Considerable Allied advances were made throughout the Western Front in the second week of August, when the Germans were driven from the village of Antheuil-Portes, just north of Compiègne, at the southernmost limit of their June offensive. On 17 August 1918 they faced a French attack on Lassigny, which had likewise been overrun in June. Six times the French attacked Lassigny and were driven off with heavy casualties. But on August 20 they were on the outskirts of the town. That day Foch felt confident enough to write to Clemenceau that he could secure victory in 1919.
Throughout the Western Front, German morale was low. On August 20, a British Second Lieutenant, Alfred Duff Cooper, in action for the first time, reached a railway cutting ahead of his men. ‘Looking down I saw one man running away up the other side of the cutting’, he wrote in his diary. ‘I had a shot at him with my revolver. Presently I saw two men moving cautiously below me. I called to them in what German I could at the moment remember to surrender and throw up their hands. They did so immediately. They obviously did not realise that I was alone. They came up the cutting with their hands up, followed, to my surprise, by others. There were eighteen or nineteen in all. If they had rushed me then they would have been perfectly safe, for I can never hit a haystack with a revolver and my own men were eighty yards away. However they came back with me like lambs, I crawling most of the way to avoid fire from the other side of the railway. Two of them who were Red Cross men proceeded to bind up my wounded.’223
***
A main French objective, Lassigny, was recaptured on August 21. When the offensive was renewed on the Somme that day, Haig expressed his confidence that victory could come before the end of 1918. That day, British forces advanced more than two miles and took 2,000 Germans prisoner. Yet for every victorious headline there was a sombre subtext. Four days before the offensive was renewed, the Newfoundland officer Hedley Goodyear, who had led his men in the attack on August 8, wrote to his mother: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m Hun-proof.’ He was killed by a sniper between Lihons and Chaulnes. His photograph, showing him in uniform, stood on his fiancée’s mantelpiece for the next fifty years.
On August 22, Duff Cooper was again in action. ‘When we were eventually formed up for the attack’, he wrote in his diary, ‘I had only ten men, and the climax was reached when I discovered that my Platoon Sergeant, who had been excellent all the day before, was so drunk as to be useless. He started the attack with us but we never saw him again until the next day. The attack itself was beautiful and thrilling—one of the most memorable moments of my life. The barrage came down at 4 a.m. A creeping barrage—we advanced behind it. We kept direction by means of a star, and a huge full moon shone on our right. I felt wild with excitement and glory and knew no fear. When we reached our objective, the enemy trench, I could hardly believe it; so quickly had the time passed it seemed like one moment. We found a lot of German dead there. The living surrendered.’
***
Although the German forces outnumbered the Allies on the Somme Front by forty-two divisions to thirty-two, in the Allied armies there was a sense of purpose, even exhilaration. One by one the scenes of the most desperate fighting on the Somme in 1916 were overrun. Thiepval Ridge was captured on August 24. When, in Berlin, General Wrisberg told the Reichstag Budget Committee that day that the German High Command was confident of victory, he was met with ‘disdainful, mocking laughter’. ‘The Germans would give a great deal to be able to make peace,’ Sir Horace Rumbold reported from Berne to London that day, ‘but they are not yet in a frame of mind to accept our conditions.’
Each day, the Germans continued to be pushed back. On August 25, Mametz Wood was captured. It had been the scene of ferocious fighting and heavy casualties in 1916. On August 26 the Germans withdrew ten miles along a 55-mile front. Only Ludendorff’s fear of the complete collapse of his armies led him to reject an appeal by his senior army commanders to fall back further. On August 27, British troops overran Delville Wood, yet another scene of slaughter and defeat in 1916. Two days later the Germans began the evacuation of Flanders, giving up all the towns and villages, hills and rivers, that they had conquered four months earlier. Ludendorff had decided upon a purely defensive strategy, to hold the Hindenburg Line at all costs.
Nervously, after a meeting of the British War Cabinet in London, Sir Henry Wilson, then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, sent Haig a telegram, warning him that ‘the War Cabinet would become anxious if we received heavy punishment in attacking the Hindenburg Line without success’. Caution had become the watchword of the hour on both sides of the line. No one wanted a return to the four years of intermittent but intensive slaughter that had just ended. On August 30 the Austrian Chancellor, Count Burian, informed the authorities in Berlin that Austria intended to open its own negotiations for peace. Mostly from the Italian Front, but also from the Balkans, and from barracks all over the Empire, by the beginning of September there were an estimated 400,000 Austrian army deserters.
***
The Germans were to be given no respite on the Western Front. As August ended, ferocious Allied assaults were made against them. On August 30 General Mangin, who four years earlier had won a rearguard action with two battalions in the retreat to the Marne, threw a French division against the German forces east of Soissons, driving the Germans back across the river Aisne. That day the Americans captured Juvigny, five miles north of Soissons. On August 31, Australian forces captured Péronne, forcing the Germans to abandon their fortified position on Mont St Quentin. Eight Victoria Crosses were won that day by the attacking force. Two days later, on September 2, Canadian troops attacked the Hindenburg Line at the Drocourt-Quéant switch. In a four-hour battle they broke through the last and strongest German defence line. Seven men won the Victoria Cross in the attack.
Near Arras, on September 2, a 21-year-old lieutenant in the Wiltshire Regiment, Alec de Candole, expressed in verse his hopes for a not-too-distant future:
When the last long trek is over,
And the last long trench filled in,
I’ll take a boat to Dover,
Away from all the din;
I’ll take a trip to Mendip,
I’ll see the Wiltshire downs,
And all my soul I’ll then dip
In peace no trouble drowns.
