![]() ![]() ![]() As winter approached and the Allies sagged, everything hinged on the pending American thrust northward from Saint-Mihiel and Verdun toward Sedan– aimed at the vital pivot of the whole German position west of the Rhine. Lloyd George’s war cabinet warned Haig that the shrinking army he was conducting slowly eastward was “Britain’s last army,” and it was going fast. They spent their dwindling strength breaching the Hindenburg Line and had little left for the Meuse, Moselle, or Rhine lines, where the Germans would stand fast. Haig suffered nearly half a million additional casualties in 1918, and so did the French. After rousing success in August and September, the British and French offensives had stalled. Most historians argue that the war was won by Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s famous Hundred Days Offensive – a coordinated Anglo-French-American envelopment of the German army on the Western Front – and most emphasize the performance of the British and French and speak of the American battles at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne as sideshows. The Americans saved Britain and France in the spring and summer and destroyed the German army in the fall. With Haig facing defeat in Flanders, actually warning London in April 1918 that the British had their “backs to the wall,” American troops- the manpower equivalent of over 100 French or British divisions-permitted Foch to shift otherwise irreplaceable French troops to the British sector, where a dazed Tommy, sniffing the tang of the sea air over the stink of the battlefield and apprised that Haig had spoken of British backs to the wall, replied, with a glance at the English Channel, “what bloody wall?” Marching up dusty roads past hordes of fleeing French refugees and soldiers-“ La guerre est finie!”-the Doughboys and Marines went into action at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood and stopped the German onslaught on the Marne. The waning of the French and British in 1917 could not have come at a worse moment, when the Germans had crushed the Russians and Italians and begun deploying 100 fresh divisions to the Western Front for a war-winning offensive in 1918: 3.5 million Germans with absolute artillery superiority against 2.5 million demoralized British and French. Lloyd George feared social revolution in Britain if casualties continued to mount, and lamented that Haig “had smothered the army in mud and blood.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George refused to send replacements to Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s army on the Western Front, so controversial were Haig’s casualties. The French army limped into the year, effectively out of men and in revolt against its officers British divisions, 25 percent below their normal strength because of the awful casualties of Passchendaele, had not been reinforced. ![]() The British, barely maintaining 62 divisions on the Western Front, planned, in the course of 1918 – had the Americans not appeared – to reduce their divisions to thirty or fewer and essentially to abandon the ground war in Europe.ġ918, eventually celebrated as the Allied “Year of Victory,” seemed initially far more promising for the Germans. France maintained its 110 divisions in 1918 not by infusing them with new manpower – there was none – but by reducing the number of regiments in a French division from four to three. The British fared little better in 1917, losing 800,000 casualties in the course of a year that climaxed with the notorious three-month assault on the muddy heights of Passchendaele, where 300,000 British infantry fell to gain just two miles of ground.īy 1918, French reserves of military-aged recruits were literally a state secret there were so few of them still alive. The French army actually mutinied in 1917, half of its demoralized combat divisions refusing to attack the Germans. By year-end 1917, France had lost 3 million men in the war, Britain 2 million. The French and British were barely hanging on in 1918. It must be baldly stated: Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. ![]()
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