval blockade of Germany deprived it of vital resources such as coal.
- The German U-boat campaign failed to destroy sufficient Allied naval and merchant shipping thanks to the use of mines, air support, and the convoy system.
- Germany invested in weapons that did not achieve any strategic purpose, notably battleships, Zeppelin airships, and giant artillery pieces.
- German generals never grasped the potential of tanks in modern warfare.
- German generals in the field often pursued objectives not part of the overall strategy of an offensive.
- The German Army lacked sufficient railway or motorised transportation to supply its frontline troops when advancing.
- Unlike the Allies, the German Army did not rotate its troops on the fighting fronts, exhausting men and wearing down divisions.
- Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare helped the United States decide to join the war.
- A massive influx of material and soldiers came from the United States in 1918.
- Germany had no answer to the Allied combined use of arms (artillery, infantry, aircraft, and tanks).
- By 1918, Germany could no longer compete with the Allies in terms of the size of its armies in the field or the technology of their equipment.
- By mid-1918, Germany's troops and civilian population, with their morale shattered, increasingly called for peace.
Germany's Weak Allies
Germany's first problem in trying to win a global war was that it had few allies, and they were not very strong militarily. In the pre-WWI alliance system, the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia faced the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Alliance was the weakest on paper, since Austria-Hungary only had an antiquated army, and Italy was a wholly unreliable ally, and so it proved when Italy later joined the Triple Entente group. Germany was joined by the Ottoman Empire and states like Bulgaria, but none of these had top-class armies or navies. Finally, Germany's empire was tiny compared to those of Britain and France. Colonies like German South West Africa and German New Guinea were hardly in a position to give substantial aid in men and material in case of a war in Europe. Germany had to constantly prop up its allies since "without providing substantial financial and material aid, without sending weapon, munitions and soldiers to its allies, the various fronts would not have held" (Winter, 168). Once these allies were defeated and the enemy could concentrate on Germany alone, "it was impossible for Germany to resist much longer" (ibid).
In contrast, when it came to the crunch, the Allies of France, Britain, and the United States worked together to form a strong partnership. There was substantial assistance, too, from France's colonies (nearly half a million men) and parts of the British Empire (particularly Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India). Other important Allies were Belgium, Italy, Japan, and, until 1917, Russia. All of these states had their own objectives in participating in the war, but a common reason was to prevent a hyperaggressive Germany from dominating Europe. Germany's allies had no such common objective.
The United States Army may only have entered the war in its final year, but the US government had been helping its allies with financial aid and materials throughout the conflict. The US loaned its allies $10 billion by the end of the war. Weapons, ammunition, and food were sent across the Atlantic, which defied the U-boat threat and gave the Allies the means to match and then better Germany on the battlefield, at sea, and in the air.
The Failure of the Schlieffen Plan
The Schlieffen Plan was prepared in 1905 and then modified. Essentially, the plan was to attack and quickly knock out France from the war, perhaps within six weeks, and then Germany could concentrate on Russia in the East. Even the German generals acknowledged that the plan was ambitious and the German Army was probably not large enough to accomplish its aims. Indeed, not only was one flank of the attack reduced just in case the French Army mobilised elsewhere, but the path through the Low Countries was narrowed to neutral Belgium only, creating a bottleneck in terms of logistics.
When the plan was finally executed in August 1914, the Allies proved more resilient than expected, starting with the Belgian defence of their well-built fortresses. Despite being pushed back almost everywhere, the Allies managed to finally counterattack against Germany's advance in the First Battle of the Marne in September. Both sides then entrenched themselves in a defensive-focused and static front that would create a stalemate not to be broken until the final year of the war. Germany was simply not prepared for a long war.
The Schlieffen Plan had other consequences. Germany had started the war by mobilising through Belgium and was clearly the aggressor. Allied troops were thereafter fighting to clear either their own land or that of their allies of the German invaders, a situation that meant morale on the side of the Allies remained robust throughout the conflict. German troops, on the other hand, were fighting for an expansion of the German Empire, rather than the defence of their homeland.