Away from noise of battle,
Away from bombs and shells,
I’ll lie where browse the cattle,
Or pluck the purple bells;
I’ll lie among the heather;
And watch the distant plain,
Through all the summer weather,
Nor go to fight again.
Two days after writing these lines, Lieutenant de Candole was killed in a bombing raid on German-held trenches.
***
On September 3, Foch gave the order for continual attacks along the whole length of the Western Front. By contrast, that same day, Ludendorff issued a secret order to stop defeatist talk by German soldiers on leave. ‘Public feeling in Berlin is not good,’ General Hoffmann noted in his diary. Three days later, on September 6, the German forces completed their evacuation of the Lys Salient. On September 8 Ludendorff ordered the St Mihiel Salient to be evacuated. He did so just as the French and Americans were preparing to launch a massive attack on the salient.
By the time of Ludendorff’s order to withdraw, the Allies had assembled more than 3,000 guns and 40,000 tons of ammunition for the attack. To provide for those who would inevitably be wounded, sixty-five evacuation trains had been assembled in railway sidings, and 21,000 beds made available in hospitals. To take the troops, guns and ammunition forward, fifteen miles of road had been reconstructed using 100,000 tons of crushed stone, and 45 miles of standard-gauge and 250 miles of light-gauge railways were built.
Even as the St Mihiel offensive was in its final days of preparation, Foch and Haig were setting their own strategic sights on a more ambitious plan, a breakthrough on the Ypres and Somme Fronts. This meant that the three hundred heavy tanks Pershing believed Haig would transfer to him for the St Mihiel offensive could not be spared, while the French produced only 267 of the 500 light tanks Pershing requested from them. The successes of the previous month had encouraged Haig and Foch to think beyond a limited conquest of trench lines, or the straightening out of a salient. During August, Britain and France, and the Americans, had captured 150,000 German soldiers, 2,000 guns and 13,000 machine guns. The British and French hoped, by an offensive to be launched at the end of September, to achieve even more. Crossing to London, Haig asked the War Office on September 10 for mounted men, and all forms of munitions designed to increase mobility, for a new type of war, a war of movement, which he anticipated in the ‘near future’.
In Germany on September 10, rousing himself from weariness and depression, the Kaiser spoke to the munitions workers at Krupp’s, in Essen. He intended his speech to rouse their enthusiasm for the war, but when he said that anyone spreading false rumours or circulating anti-war leaflets ought to be hanged, the workers were silent.
***
On September 11 the Americans began their final preparations to drive the Germans out of the St Mihiel Salient. A few days earlier German artillerymen had withdrawn some of their heavy guns from the woods above the town. The German High Command had been deceived by a deliberate American trick into believing that the main attack would come elsewhere, against Mulhouse. A copy of part of the operational orders for the attack on Mulhouse had been thrown into a wastepaper basket at Belfort and, as intended, had been found by a German agent and interpreted ‘correctly’, much to the Americans’ advantage.
The battle was nevertheless to be a fierce one. ‘American tanks do not surrender so long as one tank is able to go forward,’ Lieutenant-Colonel George S. Patton, Jr, informed his men on September 11. ‘Its presence will save the lives of hundreds of infantry and kill many Germans.’224 When the battle began on September 12, more than 200,000 American troops, supported by 48,000 French, moved forward in pouring rain along a twelve-mile front. The lack of British and French tanks proved no obstacle to success. During the advance, the American gunners fired 100,000 rounds of phosgene gas shells, incapacitating 9,000 Germans, and killing fifty. In the air, the largest ever number of aircraft were in combat, with 1,483 American, French, Italian, Belgian, Portuguese and Brazilian planes, all under American command, in action above the battlefield.
The Germans had no way of matching these numbers, or the freshness and zeal of the Americans, many of whom were in action for the first time. ‘Get forward there,’ Colonel William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan of the Rainbow Division exhorted his men, ‘what the hell do you think this is, a wake?’ Within forty-eight hours the Americans had captured 13,000 prisoners and two hundred guns. Prisoners could be captured in unusual ways. At Bouillonville, an American soldier, Sergeant Harry J. Adams, saw a German run into a deep dugout. He had only two bullets left in his pistol. Firing both of them into the dugout entrance, he called on the man to surrender. Out the German came, followed by another and, to the amazement of Adams, who now had no more bullets, by more and more men, until all three hundred occupants of the dugout had surrendered to him. Armed only with his empty pistol, he marched them back to the American lines. When the column was first seen approaching, it was thought to be a German counter-attack.
The German High Command was astounded by the swift initial American success. An officer who visited Ludendorff on September 12 found him ‘so overcome by the events of the day as to be unable to carry on a clear and comprehensive discussion’. The Americans had not won their victory without considerable loss. In the American military cemetery at Thiaucourt, in which the dead of the St Mihiel battle were gathered after the war, are 4,153 graves, with a further 284 names on the wall of the missing.
At midday on September 13, French troops entered St Mihiel. When Pétain went to Pershing’s headquarters a few hours later, the two men went into the town together. Pétain explained to the inhabitants that, although it was French troops who had liberated the town, they had done so as part of the American First Army, whose soldiers had made liberation possible by their victories on the flanks. Among those liberated was an Irish girl, Aline Henry, who had been trapped there for four years, having gone to learn French in the town in June 1914. To the shock of the inhabitants, the Germans had taken away with them all the local males between the ages of sixteen and forty-five, causing consternation. But after marching them ten miles to the east, they had let them return. On entering Thiaucourt that evening the Americans captured Professor Otto Schmeernkase, described in a French communiqué as ‘the German gas specialist and the exploiter of chlorine gas as a form of civilised torture’.
