The Tragic Pursuit of Total Victory

liverpool annie · May 15, 2009

Germany’s Unrelenting Offensive That Lost WWI

Ludendorff soon regained a semblance of calm, but it was the calm of the fatalist. On September 29 he told his staff that the army “faced not merely defeat, but imminent annihilation.” Officers were thunderstruck; a few colonels and generals openly sobbed. They accosted Ludendorff after the meeting and implored, “Can it be true?” Ludendorff could only nod his head in reply.

With total victory at all costs now impossible to achieve, making peace at any cost became inevitable. Nevertheless, Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued to vacillate between seeking an armistice and “going French,” the latter a reference to a proposal to issue calls for a revolutionary levée en masse of anyone left standing and able to pull a trigger that would end in a climactic Endkampf. As late as October 18, Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote that Ludendorff still refused to see the seriousness of the German army’s condition.

Saner heads soon recognized that the likely result of an Endkampf would be the invasion, devastation, and dismemberment of Germany. Eight days later, Ludendorff was out. The kaiser willingly accepted his resignation. Hindenburg stayed on to oversee a beaten army’s return to a defeated Reich.

That the German army had become too worn down, physically and spiritually, to continue as an effective fighting force was a fact that shook Ludendorff and Hindenburg to their cores. Instead of preserving victories achieved on the Eastern Front in 1917, the Ludendorff offensives of 1918 squandered them
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