The failure of the Schlieffen Plan had also shown a deep flaw in the German Army's method of command. In the long tradition of the German and Prussian armies, the German high command had allowed its generals in the field to decide for themselves whether or not to take advantage of opportunities as they arose. This approach meant that German armies were sometimes lured into extravagant advances to take advantage of pockets of enemy weakness that only resulted in the creation of vulnerable salients held by exhausted troops. It also meant the more important overall strategic objective of a campaign failed to be achieved. This is exactly what happened with the Schlieffen Plan when the objective of taking Paris was put aside in order to pursue and destroy the retreating French Army, an aim that was never achieved but consequently exposed the German Army's flank to enemy attack. Time and again in battles throughout the war, German generals would squander a good start and an overall operational objective for short-term glory.
Finally, the Schleiffen Plan's execution had shown that moving armies on a map was one thing; getting them the ammunition, food, and reinforcements they required to fight for month after month was quite another. The advance troops who carried out the Schlieffen Plan ran out of all of these things after just a few weeks. Indeed, their very success in advancing only meant their lines of supply stretched to become more and more tenuous. Failure to meet the logistical challenges of modern warfare would be the Achilles heel of the German Army throughout the war.
Weapons & Logistic Failures
German weaponry had been superior in the early years of the war, when such weapons as the MG08 machine gun had proved deadly against charging infantry. The Germans had been the innovators of flamethrowers and the first users of poison gas, but these were eventually dealt with – snipers knew to take out with priority the man wearing a tank of fuel on his back, and the issuing of gas masks helped negate the worst effects of the gas shells.
Another German innovation that promised much but failed to deliver was the use of Zeppelin airships to bomb the enemy's civilian populations. Paris, London, and many other cities were hit, but the limited technology of the bombs dropped, the limited number of airships, and the vulnerability of the Zeppelins to faster fighter aircraft meant that the Zeppelin bombing raids of WWI were ultimately unsuccessful in achieving any strategic purpose. Despite all the propaganda issued throughout the conflict, Zeppelins did little lasting damage, either to the enemy's infrastructure or civilian morale.
As the war went on, it was the Allies who proved to be the masters of military innovation. In contrast, the senior German generals had not seen the potential of modern weapons, like the tank, or the benefits of all-arms deployment (artillery, infantry, tank, and air support). In truth, it had taken the Allied generals an age to understand how tanks should best be deployed, but their use en masse at the Battle of Cambrai in November-December 1917 proved their great value. For Germany, the lesson came too late, and, as the military historian J. Keegan notes, "Germany's failure to match the Allies in tank development must be judged one of their worst military miscalculations of the war" (410).
The German Army could not resupply its men with sufficient food or material since it did not have adequate transport. Railway lines were left behind as the German army advanced, and the dependency on horses proved a real weakness. In 1918, the German Army had only 23,000 trucks compared to the Allies' 100,000. In addition, the Allied blockade of Germany meant materials were in short supply. Despite this weakness, a drive to make the German economy more of a full war economy was only decided in the summer of 1918.
The German idea of stormtroopers – using the best men with the latest weapons in small groups to cause havoc through and behind the enemy lines – was an excellent one, but the tactic inherently led to high casualties. Germany steadily wore down its best troops in this way. Further, it did not adopt the rotation method of the Allies, where soldiers did not permanently fight at the most ferocious points of the front but were relieved to quieter areas where they could recuperate somewhat, both physically and mentally.
Losing the War at Sea
Before the war even started, Germany had two problems. One was to build an army big enough to challenge that of France, and the second was to build a navy large enough to challenge that of Britain. This was a tall order indeed. The drama of the Anglo-German Arms Race captivated news editors through the first decade of the 20th century, but it was a race Germany could not win. Britain, still the richest country in the world in 1914, remained absolutely determined to stay ahead of any arms race, particularly concerning the Royal Navy, the vital maritime link between the many distant points of Britain's global empire. This empire enclosed some 400 million people in over 50 countries. Germany had spent big on ships but still had only the world's second-largest navy. By 1914, Britain, which had also been spending big, had twice as many dreadnought battleships as Germany and a superior number of battlecruisers.
Even worse than coming second in the arms race, German militarists realised they had spent on the wrong kind of weaponry. The days of battleships blasting each other on the high seas were already over. There was only one major naval engagement of WWI, the Battle of Jutland in May-June 1916. Both sides claimed a victory of sorts, but the pertinent fact was that, thereafter, the power of the Royal Navy obliged the German naval fleets to stay in port and out of harm's way for the rest of the war. As a contemporary edition of the New York Times put it: "The German Navy has assaulted its jailer, but is still in jail" (Winter, 335).