Entering the town of Essey that same day, the Americans were surprised to find, as MacArthur, then a brigade commander, recalled, ‘a German officer’s horse saddled and equipped standing in a barn, a battery of guns complete in every detail, and the entire instrumentation and music of a regimental band’. The Americans found it difficult to persuade the inhabitants of the town to come out of their hiding places: they did not know that United States soldiers were in the war.
Going forward that night through the German lines, accompanied by his adjutant, MacArthur was able to see, through binoculars, the city of Metz. It did not seem well defended. He at once proposed to his superiors a surprise attack, the continuation of the St Mihiel offensive to this further objective, and prize. ‘Here was an unparalleled opportunity to break the Hindenburg Line at its pivotal point’, he later wrote. MacArthur was supported in this view, and in the desire to continue the advance into Metz, by the Operations Officer of the First Army, Colonel George C. Marshall. But Foch, Pétain and Haig were already making their plans for a coordinated Allied offensive elsewhere in two weeks’ time. They did not want a ‘premature’ offensive or distraction from what was to be a major battle.
The straightening of the St Mihiel Salient, and the liberation of St Mihiel itself, were successes enough. The salient had been in German hands for four years. It had earlier resisted two French attacks on it. As a victory, it was seen without blemish. ‘It is as swift and neat an operation as any in the war,’ wrote the Manchester Guardian, ‘and perhaps the most heartening of all its features is the proof it gives that the precision, skill, and imagination of American leadership is not inferior to the spirit of their troops.’ The American soldiers had at last obtained the recognition they deserved. To his last days, however, MacArthur believed that the victory at St Mihiel ought to have been followed up at once, and Metz taken. ‘Had we seized this opportunity,’ he later wrote, ‘we would have saved thousands of American lives lost in the dim recesses of the Argonne Forest.’
MacArthur’s keenness was in contrast to the many problems that even the victory at St Mihiel revealed. On the day that he was advocating a further advance, his divisional Chief of Staff was warning that the men were not being adequately fed or clothed. Logistical problems forced Colonel Patton’s tanks to wait thirty-two hours for petrol supplies to cover the nine miles. On September 15, when Clemenceau travelled to the St Mihiel Salient, he was angered by the chaos and traffic jams on the roads. ‘They wanted an American army,’ he later wrote, with scorn. ‘They had it. Anyone who saw, as I saw, the hopeless congestion at Thiaucourt will bear witness that they may congratulate themselves on not having had it sooner.’ Most ominous of all for the next offensive, a mere two weeks away, a German intelligence report concluded: ‘The Americans have not yet had sufficient experience, and are accordingly not to be feared in a great offensive. Up to this time our men had too high an opinion of the Americans.’ St Mihiel had been a victory, but the ‘great offensive’ was yet to come.
On the French and British sectors, and against the Hindenburg Line, small attacks were launched during the St Mihiel offensive, and a series of German counter-attacks were repulsed. But the German forces were not pulling back. Rumours of Allied successes could also prove to be false: the village of Pagny-sur-Moselle, the southernmost point of the fortified German defences, which was reported to have been overrun by the Americans during the St Mihiel offensive, remained under German control until the end of the war. Near the village war memorial is a plaque to a fifteen-year-old boy executed by the Germans ‘without reason’ two months after the outbreak of war. The memorial itself depicts a soldier and his dog.
***
That August and September, Russia had become a focus of concern once more for the Allies. On August 31 the British Naval Attaché in Petrograd, Captain Cromie, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks inside the Embassy building. On September 2 the Bolsheviks announced the institution of Red Terror. In Petrograd alone, 512 opponents of the regime were executed. On September 11, 4,500 American troops landed at Archangel. That day, near Murmansk, British troops, after a successful action against the Red Army, advanced twenty-five miles along the river Dvina.
***
On September 14 the Allies launched their offensive on the Salonica Front, signalled by a six-hour artillery bombardment of the Bulgarian positions. At German headquarters in Skopje, sixty miles to the north, the sound of the guns could just be heard, a distant murmur above the quiet of the morning. As had so often happened on the Western Front, however, the artillery fire, while destroying the enemy wire, left his machine-gun nests and artillery points relatively unharmed. A Serbian assault up the steep Vetrenik mountain was successful, the final assault, by bayonet, being carried out alongside French and Senegalese troops.
That day the Austrians asked the Allied powers, the United States and the neutrals to agree to ‘a confidential and non-committal exchange of views’ on neutral soil, with a view to seeing if peace might be possible. The United States rejected this invitation at once, Britain and France soon after. Even the German Government was annoyed by it. The war would go on, wearing down the life-energies of millions. As an example of this war weariness, the pacifist Clifford Allen, who saw the Assistant Secretary to the British Labour Party, Jim Middleton, on September 14, wrote in his diary: ‘Jim is clearly broken by the sorrow of the war. He is almost haunted by the sight of train-loads of soldiers with their kit and helmets leaving Victoria and Waterloo and thundering past his home at Wimbledon. He has lost all his mirth and humour.’
As the fighting continued in Macedonia throughout September 15, a new feature in battle was a Yugoslav Division, an earnest of the determination of the South Slavs—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians—to unite territorially when the Austrians had been driven out of Laibach, Agram, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cetinje and Skopje. On crossing the former Graeco-Serbian frontier on September 15, the soldiers of this division momentarily broke off the assault to embrace one another, and also to embrace the French troops fighting with them. They were ordered back into action: the battle was far from over.
