WAGING TOTAL WAR
Trench warfare, 1916. Source: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY.
For most soldiers, fighting in the First World War was anything but heroic. On October 29, 1914, Sergeant I. F. Bell of the Gordon Highlanders was admiring his “almost perfect trench” near the Belgian town of Ypres “when all hell seemed let loose.” Suddenly the great guns roared and made the earth heave, ears ring, and eyes tear. Then “Germans sprang from everywhere and attacked us,” throwing hand grenades, ducking into craters, cutting through barbed wire, tiptoeing through minefields, and ignoring dying comrades. Terrorized defenders crouched behind sandbags, countering with rifle and machine-gun fire until their barrels glowed, but were forced to fall back. In a ritual repeated a thousand times, a British officer rallied his troops, ordering them to “retake the trench” with bayonets in hand-to-hand combat. Then Bell felt a “dull thud,” tumbled head over heels, and “discovered that [his] right foot was missing.” The dead piled up three deep, but hardly any ground was gained. Eventually stillness returned and corpses rotted in the mud, emitting a nauseating stench. The “stark hellishness” of the scene was indescribable.1
Contemporaries initially referred to this conflict as the “Great War” because it ended a relatively peaceful century and involved more countries and combatants than the prior wars of national unification. Though it was essentially a struggle for European hegemony, it gradually began to be called a “world war” due to its spread to overseas powers, the involvement of the colonies, and the global ambitions of the belligerents. Since millions of fathers, brothers, and sons were lost or wounded, while many bodies were never found, almost every little village erected a monument at its center for those fallen in combat in order to have a place for patriotic remembrance. All over the continent, military cemeteries with endless rows of little white crosses recalled the enormous blood toll of a male generation, neatly separated by nationality. At famous battle sites like Verdun, memorials were constructed as focal points of annual observances by the living veterans for their dead comrades, giving meaning to their sacrifice by renewing a commitment to the national cause. Only a minority of critical intellectuals like the British feminist Vera Brittain dared question the legitimacy of warfare and argue for reconciliation instead.2
The concept of “total war,” popularized by General Erich Ludendorff in 1935, suggested a more comprehensive mobilization and a more violent form of fighting than ever before. “The character of total war requires literally the entire power of a people.” Though earlier conflicts like the Thirty Years War had already been quite bloody, the First World War shocked participants by overturning international efforts to limit combat to soldiers. Even if the effects of bombing by airplane remained slight, German retaliation against partisan attacks obliterated the distinction between soldiers and civilians, while the Allied blockade starved women, children, and the aged, making them susceptible to disease. Moreover, the manpower needs of mass armies required a more thorough mobilization of young men, the scarcity of labor led to an increasing recruitment of women, and the necessity of generating sufficient war material required the transformation of the entire economy toward military priorities. Finally, the intensification of the struggle also made generals push for the development of ever more deadly weapons, and inspired politicians to proclaim grandiose war aims that required complete victory.3
This first truly modern war differed fundamentally from the grand Napoleonic battles, since the industrialization of the battlefield potentiated the projection of force. The advancement of technology created more efficient killing devices such as the machine gun; factory assembly lines produced larger supplies of ammunition such as artillery shells; conscript armies fielded much greater numbers of troops; and the use of new weapons such as poison gas violated accepted international norms. Mechanized combat became so deadly as to compel the abandonment of colorful uniforms in the spring of 1915. At the same time, journalists and intellectuals mobilized the home front with propaganda; bureaucratic war-production boards tried to marshal scarce resources of steel and food; plant managers persuaded women to work in the factories, blurring gender roles; generals gradually adapted their strategy to mass combat by shifting from attack to attrition; and political leaders sought to sustain an emotionalized conflict that they could not end. Unlike the one-sided colonial wars, World War I was largely a combat between equals that claimed incredible numbers of victims, recalling the U.S. Civil War.4
In contrast to the simplification of computer games, modern war was not decided just on the battlefield but also in the hearts and minds of the citizens involved. Already a century earlier Prussian theoretician Carl von Clausewitz had argued that war was the continuation of politics by other means. Of course, the success or failure of military strategy continued to play a key role in the outcome of the First World War. But by becoming more total, the struggle turned into a contest for allies, with the Entente and the Central Powers trying to tip the scales by drawing other powerful countries into the conflict. The war was also a severe test of their economies, since the capacity for weapons production would be decisive in a prolonged struggle. Similarly, the First World War was a trial of political will among the belligerents to sustain the fighting in the face of horrific personal and material losses.5 In such a multidimensional contest, only a well-organized and committed country would be able to prevail. Hence modern warfare consisted of far more than innovative weapons technology, testing the very fabric of society and politics.
SHORT-WAR ILLUSION
The public greeted the outbreak of the war in July 1914 with a mixture of enthusiasm and foreboding. In all major European cities middle-class crowds gathered spontaneously, read the latest newspaper dispatches, marched waving flags, listened to nationalist speeches, and sang patriotic songs. Inspired by professorial exhortations to national unity, university students who dominated the streets welcomed the liberation from a boring peace and the chance to prove their mettle in a historic trial of arms. Yet in working-class quarters or among national minorities, apprehension prevailed, and socialist speakers like Rosa Luxemburg called for “mass action against war.” Fearing what was to come, the poor especially worried about having to bear the brunt of the fighting. Seeking to overcome their nervousness, drafted recruits scrawled “à Berlin” or “nach Paris” on their train cars, confident that they would be home by Christmas. Neither generals nor politicians imagined that the intensity of modern warfare could be sustained for more than a few months, and therefore based their decisions on ways to achieve a quick victory.6
Given the large superiority of the Entente over the Central Powers in population size and access to resources, the war should, indeed, have been short. The former commanded 28 percent of the world’s industrial capacity compared to the latter’s mere 19 percent. Moreover, the Allies had 5.8 million soldiers under arms as opposed to only 3.8 million on the other side. Owing to the Royal Navy’s command of the seas, the Entente could draw on raw materials and food from all over the world, whereas the Dual Alliance lacked such essential supplies as nitrogen for explosives and fertilizer as well as iron for weapons and rubber and oil for motor vehicles. The Central Powers’ only advantage was their compact land area, which offered strategists interior lines for shifting troops from one front to another. In contrast, the Entente had long communication routes between France, Britain, and Russia that complicated joint planning. Perhaps the professional training of the German military and the excellent scientific support were also somewhat helpful.7 But because of their structural inferiority, the Central Powers were forced to take more strategic risks.
