I've seen some persons on this forum that the Spring Offensive is destined to fail, but with the US joining ww1 as per OTL can the Germans succeed?
And if the US stays neutral?
And if the US stays neutral?
Is a successful 1918 Spring Offensive possible?
- Thread starter EasternRomanEmpire
- Start date
No, WW1 logistics means the idea of splitting the British and French armies and driving to the coast is impossible. Even if it were possible it would not win Germany the war, the home front situation is too bad and US reinforcements coming in through the French Atlantic ports means even if the BEF is pushed back against the Channel Coast Germany won't be able to turn south and knock out France.
If the US stays neutral it goes from totally impossible to a 0.01% chance of success. As if the Germans can split the British and French apart they might if be able to knock out the French and force some sort of negotiated peace. But you are talking very, very long odds with the Entente doing everything wrong and the Germans getting everything right.
If the US stays neutral it goes from totally impossible to a 0.01% chance of success. As if the Germans can split the British and French apart they might if be able to knock out the French and force some sort of negotiated peace. But you are talking very, very long odds with the Entente doing everything wrong and the Germans getting everything right.
Apparently the loss of Amiens would trigger the whole collapse of the Entente war effort and other bullshit.
Even if the Germans maintained their gains on the western front over the last half of 1918, their Ottoman and A-H allies are no more fighting fit than the Russians at this point. 1919 has allied armies in southern and eastern Germany no matter what is going on in France and they don't need any US troops for it.
I think Niall Ferguson and others overemphasise the international and battlefield situation for the collapse of the German Army in the West in comparison to the home front. By autumn 1918 Germany was starving and by October 1918 the German Army knew about it, soldiers will fight on in seemingly hopeless situations if they feel that they are protecting their families, when they penny dropped that by continuing to fight they were prolonging the war and by prolonging the war they were ensure that hunger turn into starvation morale in the field army predictably evaporated.
I voted doomed to fail. At least in France. Vs Italy or Greece, maybe a different story there.
As the situation was in OTL March 1918? No.
If US stays neutral, and you somehow get Lundendorff out of Hindenburg's second in command, and replace him with someone like Rupprecht or Hoffman, a someone less erratic, who will clearly define goals of the operation and direct all available resources in the axis of advance, instead of trying to attack in multiple directions in 4 month consequence of offensives. E.g. forget about Marne and Oisne, focus on Flanders and Amiens, and if that succeeds, then a push towards Compiegne from north. Focus on defeating French over British, because if French leadership blinks, breaks down and quits, it's game over for Entente in Western Europe.
My understanding is that OTL as it was, it was doomed to failure, but if you go back and make up a bunch of minor PoD's from 1916 to 1918 where Entente ends up weakened by these outcomes, then it becomes a coin toss.
EDIT: There is also a question of Austria Hungary and Bulgaria. They both effectively collapsed throughout October 1918, without much US influence at all.
Therefore, even if Germany succeeds in Spring Offensive(as in: driving wedge between French Army and BEF, defeating French) it's still on timer until Autumn comes. Whether they would have found a way out of there remains unknown.
Thus, It's my opinion that Germany has to win (and by win I mean where they get an armistice on Western, Italian and Balkan fronts, shooting stops, and there's peace talks starting from there) before August 1918. This is assuming US hasn't entered the war but is still providing Entente with loans.
If US stays neutral, and you somehow get Lundendorff out of Hindenburg's second in command, and replace him with someone like Rupprecht or Hoffman, a someone less erratic, who will clearly define goals of the operation and direct all available resources in the axis of advance, instead of trying to attack in multiple directions in 4 month consequence of offensives. E.g. forget about Marne and Oisne, focus on Flanders and Amiens, and if that succeeds, then a push towards Compiegne from north. Focus on defeating French over British, because if French leadership blinks, breaks down and quits, it's game over for Entente in Western Europe.
My understanding is that OTL as it was, it was doomed to failure, but if you go back and make up a bunch of minor PoD's from 1916 to 1918 where Entente ends up weakened by these outcomes, then it becomes a coin toss.
EDIT: There is also a question of Austria Hungary and Bulgaria. They both effectively collapsed throughout October 1918, without much US influence at all.
Therefore, even if Germany succeeds in Spring Offensive(as in: driving wedge between French Army and BEF, defeating French) it's still on timer until Autumn comes. Whether they would have found a way out of there remains unknown.