That day 36,000 Serbs, French and Italians were in action against 12,000 Bulgars and Germans. So tenacious were the Bulgarian machine gunners, however, that the French used flamethrowers, for the first time on the Salonica Front, to dislodge them, driving the defenders from three mountain peaks. On the following day, September 16, the commander of the Bulgarian Second Army, General Lukov, expressed positive interest in the Austrian peace feelers. Tsar Ferdinand, his King and Commander-in-Chief, replied: ‘Go out and get killed in your present lines.’
Two Bulgarian regiments mutinied on September 16. They had no intention of fighting any longer. The German commander, General von Scholtz, one of the heroes of Tannenberg, ordered his fellow-German, General von Reuter, who was in command of the reserves, to go with his staff officers to the battlefield and, pistol in hand, to stop the Bulgarian rout. When it was clear that most of the Bulgarians would fight no longer, von Scholtz ordered a limited retreat. An appeal to Hindenburg for reinforcements was passed on to the Austrian Chief of Staff, General Arz von Straussenburg, but he had no men to spare for that distant, almost forgotten theatre of war. The only force available, which would take at least two weeks to arrive, was a German brigade then in the Crimea, which was ordered to go by sea to the Bulgarian port of Varna, then overland through Bulgaria and on into Macedonia.
On September 18, British and Greek troops attacked at Lake Doiran. There were set-backs, however: the men of one British battalion, the South Wales Borderers, having reached the summit of the Grand Couronné, were forced to retreat as a result of intense Bulgarian machine-gun fire, and ran into a British gas cloud. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Burges, who had been wounded three times and taken prisoner, was awarded the Victoria Cross. In an attack on Pip Ridge by three British battalions, the Bulgarian machine-gun fire was again so intense that only one in three of the attackers returned to the ravine from which they had started. At one point, Bulgarian artillery shells started a large grass fire which, fanned by the wind, forced the Greek Crete Division down from the mountainside.
After two days’ fighting the town of Doiran was in Allied hands, as was the Petit Couronné, but the Grand Couronné was still held by the Bulgarians. Then, on September 20, the Bulgarian army was ordered to retreat. The British, French and Greeks, advancing to the positions they had attacked in vain four days earlier, found them deserted. Pip Ridge, the Grand Couronné and Devil’s Eye, which for two years had glowered over the Allied lines, mocking all attempts to take them, were harmless and worthless. The dead of the previous days’ unsuccessful battle lay, unburied, where they had fallen.
Two days later Serbian troops were fourteen miles north of the starting line. French Moroccan troops, the Spahis, rode forward on their stallions. The town of Prilep was entered on September 21, having been evacuated by the Germans and Bulgarians. The Serb inhabitants carried their first liberators on their shoulders to what had, a few hours earlier, and for the past three years, been German headquarters.
The Bulgarian defeats in Macedonia led to unrest in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, and a mutiny among the garrison there. On September 23 there was unrest in three more Bulgarian towns, where Soviets were established by revolutionary students. Loyal Bulgarian officer cadets were sent to disperse the mutineers in Sofia (just as officer cadets had been called upon to sustain the old regime in Petrograd), assisted in their task by the German division that had just reached Bulgaria from the Crimea, too late to affect the course of the battle in Macedonia.
On September 25 British forces entered Bulgaria. Two days later a Bulgarian republic was declared in the small manufacturing town of Radomir, with the peasant leader, Alexander Stamboliisky, being declared President. Despite the support of 15,000 soldiers, however, he was unable to seize power in the capital: after three days of fighting at Vladaya, ten miles south of Sofia, the Republican forces were defeated and Stamboliisky (who in 1919 became Prime Minister under King Boris) fled into hiding.
While this abortive revolution was in progress, the Macedonian capital, Skopje, which Bulgaria had so coveted for itself, fell to the French. The Spahis, commanded by General Jouinot-Gambetta, had covered the last fifty-seven miles to it in six days. Jouinot-Gambetta was the nephew of Léon Gambetta, who in 1870 had left the besieged Paris in a balloon, to organise the resistance of provincial France against the German invaders. Now it was the Germans who were in retreat, all hope of holding the Balkans shattered, the southern approaches of the heartland of the Central Powers virtually open to an Allied advance. Chance seemed to favour the victors: a newly despatched Austrian division, the 9th, was only fifty miles from Skopje by rail when Jouinot-Gambetta and his Spahis entered the city unopposed.
***
On September 16, President Wilson rejected the Austrian request for peace talks. Clemenceau rejected it on the following day. A separate German peace offer to Belgium, on the basis of no claims to be made by Belgium for restitution or indemnity, was rejected by the Belgians on September 19. On the Western Front, the Allies had continued to advance. In the seven days up to September 24, the British Expeditionary Force took 30,000 prisoners, more than in any previous week of the war. Speaking to four hundred submarine officers on September 25, the Kaiser railed against treason. It was only two weeks since one of his submarines had, in pursuance of his policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, torpedoed the Union Castle liner Galway Castle without warning in the English Channel: 154 lives were lost.
***
In Palestine, on September 17, an Indian sergeant deserted from Allenby’s army and crossed into the Turkish lines north of Jerusalem. There would, he said, be a major offensive in two days’ time. The Turkish commanders, among them Mustafa Kemal, believed him, but Liman von Sanders did not, and no special preparations were made. At midnight on September 19 the British artillery bombardment began. Then, at dawn on the 20th, Allenby resumed the northward offensive that had ended a year earlier with the capture of Jerusalem. Within a few hours his infantrymen had broken the Turkish defence lines and his cavalrymen were advancing rapidly northward through the coastal plain.
Air power proved an important part of Allenby’s new advance. For two hours that morning the Royal Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force bombed the German and Turkish telephone exchanges and telegraph offices at Afula, Nablus and Tulkarm, breaking all contact between General Liman von Sanders and his commanders. The main German airfield, at Jenin, was also put out of action. For seven days, as Allenby’s cavalry advanced, the bombing of roads, railways and troop concentrations disrupted all the Turkish and German defensive plans.