As a desperate gamble to win a two-front war, the Schlieffen Plan almost succeeded—but coming close was not enough. In principle it was deceptively simple: in a gigantic sweep the right wing of the German front would advance through Belgium into northern France in order to capture Paris. In practice it proved difficult to execute, since the Belgians tenaciously defended their fortresses (Liège, for example) and the Russians mobilized more quickly than expected, forcing Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke to send two army corps to defend the eastern frontier. In early September the advancing German forces, nonetheless, crossed the river Marne and threatened Paris itself. But communication confusion, troop exhaustion, overextension of supplies, and a fifty-kilometer gap in the lines made them vulnerable to Joseph Joffre’s and the British Expeditionary Force’s counterattack. On September 9 Generals Karl von Bülow and Alexander von Kluck therefore decided to break off the advance. Dramatized through the shifting of defenders with Parisian taxis, the “miracle of the Marne” meant that the German war plan had failed in the West.8
The French Plan XVII met the same negative fate, since German resistance proved much stronger than expected. Based on the “cult of the offensive” and designed to liberate the lost provinces, this strategy demanded that the main thrust take place in Alsace and Lorraine in the hope of splitting the southern German states from Prussia. Though initially the French advanced into the valley of the Rhine, capturing Mulhouse, furious German counterattacks forced them quickly to retreat. As a result of this double failure, both sides dug into trenches so as to establish impregnable defensive positions. Only in the still-open northern portion of the front could a “race to the sea” have developed, with each side trying to outflank the other so as to regain the strategic initiative. But the various German and British encircling moves in Flanders’ fields canceled each other out, finally running out of space at the Channel coast. Contrary to most predictions, the war of movement ended in the West by November 1914.9 The Germans occupied most of Belgium and northern France, but they had failed to win the war.
In the East the Russian and Austrian offensives also did not achieve their goals, bogging down along an eight-hundred-kilometer front from the Baltic to the Romanian border. Mobilizing more quickly than anticipated, tsarist armies under Paul von Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov invaded East Prussia, heading for Königsberg and for Danzig. Their separation gave the German defenders the chance to surround them first at Tannenberg and then at the Masurian lakes, throwing them back into Poland. In contrast to Moltke’s failure in the West, this eastern victory by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff created a myth of their military brilliance that would have disastrous political consequences.10 In the Serbian campaign, Austrian chief of staff Conrad von Hötzendorff underestimated his enemy; he briefly captured Belgrade but could not hold it against the fierce resistance of the defenders. In Galicia the material superiority of Russian attackers was so great that the Habsburg forces lost the fortresses of Lemberg and Przemyśl before German reinforcements managed to recapture some of the lost ground in a winter campaign in the Carpathians.11
The unexpected stalemate in the West and East inspired a frantic search for allies powerful enough to tip the military balance in one side’s favor. While the Turkish entry into the war weakened Russian capabilities by diverting troops to the Caucasus front, the Entente succeeded in persuading Italy to enter the fighting on its side. Nationalist agitation in Rome focused on Italia irredenta (Italian-speaking territories still held by Austria in Trentino, Friuli, and Istria) rather than on the French-dominated Nice or Savoy. As a result of western promises of expansion on the Dalmatian coast and of new colonies, the war party in Italy, bolstered by the socialist turncoat Benito Mussolini, decided to gamble on an Entente victory. Though the Austrians had only weak militia units, their strategic position in the first chain of the Alps appeared impregnable, forcing Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna to attack across the Isonzo River. Supported by better artillery, the Habsburg defenders just managed to redeploy enough troops from Serbia to hold off a succession of Italian offensives.12 So the opening of a new front in southern Europe merely extended the carnage.
The initial war of movement therefore failed to bring a military decision by the end of 1914 because neither side won or lost decisively enough in order to cease fighting. On the one hand, the German advantages of tactical effectiveness and troop discipline were counteracted by the weakness of a multiethnic Austrian ally. On the other, the manpower and material superiority of the Entente was nullified by the lack of coordination in its campaigns. All the carefully developed strategic plans failed, since they privileged the offensive in order to reach extensive war aims through outright victory rather than adopting a defensive posture that was militarily more effective and politically easier to sustain. As a result, all armies incurred frightful losses, amounting to almost half their initial strength in dead, wounded, or captured. While the Central Powers had occupied most of Belgium and a good part of northern France, their advance on Warsaw was checked, and they were barely holding on in Galicia as well as in Italy. To everyone’s surprise, modern warfare therefore turned out to become an interminable struggle.
Map 3. World War I in Europe, 1914–18. Adapted from Maps.com.