Germany then switched to submarine warfare as the best way to harm the enemy, but this had consequences perhaps not considered by the high command. Despite initial successes, in the longer term, the U-boat campaign against Allied shipping became less and less effective as the enemy used armed convoys, air support, and anti-submarine mines to minimise losses. The convoy system was perhaps the most effective countermeasure. Of 88,000 ships that crossed the Atlantic as part of a convoy during the war, only 436 were hit by a torpedo. This allowed the construction of Allied shipping to outstrip losses at sea and vital supplies to reach Europe. Despite U-boats sinking over 5,000 Allied ships during the conflict, Germany could not win this war with submarines alone, as had been hoped earlier in the conflict.
Germany's decision to pursue unrestricted submarine warfare had important diplomatic consequences. The sinking by U-20 of the transatlantic liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915 was a case in point. With 128 US citizens amongst the 1,198 civilian casualties, there was outrage against Germany in the United States. The German Navy did, from September 1915, impose restrictions on its U-boat captains after the sinking, but it resumed unrestricted warfare again from February 1917. This and the disclosure of the Zimmerman telegram, which proposed a new Mexican-German alliance, so angered the government of the United States that it did finally declare war on Germany and bring its military might to bear in Europe.
The Crisis of 1918
The spring of 1918 was Germany's last chance for victory. Russia had dropped out of the war following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and Germany was thus able to withdraw troops and material from the Eastern Front to significantly boost the Western Front. 44 German divisions were moved westwards. Here, each side could field around 4 million men, but as each week passed, tens of thousands more US troops landed in Europe. The parity in men on the Western Front would not last long. The German commander-in-chief, General Erich von Ludendorff (1865-1937), had to advance now or never, and so he launched five major offensives, collectively known as the German Spring Offensive or Ludendorff Offensive.
In the end, Ludendorff wasted 800,000 men (either dead or casualties) in the Spring Offensive, which achieved no significant strategic gain. Despite initial successes, failure to secure the Allied-controlled railway hubs meant the enemy could continue to replenish itself at will. The first action involving US troops took place in May 1918. By August, the US had 1.4 million soldiers in France and was shipping in 250,000 more men each month. In contrast, there were no reserves to call upon from Germany since conscription had already called up all men of fighting age not vital to other industries. The next generation of eligible conscripts would not be available until November, and they would need several months to be trained. Ludendorff had fired his last bolt and missed.
The morale of those German soldiers left in the field, underfed and overused, was extremely low, and mutiny was in the air. Already, German officers had struggled to keep their men from simply downing their weapons and feasting on any Allied supplies they came across. Another blow to German morale besides poor rations was the spread of Spanish influenza. The 1918 flu pandemic hit the German lines a few weeks before the Allies, and in June, it removed 500,000 soldiers from the front lines, seriously affecting the fighting capabilities of 13 divisions. Indeed, these two problems were related, since the German soldiers' poorer diet meant that their resistance to the virus was much lower than that of soldiers in the Allied armies.
It was not only in men that Germany was being outnumbered. By 1918, Allied aircraft outnumbered German aircraft by 5:1. Aircraft were used to identify the German artillery positions and points of strongest defence. Allied fighters ensured that the German air force could not provide the same service for their commanders on the ground. There was an even bigger disparity in terms of tanks. The Allies could field 800 tanks in 1918 compared to Germany's paltry ten.
The Allies launched their counterattack to the Spring Offensive at the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918 and then pushed on in what has been called the 100 Days Offensive. Crushing victories were achieved, such as at the Battle of Amiens in August. Germany had no answers to the Allied number of soldiers or their use of combined arms.
Within the space of 100 days the Allies took 363,000 German soldiers prisoner (25 per cent of the army in the field) and captured 6,400 guns (50 per cent of all German guns on the Western Front). These numbers show the effectiveness of the Allied strategy and the low morale of the German soldiers.
(Winter, 170)
As unrest rose to unprecedented levels in the German Army, the German Navy, and amongst civilians at home, the war came to an end with the signing of the 1918 armistice with Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) was obliged to abdicate. Under the peace terms dictated by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was obliged to accept blame for the war, pay reparations to the victors, accept restrictions on its armed forces, and give up certain territories and all of its colonies.