On September 20 Allenby’s troops entered the Jezreel Valley, and in two days’ fighting took 7,000 prisoners. The Turks were demoralised and eager to give up the fight. At Afula, on the Haifa-Damascus railway, an Indian cavalry regiment charged the Turkish position, killing fifty and taking 500 prisoners for the loss of one man wounded and twelve horses killed. Near Megiddo, the biblical Armageddon, where the Turks were ordered to make a stand, the only shots fired were from nine German riflemen. Far from home, these soldiers were silenced by two machine guns. The British cavalrymen then rode on to Nazareth, where, in the early hours of September 21, the garrison of 3,000 was taken captive. The advancing army had covered forty miles in a single day.
Von Sanders fled Nazareth in his pyjamas. The Turks, lacking the will or means to resist, fled northward and eastward. That day two columns of Turkish troops were retreating, one from Tulkarm and the other from Nablus, through the hills and defiles of Samaria. Both columns were attacked by British and Australian aircraft. One Australian history records, of the Turks who were trying to reach Nablus from Tulkarm, in a column some two miles long: ‘Pilot after pilot, flying in perfect order, dropped his bombs, and then, assisted by the observers, raked the unfortunate Turks with machine guns. Their ammunition exhausted, the airmen sped back to their aerodrome for more, and returned again to the slaughter. Some pilots made four trips on that day.’225
Further east, an even more intense air raid was mounted that day on the Turks trying to reach the river Jordan from Nablus. It was the most devastating aerial attack of the war. More than fifty aircraft bombed and machine-gunned the Turks and their supply column as they fled down the narrow defile of the Wadi Fara. More than nine tons of bombs were dropped, and 56,000 machine-gun rounds fired, as the Turks struggled to reach the river. The bombers first struck at the vehicles at the head of the column, so that the rest had to come to a halt. Then they methodically destroyed the long line of stationary vehicles and the panic-stricken men who were machine-gunned from the air as they tried to escape down the steep wall of the wadi, or to climb to its top.226
On the following day, September 22, a second aerial attack was made on the Turks descending to the Jordan down the Wadi Fara, when a further four tons of bombs were dropped and 30,000 machine-gun rounds fired from the air. ‘At one part of the road,’ the Royal Air Force historian, H.A. Jones, has written, ‘lorries, abandoned in motion, had crashed forward into guns which had been carried with their teams into other transport wagons, and the accumulation had gone tearing on, shedding lorries and guns over the precipice on its way, until at last it had been brought to a standstill by its own weight. Along the length of the defile lay the torn bodies of men and animals.’ Some of the pilots who bombed the retreating Turks became so nauseated by what they saw from the air that they asked to be spared any further sorties.
The Turks had been overwhelmed by British air power and by the speed of the Allied cavalry. How many prisoners had been taken, Allenby asked the commander of the Desert Mounted Corps on September 22. On being told that 15,000 had been captured, he laughed and told the commander: ‘No bloody good to me! I want 30,000 from you before you’ve done’. His wish was granted. On September 23, five hundred of his horsemen captured the port of Haifa and, galloping northward, entered the crusader city of Acre. That day, in the Wadi Fara, a third bombing attack was made on the Turkish troops trying to reach the river Jordan. More than six tons of bombs were dropped and 33,000 machine-gun rounds fired. Among the vehicles smashed up in the three-day bombing attack were fifty lorries, ninety guns, and 840 four-wheeled horse-drawn vehicles. Hundreds of Turkish soldiers had been killed. Death from the air had assumed a new dimension.
On September 25, Australian and New Zealand cavalrymen crossed the river Jordan and entered Amman, on the Berlin-Baghdad railway. In all, 2,750 cavalrymen took part in the attack. They captured 2,563 Turkish prisoners, bringing the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s total number of prisoners, in a single week, to 45,000. Angrily, a captured German officer told his interrogators: ‘We tried to cover the Turks’ retreat but we expected them to do something, if only to keep their heads. At last we decided they were not worth fighting for.’
***
Half an hour before midnight on September 25, less than two weeks after the start, and only ten days after the finish of the St Mihiel offensive, thirty-seven French and American divisions launched a new and even more ambitious offensive. It was against the Argonne Forest and along the river Meuse. As part of the preliminary bombardment that night, the American Expeditionary Force fired eight hundred mustard gas and phosgene shells, incapacitating more than 10,000 German troops and killing 278. Almost 4,000 guns were in action, ‘none of them’, one American historian has commented, ‘made in America’.227
Among the American battery commanders was Captain Harry S. Truman. ‘I fired 3,000 rounds of 75 ammunition from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.,’ he later recalled. ‘I slept in the edge of a wood to the right of my battery position on Friday night. If I hadn’t awakened and got up at 4 a.m. I would not be here, because the Germans fired a barrage on my sleeping place!’
The six-hour bombardment continued throughout the night. Then, at 5.30 on the morning of September 26, more than seven hundred tanks advanced, followed closely by the infantry, driving the Germans back three miles. The artillery that had been so effective during the night moved forward behind the advance. ‘As we marched on a road under an embankment’, Truman recalled years later, ‘a French 155-millimetre battery fired over my head and I still have trouble hearing what goes on when there is a noise.’