STALEMATE IN THE TRENCHES
The rough balance of forces led to a protracted stalemate due to the construction of elaborate trenches in which defenders could weather murderous assaults. Across a no-man’s-land, the contending armies faced each other in a complicated maze of observation posts, infantry trenches, communication ditches, fallback positions, artillery platforms, and staging areas. The usually three-deep lines could be dented, but rarely broken, only to be reestablished farther back. Continually tested by local forays, tactical attacks, or massive offensives, this system was itself a product of learning how to survive the deadly artillery assaults by elaborate measures to maintain fighting capacity. Only where positions were hewn into stone, as in Alsace, did they remain largely static; elsewhere they shifted with battle fortunes, creating a labyrinth of protective trenches carved out of the earth. In the East, movement reemerged intermittently when the Central Powers began to capture pieces of Poland. But in the West the experience of most soldiers, and the memory of the Great War, were characterized by this warfare in the trenches.13
The deadlock was not a matter of strategic choice but a result of the superior defensive power of modern weapons. Though military doctrine celebrated the spirit of offensive, in practice attacking a well-organized trench system demanded immense sacrifices of dead, wounded, and missing in action. Assault units had to cut through rolls of barbed wire and move through minefields while facing murderous machine-gun or rifle fire. After a preliminary artillery barrage tried to break resistance, attacking troops would throw hand grenades into the trenches or use flamethrowers to smoke out defenders. Often about half the attackers were already incapacitated before a unit could reach an enemy trench, where hand-to-hand combat with small arms and bayonets would ensue. Much of the killing therefore took place at a distance through artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, or sharpshooters and therefore depended more on a sufficient supply of ammunition than on individual valor. In this impersonal, industrialized warfare the chances of survival were higher if one could hide in a well-built trench than if one had the courage to go “over the top.”14
During 1915 the stalemate in the trenches developed into a war of attrition in which each side tried to wear down the other with massive firepower. In order to liberate northern France and Belgium, the Entente forces were compelled to attack, while the Germans could hunker down in defensive positions, holding on to their gains. The increasing numbers of British troops, led by the unimaginative Douglas Haig, tried their luck in Flanders, while the French, still clinging to Robert Nivelle’s idea of percée, launched their assault in Champagne. These repeated offenses made only minimal gains against well-constructed German defenses, stalling with enormous losses. Similarly Austrian troops managed to hold off Italian attacks at the Isonzo front with heavy casualties on both sides. In contrast, a combined German-Austrian offensive broke through at Gorlice-Tarnów, captured Warsaw, and threw the still-sizable Russian armies back to their own frontier with Poland before it bogged down as well.15 On the continent itself, the Central Powers therefore managed to weather all Entente assaults during the first full year of the war.
At the European periphery, the results of the fighting initially also favored the Central Powers. Since the proclamation of a “holy war” by Sultan Mohammed V had little effect, the Ottoman Empire found itself on the defensive against Arabs in the Near East, aided by the British, and against Russian forces in the Caucasus. The failure of an Allied effort to break through the Dardanelles, the straits that controlled the shipping lane to the Black Sea, was strategically more significant. In spite of fierce fighting at Gallipoli by an Australian and New Zealand expeditionary corps, the Turkish army managed to beat off the attackers and to deny the Entente this essential maritime supply line. When Bulgaria, still smarting from its losses during the Second Balkan War, entered the fray in the fall of 1915, a combined Austrian-German-Bulgarian offensive was finally able to subdue the Serbs. A Greek counterlanding of British and French forces in Saloniki came too late. Using their superiority on land, the Central Powers thereby managed to establish strategic control over the Balkans and to open a direct connection to their Turkish ally.16
Only in the war on the seas and in the colonies did the western Allies have the upper hand, since the Royal Navy was larger and more experienced than the German fleet. Though the kaiser’s battleships sank some British cruisers, they were defeated at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, and the raiders who had destroyed some merchantmen were eventually rounded up. Commanding the Channel as well as the upper exits of the North Sea, the Royal Navy instituted a tight blockade of the Central Powers, hoping to deprive them of essential foodstuffs and raw materials. Owing to this control of the maritime supply lines, the Anglo-French colonial forces quickly captured the smaller German contingents in the colonies, with the sole exception of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who waged an elusive guerrilla war in Southeast Africa. Not willing to risk its home battle fleet, the German navy could only counter with submarine attacks on Allied battleships and merchantmen. But when over twelve hundred passengers sank along with the British liner Lusitania, which was probably carrying ammunition, it had to break off its indiscriminate torpedoing because of U.S. protests.17
During 1916, the third year of the war, both coalitions intensified the war of attrition in pursuit of outright victory. Recognizing the industrial nature of modern warfare, German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn sought to break the enemy’s will to fight by “bleeding [him] white.” Forcing the French to commit their troops, he chose to assault the fortress of Verdun, the strategic hinge of the western front, which could be attacked from three sides. German artillery pounded the forts around the city; German infantry captured the fort Douaumont and inflicted severe losses on the defenders. But declaring “they shall not pass,” General Philippe Pétain organized a determined defense, hauled in supplies, and deployed colonial troops. When Falkenhayn realized that inflicting frightful losses at the cost of equal sacrifices had failed to break the French resistance, he desisted from further attack. At the same time a growing number of well-supplied British troops, aided by Canadian and Australian forces and supported by a new kind of weapon—tanks—mounted a huge offensive at the Somme. Costing nineteen thousand dead on the first day, it exerted an even higher blood toll for little territorial gain.18 Owing to the failure of both attacks, the stalemate continued in the West.
