1896-1898
The End of the Beginning, Part One
From the outset of the Great War in February 1896 Germany appeared to be faced with an unwinnable conflict. Surrounded, horrendously outnumbered and facing the reality of a Royal Navy imposed blockade the Empire was faced with a threat on an incredible scale. Yet, in the first dizzying months of the War, Germany appeared to strike out and make victory appear a genuine possibility. Firstly the so called ‘Burgfrieden’ was established in which all political parties and trade unions agreed to support the government unconditionally and allow the Kaiser to temporarily take power from the civilian government of Chancellor Hertling and grant it to an extraordinary military government. Diplomatically the Germans pulled off an astonishing coup within the first weeks of war as the United States of America, one of the world’s greatest economic powers and the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, signed a military alliance and entered the war on Germany’s side. With America troops pouring into Canada and assaulting Spanish, French and British colonies in the Caribbean the hopes of the German Empire grew considerably.
On the field of battle too there were reasons for optimism. In the opening moves of the war the Germans, supported by substantial Dutch, Belgian and Danish forces launched an invasion of Northern France through Belgium with the aim of striking towards Paris and closing the Western Front early in the war. Although the French army was impressively broken within weeks the arrival of around 150,000 British soldiers checked the German led advance around the Channel Ports – holding it up just long enough to allow for a mixture of conscripted troops and soldiers brought over from Algeria to begin a counteroffensive. For the rest of the year Anglo-French troops would be engaged in a bloody struggle of trench warfare across Northern France, Belgium and Alsace. To the South the Italians made quick progress in the Tyrol and Istria before a mixture of German and Hungarian troops began to reverse their advance with the Italians reaching as far as Zagreb and Salzburg at the height of their penetration. In the East two Russian armies were utterly destroyed in Poland and East Prussia as Warsaw fell under German occupation by the end of March. Meanwhile in Transylvania badly outnumbered Serbian and Hungarian forces prepared for a defensive battle against Romanian, Ruthenian and Russian troops. Finally, British troops were deployed to Norway in an attempt to foster a rebellion in the Swedish ruled country and prevent Sweden from committing its not insignificant army to the continental fronts.
It was at this early stage of the war that Germany managed to make victory appear to be a tangible possibility. The Italians had been checked and were in retreat, the Anglo-French were barely holding the line, the Russians had been routed and in North America the British had been utterly defeated in Canada. Although overseas German troops in West, Equatorial and East Africa all faced overwhelming odds even there Allied advances were hardly significant. It would be in the next phase of the conflict that the hubris of German high command led to a series of fatal errors. Simply put a, in light of the overwhelming numerical superiority of their enemies in terms of manpower, a single major strategic error would likely mean defeat – through the summer of 1896 the Germans were to make several.
In the South the Germans and their allies were in high spirits as the Italians were pushed across the Alps and into the Veneto – indeed Udine, Treviso and Verona were all captured during April and May. But these victories were not to last. They had cost significant energy and manpower to achieve and were largely indefensible. As early as April the first Hungarian troops on the Southern Front were being withdrawn to protect the Hungarian homeland on the Carpathian Front, at the same time the successes on this front led to German high command directed reinforcements elsewhere rather than plug the gaps left by the Hungarians. These laxities were to allow for a total reversal of the situation in the South over the summer as Spanish, French and most importantly large number of Italian conscript troops routed the Germans and forced them into headlong retreat over the Alps – inflicted massive and irreplaceable casualties.
In the East the successive failures of Russian armies to offer any meaningful resistance to German advance led German generals into an assumption that a quick victory might be won in the most unlikely of locations – the Russian Empire. Through the summer of 1896 German troops advanced as far East as Kiev and Minsk, only in September were their advances finally halted as tirades of Russian troops – losing 3 sometimes 4 or even more men for every German killed – did not only send the Germans into retreat but destroyed large sections of the Eastern Army.