By the morning of September 27, more than 23,000 German prisoners had been taken. That day, near Cambrai, the British Expeditionary Force attacked the Hindenburg Line. More than a thousand aircraft supported the attack, with seven hundred tons of bombs being dropped, and 26,000 machine-gun rounds fired from the air. By nightfall the attacking forces had taken 10,000 prisoners and two hundred guns. Even by the standards of the Western Front, the scale of the German losses was astounding: 33,000 prisoners in one day. But the fighting in the Argonne Forest showed that the German army would not give up, and the Americans suffered considerably from the tenacious defence that was offered them. As the American soldiers put it, ‘Every goddam German there who didn’t have a machine gun had a cannon.’ One American division, thrown into a panic by a German counter-attack, fell back in disorder.
By former Western Front standards the Americans were successful. Montfaucon, which Pétain had believed could hold out until the winter, was taken on September 27, and advances were made of up to six miles. But the plan had been far more ambitious, making the set-back all the more galling.
***
On September 28 the British launched Haig’s massive offensive against the Germans in the Ypres Salient: the Fourth Battle of Ypres. Five hundred aircraft took part. Among the New Zealand troops in action that day, at Gheluvelt, was the nine-times-wounded General Freyberg, who wrote to a friend: ‘I commanded my Brigade from a horse (an ugly white German one) and advanced under a barrage on it until it was killed.’ The advance on the ground was rapid, with Wytschaete falling during the day, and 4,000 Germans surrendering. Belgian troops were also in action on September 28, recapturing Passchendaele, scene of such terrible slaughter a year earlier, with little loss.
That evening Ludendorff pressed upon Hindenburg that Germany must seek an immediate armistice. What neither of them knew was that Lloyd George and his Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, still not convinced that the speed of the British advance meant that Germany could be beaten, were insisting that Haig reduce British commitments to the offensive in order to preserve his manpower for the battles of 1919. In Britain, the focus on those battles was intensifying. ‘I shall never forget going through a large workshop in the North of England late in September 1918,’ a munitions expert, George Dewar, later wrote, ‘and witnessing the making and testing by German rifle-fire of the plates of our new type of tank, Mark VIII; thence passing on to another workshop in the same district and witnessing the production and the testing of the engine to drive this super-tank. Mark VIII was destined never to go into action; but had the war continued, Great Britain would have assembled and despatched to the Front large numbers of that great type by the early spring of 1919.’
***
On the Salonica Front, more than 10,000 Bulgarian and German soldiers had been taken prisoner in the third week of September. On September 28 Bulgaria, with British and Greek troops already on her soil, began armistice talks with the French and British in Salonica. She was the first of the Central Powers to succeed in calling off the fight. At Spa, Ludendorff was insistent in his discussions with Hindenburg that Germany too must ask for an armistice with the Allies. On the following morning, September 29, the two German military leaders, the once feared combination that at different times had so nearly defeated all its enemies, went to the Kaiser and told him that the war could not go on.
Ludendorff and Hindenburg explained to the Kaiser that the problem was not only the German soldiers’ will and ability to fight, but also President Wilson’s deep reluctance to negotiate in any way with the Kaiser himself or his military chiefs. Grasping not only the nettle of military defeat, but also that of political democratisation, the Kaiser signed a proclamation establishing a Parliamentary regime. In the space of a single day, Germany’s militarism and autocracy were all but over.
The battles continued, however, nowhere more fiercely than on the Meuse-Argonne Front. On September 29, the fourth day of the battle, the American forces were brought to a halt, partly by the unflagging German defence, partly by the incredible chaos that had developed in their lines of supply and communication. ‘His soldiers were dying bravely,’ a French visitor to Pershing’s headquarters noted, ‘but they were not advancing, or very little, and their losses were heavy. All that great body of men which the American army represented was literally struck with paralysis.’
Paul Maze, while visiting an American battalion headquarters that day on a reconnaissance task, saw a group of American soldiers who appeared to be falling back. He went forward on his motor-bike to investigate. ‘They were indeed retiring,’ he later wrote, ‘but simply because they were not in touch with anybody; they had no news, and most of their officers had been killed in the advance. I made some of them stay where they were and place their machine-guns facing the battle, then ordered the rest to go forward and rejoin their comrades, which they immediately did. They were not in any sort of panic, but had merely sauntered back for want of instructions.’
Paul Maze returned to the battalion headquarters to tell them there about these men. ‘To my amazement I found the place shattered as if by an earthquake. Three corpses lay there partly covered by a sack. They were the sentry, who had been standing at the door of the dug-out, and two of the officers with whom I had spoken before I left. Down below the Colonel sat alone, mopping his brow. “Say, Captain, this certainly is war,” he commented as I entered.’
Among the artillery batteries in action on September 29 was Harry Truman’s. ‘Fired on three batteries’, he later recalled, ‘destroyed one and put the other two out of business. The regimental colonel threatened me with a court martial for firing out of the Thirty-fifth Division sector! But I saved some men in the Twenty-eighth Division on our left and they were grateful in 1948!’228
The congestion of essential supply vehicles behind the American lines that day was such that when Clemenceau drove towards Montfaucon, on his way to the French Fourth Army, his path was completely blocked by American trucks, some of whose drivers told him they had been held up by the traffic jam for two nights. Whatever inconvenience American transport confusion might have on Clemenceau, however, America’s contribution had made its mark on the German High Command. On September 30, Ludendorff told General Hermann von Kuhl: ‘We cannot fight against the whole world.’
***
Hostilities on the Bulgarian Front ended at noon on September 30. With Bulgaria in turmoil, Macedonia liberated, and any chance of German reinforcements ended, the Bulgarian delegates then at Salonica, including General Lukov who had wanted to seek an armistice two weeks earlier, had no other course but to accept the terms they were offered: the evacuation of all Greek and Serbian territory, the surrender of all arms and weapons of war, the evacuation of all German and Austrian troops, Allied occupation of strategic points inside Bulgaria and use of the Bulgarian railroads to advance northward, and the almost total demobilisation of the Bulgarian army.
