Seven German Mistakes that Lost the Great War January 10, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Germany went to war in August 1914 to bloody Russia, put Britain back in its place and break France’s back. Looking at their war record, after a century, what is striking is just how close Germany came to achieving at least a relative victory. Yet Germany’s leadership was not up to the job: this is clearer in the First than the Second World War. On several occasions Germany made fatal even embarassing mistakes. Here below are the seven big ones that doomed Germany not only to defeat, but to a decade of totalitarianism, and then the Second World War.
1) Don’t Build Those Ships: Germany had its army and Britain had its navy. Britain was happy to sit back from continental affairs as long as Germany respected Britain’s naval dominance, a naval dominance that could not easily affect Germany (save with blockades). However, from the late 1890s the Kaiser initiated a naval arms race with Britain. There were two results here. First, Britain was pushed reluctantly into the arms of France and the Entente Cordial. (The French for God’s sake!) Second, Britain started building even more ships beating the German navy back. The result was that Germany had a large navy when the war began, but not one large enough to take on the British, and the German navy was then, with the exception of Jutland, never actually used. Germany would have done far better to concentrate on its army and put nothing but submarines to sea.
2) Don’t Declare War (Yet): Germany was surrounded by a disparate and uneasy alliance in 1914. France wanted badly to declare war on Germany, but was not strong enough and Britain and Russia would only do so if badly provoked. Yet Germany, under Wilhelm’s direction went looking for war, knowingly antagonising all three allies. Of course, Germany had long been ready for a two-front war: its entire strategy was based upon it. But by giving orders to France in the days before the war and by invading Belgium Germany got a three front war, with Russia, the UK and France furious, het up and determined. All Europe’s financial indicators suggest that Germany was winning the only war that mattered, the economic one. If Germany had waited till 1924, her chances of a knock out blow to France and the BEF would have been much greater.
3) Don’t Stop on the Marne: the first battle of the Marne could have ended the First World War in August 1914 at least in the west. If German infantry and cavalry had been able to break French (and paltry British) positions on the Marne, they would have reached Paris. France would have repeated 1870 and sued desperately for peace. The British may have fought on at sea but without an army and without US help there is nothing that they could have done to damage continental German dominion. And the Germans came so close to winning that it makes sense to consider what might have allowed a German victory. The most striking moment is perhaps the stop order given by Richard Hentsch (pictured at the head of this post) to the First army in the west. German historians have argued that without that ‘pessimistic’ order the First Army would have gone through the improvised French lines. Maybe…
4) Give Up at Verdun: Verdun was the key French-German conflict and perhaps, without wishing to hurt the sensibilities of Dominion, British, Italian and Russian readers, the key battle of the war, one that lasted from February to December 1916. Final casualties stood at almost a million and at about 300,000 deaths. Verdun broke the French army for the First World War (and arguably for the Second too) but by holding this key fort and baiting the Germans the French won an important immediate victory. They tempted more and more German infantry into the sausage machine of their lines with consequences for German morale and, above all, German strength. Now imagine an alternative reality where German generals had let Verdun go hang and had sent their surplus to fight the Italians or the Russians. On both of those fronts a great and far less costly victory was hanging low from the branches: Caporetto a year early or possibly the quicker collapse of Tsarist Russia.
5) Don’t Use Submarines: Britain sensibly blockaded Germany as its superior naval power allowed and Germany realising that it couldn’t beat the British on the surface used submarines. This was in tactical terms an intelligent move, but in strategical-political terms it was catastrophic because it would eventually bring the United States into the war. None of this is to say that Germany shouldn’t have used submarines in the Great War, but those submarines should have been given definite orders about only opening fire on enemy warships. The bad press that ramped up to American involvement just wasn’t worth ‘starving’ Britain or attempting to.