Thus, It's my opinion that Germany has to win (and by win I mean where they get an armistice on Western, Italian and Balkan fronts, shooting stops, and there's peace talks starting from there) before August 1918. This is assuming US hasn't entered the war but is still providing Entente with loans.
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Unlikely but possible. Depends more on the allies cocking things up than the Germans doing things better. The veteran shocktroop factor was supposed to buckle the allied defensive lines as the Germans moved toward Amiens. It didnt but let's say the French lines collapsed or even worse, muntinied in some fashion, a la the 1917 mutinies or even Paris Commune. Amiens falls and the British and French forces are split. With Paris threatened maybe the Germans can get a White Peace with a fiat accompli understanding with Brest Livtosk. A big ask with the Americans arriving but it the French put enough pressure on the British maybe they consider it.
Focus on attacking the French, attack at the Chemin Des Damme's first (instead of in May, rollup the French line east, encircling Verdun)
At the same time offer reasonable terms from a position of strength, i.e. signal a willingness to give up colonies, evacuate Belgium, accept naval limitations, for Britain, and better arrangement for the French in Alsace-Lorraine (in return for gains already in hand in the East).
Germany has to play the political along with the military.
At the same time offer reasonable terms from a position of strength, i.e. signal a willingness to give up colonies, evacuate Belgium, accept naval limitations, for Britain, and better arrangement for the French in Alsace-Lorraine (in return for gains already in hand in the East).
Germany has to play the political along with the military.
August 1918 is a good deadline. People are far too prone to looking at this as a military problem for Germany that can be solved by military means, which on one level is fair enough, that's how Hindenburg and the Kaiser thought but then again they lost. Somewhere between August and November 1918 is the absolute deadline for the German economy, after that point its collapse is beyond the point of any plausible recovery. In order to avoid that you need to achieve one of the following; absolutely massive amounts of loot (primarily food but all the Industrial inputs which Germany was short on, which was basically everything apart from coal) coming in from summer 1918, and to be clear we're talking orders of magnitude more than OTL, Germany had been running down stocks since August 1914 and autumn of 1918 saw a whole bunch run totally dry. Capturing Amiens or even Calais or Paris isn't going to magic food into shops in Hamburg.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
What was weakening them so badly, especially the Austro-Hungarians, in the second half of 1918, when they both - Ottos and Habsburgs, had been relieved of Russian pressure since March 1918, and effectively, Nov 1917, with any Russian "pressure" from Aug-Nov 1917 being only of the most pathetic, feeble kind?
Indeed, what was weakening the Bulgarians by the second half of 1918 and September of that year, when they had not had to fight anyone seriously since giving a beatdown to the Romanians in autumn 1916, nearly two full years prior? Tanned, rested, and completely unready and outclassed - what?
Seems like the three minor CPs should have been having the "time of their lives" with multiple local enemies defeated and fronts closed down.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
Isn't this:
The first seems focused more on defeating the British then the French.
@Catspoke's operational concept seems more consistently aimed against the French. And it might take ground that's less picked over already, and overtake defensive positions and entrenchments, and gather PoWs, from relatively inexperienced, but well-provisioned, American troops in addition to the French B team in these sectors.
Sort of at odds with this:
The first seems focused more on defeating the British then the French.
@Catspoke's operational concept seems more consistently aimed against the French. And it might take ground that's less picked over already, and overtake defensive positions and entrenchments, and gather PoWs, from relatively inexperienced, but well-provisioned, American troops in addition to the French B team in these sectors.
Only if the Entente does much much worse.
The problem is that by Spring 1918 the British and French are too savvy.
And their industry’s and Empires were fully geared up for continental war in a way that they hadn’t been in 1914.
No it would take too great a level of incompetence for the Entente to fail hard enough for Germany to win large enough to achieve a victory good enough to achieve the conditions for an advantageous (for the Central Powers) peace talks.
Not impossible, but very very improbable.
The Allied blockade, the Central Power bloc has a whole had a calorie deficit of over 30% against peacetime demand and probably 10-15% against starvation* and shortages of pretty much every industrial input apart from coal. Winning battles doesn't matter if your family at home is starving to death. They were able to keep going until 1918 on the back of pre war stockpiles, loot** and literally eating their seed corn.
*in other words if you want everyone to get by on the bare minimum without any imports or depletion of stockpiles you need to kill 10-15% of the population. The small size of the gap between peacetime and starvation speaks to how poor much of the CP was pre war.