The Bulgarian collapse was a blow to Germany and Austria, both of which were suddenly cut off from all land links with their ally Turkey. The way was also opened for an Allied advance up the Danube. In London and Paris there was great excitement at the thought of Germany becoming vulnerable through the defeat of her allies. ‘The first of the props had fallen,’ commented the British Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey.
***
On the Western Front the battle had continued with ever-increasing ferocity. On September 29, British troops successfully crossed the St Quentin Canal, using boats, ladders, and 3,000 lifebelts taken from the cross-Channel ferries. More than 5,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner, and a hundred guns captured. On the following day, on the Ypres Front, the British were within two miles of Menin, the town whose capture had eluded them for four years. In the British and French sectors, a further 18,000 German prisoners-of-war and two hundred guns were captured. Only the Americans had been forced to a halt, in the Argonne, but they too were planning to renew the assault within a week.
Among those wounded on September 30 was Paul Maze. He had gone forward on foot to report on the whereabouts of the front line, at a point where it was being fought for by the Australians. From a shell-hole, he saw, two hundred yards away, the tops of German steel helmets: it was a front-line German trench. Raising his field glasses to have a closer look, he was shot in the wrist. As he made his way back to safety and to hospital, travelling slowly that evening to the coast in a hospital train, he could hear in the distance ‘the guns making a thundering row’. It reminded him of the comment of the mother of a French friend of his, who had succeeded in reaching her son in a village immediately behind the line, during a battle. ‘She had sent word and was waiting for him, a tall black figure in the middle of the road; as she spied him coming towards her down the shattered street she called out: “My dear child, why all this noise? What is it all about?”’
***
From Palestine, on September 27, Allenby’s cavalrymen had ridden across the Golan Heights into Syria. Damascus lay only sixty miles away. That day, further east, at the village of Tafas, Turkish and German forces murdered several hundred Arab women and children in an act of cruel defiance for the successful harassment by the forces of the Arab revolt. On the following day, September 28, at Dera’a, where thousands of Bedouin had joined the Arab forces, wounded Turkish soldiers and prisoners were murdered as a reprisal, arousing violent anti-Arab feeling among the Indian cavalrymen who entered the town while the massacre was taking place. ‘Arabs murdered in cold blood every Turk they came across’ was the brief note in the 4th Cavalry Division’s summary of events.
On the following day 1,500 Turks blocked Allenby’s path at Sasa, holding up his advance for two days. But by late afternoon on September 30, Allenby was on his way to Damascus. That night, the Turkish authorities abandoned the city which the Ottomans had ruled for so many centuries. On October 1, Allenby’s cavalrymen, having ridden more than four hundred miles in twelve days, were approaching their prize. As troops of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, from Western Australia, reached the outskirts of the city, there was a burst of Turkish rifle-fire. No one was hit, and the officer in command, Major Olden, decided to continue. Ordering his men to draw their swords, Olden galloped forward with them towards the main Turkish barracks, where several thousand Turks were quartered. ‘For the moment the enemy decision was in the balance,’ one Australian history recorded. ‘But the sight of the great Australian horses coming at a gallop (the Turks and natives never ceased to marvel at the size of our horses), the flashing swords, and the ring of shoes upon the metal, turned the scale.’229 An Australian officer later recalled, ‘The shooting by the Turks gave way, in a second, to the clapping of hands by the citizens.’ Suddenly more shots rang out, but these were Arab riflemen, expressing their joy that so many centuries of Turkish rule were at an end. A few hours later ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ arrived, his Rolls-Royce escorted by Indian cavalrymen.
For twenty-four hours there was much looting by Arab and Druze. Then Allenby, leaving his headquarters at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, drove along 120 miles of poor roads across the river Jordan and up the Golan Heights to Damascus, installed the Emir Feisal as head of the local administration, and returned that same evening to Tiberias. It was left to the politicians to inform Feisal that, under the terms of the secret agreement negotiated by Mark Sykes and François Georges Picot in 1916, Syria, as well as the Lebanon and northern Mesopotamia, including oil-rich Mosul, was to be within the French sphere of control.
***
On October 1, as the British Expeditionary Force prepared to break through the final obstacles on the Hindenburg Line, and the Americans got ready to launch a new attack in the Argonne, Ludendorff begged the Kaiser to issue a German peace offer at once. That night German forces evacuated Lens and Armentières. North of Cambrai, Canadian troops had taken more than 7,000 German prisoners and two hundred guns in the previous five days. The German army, Ludendorff told his Staff, was ‘heavily infected with the poison of Spartacist-Socialist ideas’. Ludendorff was exaggerating, but while the soldiers at the front were continuing to fight, those who were in Germany on leave, or about to be sent back to the front, were certainly prey to political agitation of the most extreme sort. The leaders of the Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were demanding an immediate peace and the end of the monarchy. Not for them the panacea, if such it was, of a democratic or parliamentary monarchy, British style: their aim was a socialist republic.
So excited was Lenin by what appeared to be the imminent collapse of Germany, through both defeat on the battlefield and insurrection in the cities, that he wrote that week to his fellow-revolutionaries Sverdlov and Trotsky to tell them that international revolution was imminent. To assist the proletariat of all countries to throw off their shackles, he wanted the Bolsheviks to create a three-million-strong army. Near to Petrograd, however, at Pskov, an anti-Bolshevik army was being created by former Tsarist officers and released Russian prisoners-of-war, under German protection. That week, in the Black Sea, some two hundred German sailors took over the Russian battleship Volya, as well as four Russian destroyers and two torpedo boats. Germany’s machinations in the east had outlived her triumphs in the west.