In the East, the Russians mounted a last big offensive under Alexei Brusilov in the summer of 1916 that almost changed the outcome of the war. Drawing on their inexhaustible manpower supply and armed by a rapidly expanding industry, they attacked the German lines at Vilna, only to be eventually pushed back. But in June, when they surprised the Austrians in Galicia, the tsarist armies recaptured much of the previously lost territory. This apparent change of fortunes brought the Romanian government, hoping to extend its territory in Transylvania, into the war in August. However, the combined German, Austrian, Bulgarian, and Turkish forces subdued this new enemy and occupied virtually the entire country by the end of the year. The exploitation of Romania’s rich resources of grain and oil helped the Central Powers to continue the war for two more years. Finally, the presence of Entente troops also drew Athens into the conflict, intent on recapturing some of its historic territories from Bulgaria to create a greater Greece. Ironically, the entry of further countries into the war spread the conflict without really changing its outcome.19
The continuation of warfare on the high seas also failed to tip the military balance. With the Royal Navy maintaining its blockade of the North Sea exits, the Kriegsmarine did not dare a challenge in unfavorable waters. The only major naval battle took place somewhat by mistake at Jutland when both forces ran into each other during fog. The German ships sank more British tonnage, but the Royal Navy maintained its command of the seas, scoring a strategic victory. Submarine warfare, however, proved more dangerous to British supply lines as long as U-boats torpedoed enemy shipping on sight, since following traditional rules by surfacing exposed the vulnerable submarines to enemy counteraction. But Americans insisted on trading and traveling in contested waters, warning Berlin against sinking liners or neutral ships like the Arabic or the Sussex. To keep the United States out of the war, the German submarine fleet therefore tried to carry on its campaign without sinking passenger ships, limiting its results.20 Due to the lethal effectiveness of technical weapons, the stalemate unleashed horrendous violence, destroying millions of lives.
For the soldiers on both sides, the front experience was a special kind of hell that burned itself deeply into the memory of the survivors. The routine of trench warfare involved long stretches of boredom, in which the men could perfect their shelters, play cards, smoke cigarettes, and tend to their infected feet. When action started, there was frantic excitement, a heightened state of existence that proved exhilarating. The noise was overwhelming, mixing the barking of orders with the tok-tok-tok of machine guns, the whistling of mines, the dull thuds of exploding shells, and the cries of the wounded men or horses. The sight of it all was ghastly: blurry photos show bent soldiers dashing forward, bodies being torn by grenades, muddy figures crawling into craters for coverage. At night the sky was lit up with flares, illuminating an eerie scene of death and destruction. The stench of rotting corpses was overwhelming. Many soldiers could only bear the alternating emotions of fear and indifference through iron discipline, liberal doses of alcohol, or visits to brothels. The fighting in the trenches forged a close comradeship of male bonding as a survival community.21
WAR AIMS AND PEACE MOVES
The First World War dragged on because both sides pursued aims that could be realized only through victory, thereby condemning all secret peace feelers to failure. In order to mobilize public support, governments claimed to be defending their countries against foreign aggression and appealed to patriotism even among the working classes, previously suspect for their internationalism. At the same time military planners, economic interest groups, and chauvinist propagandists demanded tangible gains as compensation for all the material and human sacrifices incurred, drawing up vast claims that required their enemies to be completely defeated. Moreover, several secret agreements such as the Treaty of London between the Entente and Italy promised territorial annexations and other rewards for entering the war, which in some cases even contradicted each other. While the actual extent of the aims fluctuated with military fortunes, the exigencies of mass politics increasingly trapped cabinets between pursuing limited aims that might be realized and the need to whip up enthusiasm through uncompromising rhetoric.
Among the Central Powers Austria was the most vulnerable, since it faced separatist agitation from the Serbs and the Czechs. The ancient Habsburg Empire was technically a dual monarchy, ruled jointly from Vienna, supported by German speakers, and from Budapest, based on Hungarian dominance. Attacked by nationalist agitators, the multiethnic structure was held together by the aging emperor Francis Joseph, a central bureaucracy, an imperial army, and a commercial middle class in which Jews played a major role. In order to quell further agitation, the Austrian government decided to partition Serbia, although the Hungarians were hardly enthusiastic about adding more Serbs to their domain. Since the Poles in Galicia were still largely loyal to the crown because they had more freedom than their relatives under Russian or Prussian rule, Austria also wanted to expand into central Poland. Whatever the precise aims, Vienna ultimately fought for the very survival of the Habsburg state.22 Similarly the Ottoman Empire also struggled for its continued existence against separatist movements in its domains.
German war aims were also a paradoxical blend of defense of their continental position and expansion in order to become a global player. The semiconstitutional system, headed by the volatile emperor William II, precariously balanced a strong military with a weaker civilian leadership dependent on Reichstag support. At the height of the first advance, the chancellor’s secretary Kurt Riezler drew up the secret “September Program,” which sought to “make the German Empire secure towards West and East.” By annexing Luxembourg, Antwerp, and the iron-ore basin of Longwy-Briey, the plan tried to weaken France; by claiming a border strip in Poland and creating vassal states in the East, it intended to push Russia back; by constructing a Central European customs union, it attempted to gain economic control over the continent; and by consolidating colonies into a Central Africa, it sought to shore up the overseas possessions. Modified according to the military situation, these goals were loudly proclaimed by a war-aims movement that contradicted the claim of self-defense and rendered separate-peace attempts futile.23
The Entente’s goals during the war were no less extensive, since they also aimed at the fundamental weakening of their opponents. Tsarist Russia was an embarrassment to its western Allies because its autocratic rule, only somewhat modified by the Duma, and its economic backwardness did not fit into the image of defending democracy. Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov pursued “the chief aim of countering German power and its efforts at military and political dominance.” Concretely, that meant annexing some Prussian territories and conquering all of Poland, assuring it some kind of undefined autonomy. The Austrian rival was to be weakened by promising “freedom and the realization of their national wishes” to the ethnic minorities, especially the Czechs. From the Ottoman Empire, the Russian leadership demanded control over the Straits of Constantinople in order to have free access to the Mediterranean, plus the cession of additional territories in the Caucasus.24 These aims were so ambitious that Petersburg rejected all of Berlin’s advances to conclude a separate peace, although it thereby risked the future of the monarchy.