Although the other fronts saw horrendous casualties the Western Front was to be the most brutal, most modern and most mechanical of all the theatres of the Great War. Here Germany became embroiled in a battle she could never win faced with her commitments to other theatres – a war of attrition. From March through to October the Battle of Tournai (in reality a series of long Anglo-French offensives for control of the city) alone cost the lives of 700,000 men on both sides, the slight majority being Anglo-French. Likewise at Metz to the South 300,000 were killed on both sides. Although the Germans might have been able to sustain these losses provided a regular supply of reinforcements the defeats in the South and East meant that any new troops were directed to those theatres in order to plug the gaps, allowing the Anglo-French to slowly build up an overwhelming numerical superiority even as their losses were consistently higher than those of Germany and her allies.
Germany’s military situation grew critical over the autumn, by mid-November significant German lands were under occupation in the West, East and South and everywhere the army was being stretched to breaking point. Despite the fine performance of the Americans on their own continent the strength of the British, French, Spanish and Italian fleets meant any hopes of American assistance in Europe were simply not within the realms of possibility. Within Germany itself the frank absurdity of German losses (well over a million in less than a year!) had seen bubblings of discontent begin to emerge. In January 1897, with enemy armies bearing down on Munich, Vienna, Cologne, Breslau and Danzig, the SPD and FVP (Free People’s Party) expelled members who were calling for an immediate peace treaty – in the ensuing months most of these expelled members would coalesce in the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), a party declared illegal as it openly demanded peace, bread, democracy and working class power.
As February saw the French pour into Southern Germany and cross the Rhine into both Westphalia and Holland, as the Italians captured Munich, and two weeks later Vienna, in March and the Russians advanced towards Stettin the war was essentially over by the dawn of April 1897. Germany had been beaten. The Chief of the General Staff, and effective leader of German government, Alfred von Schlieffen petitioned the Kaiser to accept the inevitable and capitulate to Allied demands of unconditional surrender. Wilhelm II refused and instead called for the regrouping of the German army (still around 400,000 battle ready men) to the Brandenburg region in preparation for a defence of Berlin from Russia attack that might convince the Allies to accept a negotiated truce rather than outright surrender.
The madness of the last weeks and months of the Kaiser’s rule had begun. In these final months the German army actually performed relatively well – the Russians were definitively beaten back through April and May whilst a British attempt to attack the capital via a landing in Mecklenburg and Pomerania was also repulsed. However, as famine began to become a genuine issue and the destructive rampaging advances of the Allies armies proceeded across the German Empire demands for an end to the war became deafening.
The events that were to become the German Revolution began on June 28th 1897 in Dresden. As Russian troops advanced into Bohemia Czech nationalists had risen up and overthrown the German government in Prague and welcomed the entrance of Russian troops into the city – their actions were aped by nationalist groups throughout the area still under German control. When command order troops based in Dresden to march South against these nationalist groups the troops refused their orders and instead began to march Northward to Berlin with two simple demands – immediate peace and the abdication of the Kaiser. On June 29th, under extreme pressure from his government Wilhelm II abdicated the throne becoming the third and last German Emperor. The military government – which now pursued the legitimacy of being nominally civilian by reappointed pre-war Chancellor Hertling – offered unconditional surrender. This was in turn accepted and on July 4th 1897 the Great War came to an end.
In not much more than a year an incredible 5.5 million people had lost their lives – perhaps as many as 2,000,000 of them German (although many claimed the figure was far higher). German civilisation had collapsed – her economy was in ruins (by the end of the year industrial production stood at barely 1/3 of its pre-war high), between 3 and 4 million were left unemployed whilst food shortages gripped the entire country. The political establishment had been totally discredited with the old elite now an object of hatred for the general population, the Kaiser having to use disguises in his flight to the safety of the Swiss border. The German Empire was no more, what would replace it was still a very open question. Within a week of the surrender two Republic had been proclaimed in Berlin – one by a united front of the SPD and FVP with the tacit support of Liberal elements and the other by ultra-leftist revolutionaries even more radical than the USPD, at the same time the Prussia military – attempting to align itself to Southern conservatives in the Centre Party – presented itself as a third alternative with the promise of order and a strong hand against revolution being a tantalising offer to many. Even as the foreign armies withdrew to the fringes of the Empire where they continued to occupy large parts of metropolitan Germany the fighting was far from over.