***
The first four days of October saw the Allied armies advancing on all sectors of the Western Front. A thirty-mile sector of the Hindenburg Line was completely overrun. But with this Allied success came news of grave difficulties on the American sector of the front, where on October 4 the renewed offensive was met by devastating German machine-gun defences, ‘one damn machine gun after another’ in the American soldier’s parlance. That day an American force of just over five hundred men, holding a precarious position in a ravine about half a mile ahead of the front line, was surrounded by a much larger force of Germans. For two days the Americans were continually attacked and shelled. On the second day, after their food ran out, they were accidentally hit by an American artillery barrage. They released their last carrier pigeon with an appeal for Americans to stop shelling Americans. The Germans then used flamethrowers against the men in the ravine, but some of the Americans clambered out and killed them. The American High Command assumed that all was over and posted the men as ‘lost’. That night the Germans withdrew. The ‘lost battalion’, as it became known, had not been defeated. Of the 554 defenders, 360 had been killed. On the following afternoon the survivors came down from their hillside into the American lines.
***
At sea, the submarine war, on which so many German hopes had rested, continued without pause, and with more tragedies. A Spanish steamship, the Francoli, had been sunk off Cartagena on October 2, and 292 passengers drowned. Two days later a further 292 passengers had been drowned when the Japanese liner Hiramo Maru was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. An accidental collision in the English Channel that same week led to the sinking of an armed merchant cruiser, the Otranto: of the thousand American troops on board, 431 were drowned.
***
The first German revolution took place on October 2. It was not in the streets, as Ludendorff had feared, but in the council chamber, where Prince Max of Baden, the Kaiser’s second cousin, became Chancellor. Prince Max agreed to take office only after the Kaiser accepted two conditions: that henceforth Parliament alone would have the right to declare war and make peace, and that any remaining control that the Kaiser might have over the army and navy cease at once. That day, at a Crown Council in Berlin, Hindenburg reiterated Ludendorff’s advice of the previous day (Ludendorff having stayed at Spa) for an immediate truce. ‘The army cannot wait forty-eight hours,’ Hindenburg told the Kaiser. Prince Max disagreed. He did not want to enter into negotiations with the Allies with the position already surrendered. ‘I hoped I could fight down pessimism and revive confidence,’ he later wrote, ‘for I myself was still firmly convinced that in spite of the diminution of our forces we could prevent our enemy from treading the soil of the Fatherland for many months.’
Hindenburg replied that the situation demanded an immediate armistice. If the situation was so desperate, Prince Max replied acerbically, it was for the army to raise the white flag in the field. No decision was made, for Hindenburg, like Kitchener before him on the British side, lacked the ability to argue his case, and could merely reiterate it. A message from Ludendorff was needed to articulate what had to be done, and why. This message was sent to Berlin later that day, as the result of a telephone call from Hindenburg. It stated that the collapse of the Salonica Front, ‘whereby a weakening of our reserves in the west is necessitated’, and the impossibility of making good the ‘very heavy losses’ in the battles of the previous few days, made an immediate armistice imperative ‘to spare the German people and its allies further useless sacrifices’. Ludendorff’s letter, to which Hindenburg appended his signature, ended with the reality of the battlefield spelt out clearly: ‘Every day lost costs thousands of brave soldiers’ lives.’ It was a sentence that could have been written on almost any of the past 1,500 days.
***
Prince Max had not given up hope of delaying the appeal to the Allies. On October 3 he warned Hindenburg that too swift an armistice could mean the immediate loss both of Alsace-Lorraine and of the predominantly Polish districts of East Prussia. Such German territorial losses were implicit in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Hindenburg again telephoned Ludendorff, only to report back to the Chancellor that, whereas the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was acceptable to the High Command, the loss of any territory in the east was unacceptable. One historian has commented: ‘It became more and more evident that the Chancellor had read the Fourteen Points while the Supreme Command had not.’230
Prince Max now chose his own way forward. During October 3 he brought two Socialist deputies into his government, one of whom, Philip Scheidemann, told him, with much wisdom, ‘Better an end to terror than terror without end.’ To avert terror, an armistice was essential. On October 4, having informed the Reichstag of the need for peace, and having obtained Austrian support for what he now realised could not be delayed, Prince Max telegraphed to Washington requesting an armistice.
That day, at a Franco-American conference in France, held at the small town of Trois Fontaines, plans were being drawn up for shipping American troops and munitions across the Atlantic for the campaign to defeat Germany by the end of 1919, or in early 1920. The two senior participants at the conference were Marshal Foch and the American Secretary of War, Newton Baker. They agreed to an accelerated shipping programme throughout the winter of 1918, so that by the following summer the American Army would have adequate supplies for a major offensive in 1919.
During the month of September, a total of 297 artillery units had been manufactured in the United States. The subsequent targets that were now fixed, and were in due course reached, were just over a thousand between October and December 1918, and a further thousand between January and April 1919. Every other branch of ordnance and supplies was given similar accelerated and increased production targets for the coming six months, and beyond. An expanded network of telephone and telegraph lines was even then being constructed by the American army throughout France, determined to improve and accelerate communication with the front line and, by drawing on the lessons of the Argonne set-backs, to ensure a successful campaign in 1919.
The Franco-American agreement reached at Trois Fontaines on October 4 held out hope of a considerable military advance during the early months of 1919. As Pershing’s troops struggled to regain the initiative on the Meuse, their commander was calculating how many divisions he would need in France by 1 July 1919, for the decisive battle. The number of men involved, most of whom would be transported across the Atlantic in British ships, was 3,360,000: two million more than he had already. They were on their way.