**Romania was a massive boon in terms of food and looting it probably extended the war by 6 months, it was actually far more useful than Ukraine to the CP as the transport network was sufficiently intact that the food could be exported to where it was needed most, the industrial cities of Germany.
raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
So, Romania just *waits* [maybe its skeptical of Allied victory, at least in 1916 or 1917, or some Allied powers- maybe Russia or Serbia, are too slow to agree to Romania’s desired territorial gains of greater Transylvania and Temesvar]. While it’s waiting, Brusilov offensive meets its culminating point and halts after the Lake Naroch failure and devastating German counterattacks in the northern sectors. Romanian entry into the war vs. CP is “on ice” through winter 1916-1917.
Consequently, Romania remains neutral, sovereign, and unoccupied, un-looted over fall and winter, only exporting the food CP can *pay* for. How much more effed are the CPs by Christmas 1916? Spring 1917? Summer 1917? Christmas 1917? Spring 1918?
If so, why didn’t the allies simply take a defensive position to wait for Germany to collapse and not bringing in American boots to get the most out of the war?
And was there really no PoD in 1918 that can make Germany at least sustain to 1919? While military success doesn’t translate to food, I still fail to see how more favorable frontline and no prospect of looming defeat would somehow make them collapse earlier.
Because the costs of keeping the war up were ruinous. No country wants to stretch things out. Plus things didn't look so good for the Entente at the beginning of 1918. Russia had been soundly defeated, Romania knocked out of the war, various failed Anglo-French offensives on the Western Front, and Italy humiliated at Caporetto. They didn't know just how bad things were on the home CP front.
There isn't.
I don't know what Kaiserreich developers were smoking when they had chance to make new lore for WW1 during German rework over two last years, and they decided to have WW1 go until August 1919.
At this point both Germany and France would have collapsed into revolutions. Rant mode off.
I once again repeat. Either Germany wins by end of summer 1918, or it collapses by December or November. End of the story. Lundendorff and Hidenburg basically cannibalized country's economy and fucked over what remained of agricultural sector with their programme. There was no possible salvation from repercussions of blockade and Hindenburg programme other than winning the war.
Their economies were collapsing. They were basically in the same spot the Russians were. In the case of the Ottomans, prices had increased 20 fold since 1914. You can’t fight modern war without the economic ability to support it.
@RedSword12 is correct about the Entente not knowing how badly things were going inside the Central Powers but also if the French and British had just sat on the defensive in the west the Germans might have been able to conquer Ukraine much sooner and taking Ukraine in say 1916 would have solved a lot of the CP's problems, a generation later the fact that the Germans got most of the Ukrainian harvest of 1941, all of the harvest of 1942 and much of the harvest of 1943 massively helped them, though because they'd taken France, the other major food surplus region in Europe in 1940 that meant their situation was never that bad.
Yes but it's not a military one. The biggest problem for the CP was that they were net importers of food pre war but by cutting back on luxury crops and livestock and focusing on maximising calorific they might have managed if it wasn't for them being importers of natural fertilisers as well, obviously without fertiliser food production drops. There is an answer to this, using the Haber process to make artifical nitrogen fertiliser, however you also need nitrogen for explosives and in OTL they focused on ammunition, didn't give their farmers enough fertiliser and yields dropped. So if the CP's realise that food is their great weakness and cut back on shell production to focus on fertilisers they would have significantly improved their food situation. The problem with that is without shells they can't conquer Romania or Ukraine. It's a Catch 22, however there is one small window where they could change things. In late 1917 after the Bolshevik coup they absolutely slash shell production (>80%) and go all out for fertilisers they might be able to get enough nitrogen fertiliser together to apply in spring 1918 on their crops to save the 1918 harvest. Meanwhile they cut a deal with the Bolsheviks to get as much of Ukraine as possible and focus all of their military resources on establishing control there so they can start extracting resources ASAP. The combination means they can probably scrape together enough food to keep things going. The problem is the armies facing the British, French and Italians have very little ammunition and we've seen in Ukraine that in practice the results in losing ground and a lot of dead soldiers. So 1918 ends with the CP having just enough food to keep things ticking over with the hope that in the autumn of 1919 they'll get a good crop from Ukraine and be able to improve rations but having lost a lot of ground and soldiers in the West. They still need to use a larger than OTL share of their nitrogen production on fertiliser if they want to avoid another food catastrophe but they will have been able to increase shell production to something like 80% of OTL 1917 levels. Against Britain and France that should be enough to force a compromise peace with Entente gains in the west and CP gains in the east. But if America is in nothing can save them, they steamrolled in the spring of 1919.