In France, the war-aims debate was simplified through the national consensus of liberating the northern departments from their German invaders. Though the Third Republic was politically fragmented between a nationalist Right and an internationalist Left, all parties agreed on the restoration of the “lost provinces” of Alsace-Lorraine, responding to the wishes of the francophone bourgeoisie in spite of the reservations of much of the German-speaking populace. The return of Belgian independence and economic reparations were not controversial either. Pushed by nationalists like Georges Clemenceau, the French government secretly also aimed at annexing the left bank of the Rhine or, failing that, at least creating a separate Rhenish state and at conquering the Saar Basin, though both were indisputably German by ethnicity. Moreover, Paris also developed extensive plans for dividing the Near East into spheres of influence with the British in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement and assured Russia of support for its ambitions to seize the Straits in exchange for accepting French expansion toward the Rhine. Above all, France sought future security against Germany.25
The British were publicly less vindictive toward Germany but also pursued interests that would materially strengthen their position. In a constitutional monarchy, the cabinet had to pay close attention to the House of Commons, where some leftist members were less annexationist. Nonetheless, there was broad agreement on the restoration of Belgian independence, the destruction of the kaiser’s fleet, and the takeover of the Reich’s colonies, demanded also by the dominions. London remained noncommittal regarding boundary shifts on the continent and the Balkans, even if its rhetoric also favored national liberation movements. Instead, Britain sought to defend the Suez Canal and foster a revolt of Arab subjects against the Ottoman Empire so as to establish predominance in the Near East. In the competition for Jewish support, London also upstaged Berlin by issuing the Balfour Declaration, which supported the creation of an Israeli homeland although that clashed with promises to Arab sheiks.26 In short, Britain wanted to eliminate German competition without too much upsetting the balance of power on the continent.
With such extensive war aims on both sides, peace moves were almost preordained to fail, since the respective conditions were too far apart for compromise. The London Agreement of August 1914 between the Entente leaders had foreclosed the possibility of separate peace—an aim consistently pursued by Berlin in order to break its diplomatic “encirclement.” American mediation by President Woodrow Wilson’s confidant Colonel Edward House was also doomed because its proposals, such as the restoration of Belgian independence, the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, and Russian access to the Mediterranean favored the Entente, though the military situation remained somewhat more auspicious for the Central Powers. When domestic pressure to end the war forced the German government to launch a peace offer of its own in December 1916, its conditions of returning to an improved status quo ante, circumscribed by the Supreme Command, remained unattractive to the Entente. The responses of both sides to subsequent offers by the U.S. president and the pope turned into a propaganda contest of trying to look peaceful while carrying on the war.27
The failure of the peace moves suggested that modern war was escaping the control of cabinet diplomacy, since appeals to mass support inflamed popular passions, rendering compromise impossible. Arguing that only tangible gains would make the blood toll worthwhile, chauvinists pressed for extensive public commitments, which effectively tied the hands of the governments among all belligerents. Annexationist war-aims demands, however, increasingly undercut the claims of national defense around which the majority of the populations had rallied in the summer of 1914. Faced with material deprivation and losses of family members, most Europeans were getting tired of the carnage, since the incompatible aims of the elites did not seem worth the additional suffering required for their accomplishment. Left-socialist and pacifist antiwar agitation therefore found more and more adherents who were willing to strike in order to end the senseless slaughter. Instead of returning to the prewar order, the frustrated governments continued to pursue outright victory.28
DOMESTIC MOBILIZATION
In modern warfare the home front became just as important as the actual fighting, since it offered the material and psychological support that soldiers needed to carry on. A universal male draft could function only if young men were either enthusiastic or at least willing to join a struggle in which many of them would be killed. Since the production of weapons and ammunition was essential for military success, the absence of a considerable share of the labor force had to be compensated for by employing nonconscripted men, women, POWs, or colonials. At the same time, the war required enormous amounts of money to be raised through increased taxes or public borrowing in order to finance the huge expenditures of paying for troops and their supplies. All belligerents therefore mounted propaganda campaigns to convince neutrals of the justice of their cause and to shore up the fighting spirit of their own population. Where patriotic appeals evoked little response, military censorship saw to it that no criticism would be raised or damaging information divulged.29 Much more than earlier conflicts, World War I involved civilians at home.
After the outbreak of fighting, all belligerents tried to present a united front by suspending domestic politics so as to maximize their commitment to war. In Germany, Kaiser William II sought to overcome regional, religious, class, and ethnic divisions by proclaiming to the Reichstag “I no longer know parties, I know only Germans.” Instead of locking up socialists as subversive agitators, this “truce-within-the-castle” appeal urged them to vote for war credits in exchange for having the labor movement accepted into the national community. In France, the left-center government similarly included two socialist ministers and announced a union sacrée, uniting all different groups in a national struggle without seeking partisan advantage. In England the competing Liberals, Unionists, Labourites, and Irish Nationalists also rallied behind the war effort, though they debated more openly about the right strategy. Even in the authoritarian Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires there was a similar closing of ranks, albeit with more compulsion from above.30 This “spirit of 1914” only began to fray when the war dragged on and suffering became interminable.
