Ending the War, 1918

In the spring of 1918, the Central Powers made one final attempt to smash through the Allied lines using a new offensive strategy. It consisted of concentrated forces piercing single points of the enemy’s defense lines and then wreaking havoc from the rear. Using these tactics, the Central Powers had overwhelmed the Italian army at Caporetto in the fall of 1917, but a similar offensive on the western front in the spring of 1918 ground to a bloody halt within weeks. By then, the British and French had started making limited but effective use of tanks supported by airplanes. The German armies, suffering more than two million casualties between spring and summer, rapidly disintegrated.

By October 1918, the desperate German command helped create a civilian government to take over rule of the home front. As these inexperienced politicians took power, they were also taking blame for the defeat. Shifting the blame from the military, the generals proclaimed themselves fully capable of winning the war. Weak-willed civilians, they announced, had dealt the military a “stab in the back” by forcing a surrender. A sailors’ revolt and workers’ uprisings led the Social Democratic Party to declare a German republic in an effort to prevent revolution. At the end of October, Czechs and Slovaks declared an independent state, while the Croatian parliament simultaneously announced Croatia’s independence. On November 9, 1918, Kaiser William II fled as the Central Powers collapsed on all fronts. Finally, on the morning of November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed and the guns fell silent.

In the course of four years, European civilization had been sorely tested, if not shattered. Conservative figures put the battlefield toll at a minimum of ten million dead and thirty million wounded, incapacitated, or doomed eventually to die of their wounds. In every European combatant country, industrial and agricultural production had plummeted. From 1918 to 1919, a worldwide influenza epidemic left as many as one hundred million more dead. (See “Taking Measure: The Victims of Influenza, 1918–1919.”) Soldiers returning home in 1918 and 1919 flooded the book market with their memoirs; whereas many had begun by emphasizing heroism and glory, others cynically insisted that the fighting had been absolutely meaningless. Total war had not only drained society of resources and population but also sown the seeds of further catastrophe.