6) Give Up While the Going is Good: At the end of 1917 Germany was not in a terrible position, but the more far-sighted members of its government saw trouble on the horizon. The fabric of German society was fraying, America had entered the war, the army was tired, replacements were no longer possible. If the German army had swallowed hard and ordered its army out of France and out of Belgium it would have been very difficult for the US and Britain to fight on determinedly and France was in no position to alone. Germany would have been humiliated in the west, but it would have had, as its bonus, thousands of square miles, gained from Tsarist Russia to justify a three and a half year struggle. Those same far sighted officials should have seen that Germany didn’t have the Allies’ stamina and have argued peace to the Kaiser.
7) Don’t Give one Last Try! By the spring of 1918 the Germans had decided to launch Operation Michael and sister operations against the French and British before the Americans could effectively reinforce them. It was a gamble but one stacked badly against the Germans and though the Germans broke British and French lines, the British and the French were able to absorb the blows much better than the Germans. By this point of the war Germany could only afford to lose one soldier if it managed to kill or incapacitate or imprison three enemy soldiers. The German infantry and their officers were good, but not that good. The only chance they ever had of killing enough Britons, Americans and French soldiers was to stay locked in the fortress that they had created in Flanders and northern France. Instead they sallied out and effectively ended the war.
What is striking about these seven points is that had any of these mistakes been avoided (with the exception of perhaps 3 and 7) Germany would almost certainly have won the war or, at least the peace. The Great War was Germany’s to lose and luckily for Europe they did… Other thoughts on German victory in the Great War: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
10 Jan 2015: Tacitus from Detritus writes, Add to the list of German WWI errors a few more. 1. the zeppelins. A waste of resources and a technology dead end. The same effort spent on conventional aircraft in the prewar and early war years would have given air superiority and made the much better German artillery arm even more effective. Germany was among the aeronautical pioneers in the early 20th century and still fought “above their weight” despite consistent numerical disadvantage. 2. offer Italy a better bribe than the Allies. Really this would have been best for all concerned. Italy gets some slice of Alps or maybe German East Africa. Italy stays neutral and the Germans and Austrians have several more corps of troops to deploy. 3. Offer all Russian prisoners from Poland, the Baltic States and perhaps the Ukraine a parole if they offer to fight against the Tsar. The Russian state in 1914 was as rotten inside as a later generation of Germans assumed it would be in 1941. True, it is hard to go to war with carrying a banner of national liberation when the causus belli was preserving the subjugation (by Austria) of ethnic minorities, but it probably would have worked and one can image Nicholas would have been quick to sue for peace when he saw his provinces slipping through his indolent fingers. 4. And of course you omit the classic, transferring troops from the West at the moment of crisis only to have them arrive in the East after the victory at Tannenberg had been won without them.
10 Jan 2015: KHM writes, I forget who said it, but it is the one who wins the last battle that wins the war. Germany should have immediately initiated peace negotiations during or after the Brest-Litovsk treaty of March 3, 1918 with Bolshevik Russia. It would have gained land in the east even though losing some in the west. So, Numbers 6 and 7 seem to be especially important. The problem with WW1 is that there were no ideological issues, only those of nationalism and conflicting imperialistic aspirations. As a result the peace treaties signed at the end were sadly unrealistic. Germany and allies had not been totally defeated and were left in a better position than they deserved. The war should have continued on until the Central Power’s territory had been successfully invaded and occupied. War reparations weren’t the answer, but annexation of occupied lands, buildings and factories would have been historically in line with prior European war experience. The lines should have been redrawn more severely than they were. Unfortunately, Wilson’s 14 points set the stage for the premature end of hostilities; the subsequent treaties, as Hitler said, were only scraps of paper. So, America’s entry into the war was only a mixed blessing – it brought a quicker end to WWI, but made WWII inevitable, along with three times as many American casualties. So much for an American’s hindsight – but for an actuary, hindsight is relatively important.
29 June 2015: SJ with a brilliant email, disagree with a lot of these but they are fascinating.
I will first comment your list and then send in an other mail what were according to me the real German mistakes.