The propaganda that mobilized the home front and appealed to international opinion created a veritable “culture of war,” which blended patriotism with hatred. In this area, the Allies had a great advantage, since the Reuters and Havas agencies controlled the international cables that transmitted the news. The Entente succeeded in depicting the struggle as a fight between the universal values of Western civilization, based on democratic government, and Prussian militarism, exemplified by atrocities against Belgian civilians.31 The Central Powers found themselves on the defensive in the publicity war, since they were unable to frame their cause in a general fashion by emphasizing the superiority of their own Kultur. Less versed in dealing with the media, the German government relied more on censorship under martial law, favoring patriotic rhetoric as “apolitical” and suppressing leftist criticism. While writers such as Maurice Barrès or T. E. Lawrence provided support for the Entente, professors such as Werner Sombart and authors such as Thomas Mann polemicized in favor of the Central Powers.32 In colorful posters graphic artists also reinforced patriotic appeals by painting horrifying images of the enemy.
In industrial warfare, a high-performance economy was crucial for producing the necessary weapons for fighting. The Entente powers also led in mobilizing the economy, as they had better access to resources through drawing on wealth accumulated during decades of prosperity. Owing to their control of the seas, they were able to resupply themselves from the empire and the United States, where businessmen were ready to float loans in order to make a tidy profit. In contrast to Russian ineptitude, England and France used a mixture of government control and private enterprise in order to raise their output considerably.33 With fewer resources at their disposal, the Central Powers had to rely on technological innovation like Fritz Haber’s nitrogen synthesis in order to replace raw materials with Ersatz products. The Berlin government used a more bureaucratic approach to coordinate production through a War Raw-Materials Department let by Walther Rathenau, and rationed food so as to hold prices down. But when the blockade tightened and the potato harvest declined by 50 percent, widespread starvation ensued in the “beet winter” of 1916–17, sapping the will to fight.34
Because of its larger population, the Entente also had an advantage in available manpower, which was crucial for continued fighting and arms production. The French moved almost half a million North African soldiers to the front, while Britain, helped by numerous volunteers from the dominions and the Indian army, instituted the draft in 1916. Russia had an ample supply of men but difficulty in training troops. With reserves depleted, the Germans called up the birth cohort of 1900 in 1918, since Austrian troops were ethnically unreliable and only the Turks could be counted on among the Ottoman ally. Facing enormous numbers of wounded, medical officers made heroic efforts to treat the disfigured or shell-shocked so as to save their lives and return them quickly to combat. At home, skilled industrial laborers needed to be replaced while farm workers were also in short supply. To make up these deficits, in the fall of 1916 the Berlin government proclaimed the Hindenburg Program to double arms output, which compelled all males between sixteen and sixty-five to perform some kind of national service in the factory or on the land. As a reward for cooperating in the patriotic effort, labor unions were granted new rights of representation.35
Though women remained excluded from combat, their contributions became increasingly important to the war effort. On the one hand they played traditional supportive roles, serving symbolically as patriotic inspiration and practically as psychological comfort by sending letters and packages. When soldiers were home on leave, wives were also encouraged to get pregnant in order to make up for the manpower losses on the battlefield. On the other hand, women gradually assumed auxiliary military functions as nurses, secretaries, or drivers in uniform, thereby freeing men for the actual fighting. More important yet was the recruitment of females for industrial production, where they replaced drafted workers in making artillery shells, machine-gun ammunition, and even actual weapons. This was tough work in noisy and ill-vented factory halls that tested physical stamina and mental commitment. While combat reinforced the distinction between male killing and female support from the sideline, the war hastened the erosion of traditional gender roles in the workplace.36
When the struggle entered its third year with no end in sight, public opinion became increasingly polarized between advocates of victory at any price and proponents of immediate peace. The ever larger numbers of dead, wounded, and missing as well as shortages of food and fuel raised the question of whether the sacrifices were worthwhile. Nationalists among all the belligerents stressed the need to “persevere” until a victorious end, because otherwise all the previous suffering would have been in vain. Schoolteachers tried to motivate pupils by showing the front lines with pins on maps, posters appealed for subscription to war bonds, and patriotic rallies celebrated local victories. Within the Central Powers, ineffective or unlucky commanders such as General Falkenhayn were replaced with presumed winners like Hindenburg and Ludendorff. In response to army mutinies and strikes, hard-line politicians such as le tigre Georges Clemenceau and the mercurial Lloyd George assumed greater responsibility in the Entente countries because they were capable of rousing the masses with patriotic appeals. Newly founded chauvinistic groups like the German Fatherland Party also tried to strengthen the will to victory.37
In spite of such efforts, the patriotic fervor wore off, and war weariness spread among soldiers and civilians facing death or deprivation. In all countries, the majority of the elite remained committed to annexationism while the middle class continued to respond to national appeals. But in the trenches some soldiers began to refuse orders to attack, and in the factories many laborers demanded more food, shorter hours, and better pay. The mounting criticism of the war as an imperialist struggle among independent socialists, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht, led to the symbolic refusal of war credits by leftist parliamentarians. Promising an immediate end to the carnage, the slogan “no annexations, no indemnities” resonated ever more widely among industrial workers who broke with the suspension of politics by organizing strikes. About forty thousand French soldiers on the western front also mutinied, though their protests were put down with some concessions and force. Since the misery of the trenches and the hunger at home made patriotic rhetoric lose its appeal, the conduct of the war reached a crisis during the winter of 1916–17.38
ULTIMATE ESCALATION
As neither the Bulgarian nor the Romanian entry proved decisive, the totalizing logic of modern warfare finally also drew the United States, the only country left that could tip the balance, into the conflict. American opinion was, however, divided, with much of the progressive reform coalition heeding George Washington’s warning against getting involved in European quarrels. In particular, many midwesterners and westerners, immigrants of Irish descent, and German-Americans were opposed to participating in a fight that looked as bloody as it seemed pointless. However, eastern elites felt a cultural affinity to Great Britain and France, while businessmen were making much money by supplying the Entente and bankers floated loans to finance such orders. British command of the sea and of the news cables meant that sentiment and material interest among an influential segment of politicians and the press swung in the direction of the Entente. Conscious of the strength of isolationist reluctance, the Democratic administration of President Woodrow Wilson sought to mediate until the submarine issue finally drew the United States into the war.39
Unlike the British naval blockade, the submarine was a new kind of weapon that, used without restrictions, violated the rules of sea warfare. During the naval race Admiral Tirpitz had not put much priority on its development, since the kaiser wanted to create a competitive high-seas fleet. Following the traditionally accepted pattern, submarines would have to surface, stop an enemy ship with a shot across the bow, send over a boarding party, let its sailors enter lifeboats, and only then sink it. But the cornered vessel could in turn try to outrun a slower submarine, ram it, or puncture its vulnerable hull with machine-gun or small-cannon fire. Moreover, ships of belligerent nations could change their names, add false smokestacks, or fly neutral flags to disguise their origin. Though they had some success with conventional methods, submarine commanders came to prefer a policy of sinking by torpedoing on sight, because that kept their own ship and crew safe while giving the enemy no chance to escape. The strategic aim of sinking merchant shipping was the interdiction of food and raw-material supplies, especially to Britain, which needed both.40
In neutral countries unrestricted submarine warfare created more resentment than a conventional blockade, since ships and crew members were lost instead of just being impounded and interned. The British stretched the rules of sea warfare by demanding that neutral vessels stop in their ports, from which they would be released only if they carried no goods for transshipment to the Central Powers. The U.S. government protested somewhat halfheartedly against such restrictions of trade. In contrast, the sinking of passenger liners like the Lusitania provoked a greater public outcry, because 128 American citizens went down with it, although they had been cautioned not to travel in a war zone on a British ship that might carry ammunition. In response to the further torpedoing of passenger ships, President Wilson sternly warned the kaiser that a continuation of unrestricted sinking would bring the United States into the war. Berlin therefore backed down, much to the chagrin of its own naval leadership. While the British blockade killed slowly by starvation, the loss of life by submarine warfare violated the ethics of civilization more dramatically.41
The German decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on January 9, 1917, was therefore a desperate gamble to secure outright victory. The failure of Berlin’s peace offer to produce viable negotiations left the civilian leadership around Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg no alternative but to go along. While the new Supreme Command of Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided on a defensive strategy for the western front, it hoped to knock Britain out of the war by using growing numbers of submarines to interdict essential supplies of war goods, raw materials, and foodstuffs. Glad at last to be able to play a decisive role, the naval command supported the strategy, producing spurious statistics that promised that the United Kingdom would collapse within six months. The civilian experts consulted were more cautious, since they were somewhat better informed about the potential of the United States. But during the decisive meeting, the military leaders fatally underestimated American power by ignoring its war-production capacity as well as its ability to train enough soldiers to affect the outcome on the western front.42
The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare triggered American entry into the First World War, which transformed the country’s friendly neutrality toward the Entente into an actual cobelligerency. The yellow press had aroused public opinion with sensationalist stories about German sabotage and spies that exaggerated a few misguided incidents into a ubiquitous danger. The interception of a secret telegram by German secretary of foreign affairs Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government created a further outcry, because Berlin proposed an alliance and promised the restoration of territories that Mexico had previously lost to the United States. Violating the Monroe Doctrine, this diplomatic ploy of befriending the enemy of your enemy provided President Wilson and his advisers with a public pretext to join the Allies at last in the hope of creating a new and peaceful world order. The affront of ignoring previous warnings triggered a lopsided vote in both houses of Congress in favor of entering the conflict. Claiming that “the German government has committed repeated acts of war against the government and people of the U.S.,” Washington declared war on April 6, 1917.43
The immediate military effect of the American entry was limited, although the formal backing strengthened the Entente’s resolve to continue the fight. Since it had previously engaged only in local or imperial campaigns in places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Mexico, the U.S. Army was merely a colonial force, while the navy was rapidly growing. Though President Wilson insisted on a special role as an “associated power” so as not to be committed to the secret treaties of the Entente, his involvement put the full industrial and financial power of the United States at the disposal of the Allies. Now the navy could openly co-organize a convoy system across the Atlantic in which merchant vessels were protected by warships with sonar and depth charges, thereby blunting the effectiveness of the submarines. Finally, the army itself instituted an ambitious program of expansion that allowed it to train tens of thousands of raw recruits, which would resupply the depleted manpower reserves of the Entente with young men still willing to risk their lives in an attack.44 Even if its initial impact remained slight, U.S. participation turned the war into a truly global conflict.
Since most fighting took place in Europe, the U.S. government mounted a propaganda campaign to unite a divided population behind the war effort. President Wilson sought to endow the conflict with a higher meaning by proclaiming that this would be “a war to end all wars,” designed “to make the world safe for democracy.” Moreover, his administration created a Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel, which pilloried Prussian militarism and ridiculed “Kaiser Bill” as “the Hun,” referring to the emperor’s ill-advised injunction to the international force to put down the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 by being as “terrible as the Huns.” Creel’s effort, supported by a rabid mass-circulation press, created a veritable “war hysteria,” which forbade speaking German in public, renamed streets patriotically, and changed harmless products like Sauerkraut into “victory cabbage.” This nationalist frenzy even claimed some human lives, such as in the lynching of a hapless German-American in East St. Louis.45 In propaganda terms, the U.S. entry transformed the war into a struggle between “Western civilization” and German barbarism.
In spite of the addition of a new belligerent, the outcome of the war remained undecided in the spring of 1917. The British continued their massive offensives in France and Belgium against the heavily fortified positions of the Hindenburg line, conquering small areas of devastated territory at enormous human cost. The Germans slowly advanced from Poland into Russia, also suffering heavy losses but capturing larger areas from the Baltic provinces to the Romanian border. Moreover, it was not yet clear whether the convoys or the submarines would win the naval struggle. In the western countries, deep political divisions over military strategy reemerged, but ultimately advocates of continued fighting prevailed. The strains were showing more clearly in tsarist Russia, where food riots tested the imperial order, and in the Habsburg monarchy, where the voices of separatist nationalism grew ever louder. The end of the war was therefore a race between the gradual collapse of Russia, leading to German victory in the East, and the arrival of American troops, helping the Entente to win the war in the West.
MECHANIZED SLAUGHTER
The “front experience” deeply scarred European intellectuals, disabusing them of their optimism about the continuation of progress. A “lost generation” of poets sought to make sense of “the pity of war.” Wilfred Owen, for instance, deflated the notion of glorious death by describing the effect of a gas attack:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Such shocking experiences destroyed faith in a benign providence, disillusioned patriotic idealism, and undermined military discipline. Many of the greatest talents of European youths, like Rupert Brooke or Walter Flex, paid for their patriotism with their lives. Even soldiers who survived began to question not just the purpose of the war but the very values that they were presumably defending. Most writers including Erich Maria Remarque or Robert Graves left powerful indictments of warfare so as to warn against its repetition. But there were also nationalists like Ernst Jünger and Louis-Ferdinand Céline who glorified danger and the comradeship of war.46
In these testimonies, mechanized war appears as all-engulfing force, unleashing previously unimaginable levels of violence. To begin with, the advance of technology made weapons such as heavy artillery, machine guns, poison gas, and tanks much more destructive and deadly than ever before. The actual battlefield therefore tended to resemble a moonscape with trenches, shell craters, concrete shelters, and gun emplacements, in which houses were reduced to rubble, trees cut down to stumps, and pools filled with carcasses of horses. At about seventeen million, more people than ever before were killed outright, with equal numbers grievously wounded and others so psychologically damaged that they would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. While much of the killing was at a distance through artillery bombardment, machine-gun salvos, or rifle shots, battling in the trenches still involved hand-to-hand combat with hand grenades, sidearms, and bayonets. During this kind of fighting, most illusions of individual heroism vanished. The reality of industrial warfare turned out to be dirty, destructive, and depressing.47
In retrospect, it still seems amazing that soldiers continued to wage such a murderous war, facing considerable odds of getting killed in the process. Diaries and letters from the front offer some clues as to their motives. Initially there was much patriotic fervor, which made upper-class Englishmen volunteer and drove German students into death at Langemarck. But for drafted workers it was more likely compulsion that kept them in uniform, since shirking one’s duty was severely punished, with deserters being shot. For a while, hatred of enemies, deprecated by names like “Jerries,” “Limies,” and “Frogs,” spurred the fighting. Yet there were also moments of truce to gather up the wounded, and even rarer instances of fraternization such as by singing Christmas carols together, that indicated a sense of being caught in a vortex from which there was no escape. More powerful still was the solidarity with one’s immediate comrades when units became survival communities where each member depended on all the others. Finally, a misplaced desire to prove one’s manhood also played a role since young men did not want to be shamed in front of one another.48
Modern warfare also put new demands on civilians because the escalation to total war involved the home front to a much higher degree than before. According to the traditional division of labor, women were supposed to keep the home fires burning while nonconscripted laborers provided the essential supplies for fighting. But in World War I the British blockade mercilessly starved the old as well as mothers and children, while German submarine attacks sank ships with their crews and passengers. At the same time, the rise of mass politics meant that governments had to go to greater lengths to persuade the electorate of the justness of their cause by claiming that they were merely defending the mère patrie or Vaterland, though their war aims were undoubtedly expansionist. In order to break an enemy’s will to fight, they therefore engaged in mutual subversion and clothed their national interest in universal language that might appeal to minorities among their foes. In this political contest the democracies held better cards than the monarchies, since the former were used to conflict while the latter counted on deference.49
As the initial step toward the self-destruction of Europe, World War I was “the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century.”50 Dragging on for four and a half years, it reduced to ashes houses in the battlefields of Belgium and northeastern France, northern Italy, the Balkans, Poland, Russia, and the Baltic. Pieces of corpses and metal scraps still surface upon plowing in battlefields like the Somme, and trees remain stunted at Verdun while the red poppies of Flanders’ fields symbolize the futility of the carnage. By mobilizing troops from the colonies, the overseas empires shattered the myth of white supremacy and taught subalterns those military skills that would eventually displace them. The entry of transoceanic powers like Japan and the United States also marked the end of European hegemony in world affairs, since the conflict could not be resolved without drawing on resources and manpower from beyond the continent. Finally, the unprecedented violence of combat left a legacy of hatred that poisoned European politics for the next generation. Even if the fighting produced some technical innovations and medical advances, the negative impact of the first modern war on Europe can, therefore, hardly be exaggerated.