As morale waned in the trenches of January 1918, Allied leaders strove to get a more unified strategic approach to the war
Ground crew attending to a French Spad on a snow-covered field in 1918, when a harsh winter brought further misery for Allied troops
“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ ”
King George VI made these lines famous in his 1939 Christmas broadcast to the Empire. They begin the poem God Knows, written by the English missionary Minnie Haskins, later a tutor at the London School of Economics, and were published privately in 1912. Had they been spoken by George VI’s father, George V, at Christmas 1917, they would have been scarcely less apt. Unlike January 1940, at the gate of the year in 1918, there was indeed a man with a light wishing to share it: Woodrow Wilson, the US president.
Yet Wilson was not so much answering the despairing question that General Émile Fayolle, commanding the French reinforcements on the Italian front, confided to his diary as the new year came — “How the devil can we finish this war?” — but proposing how the enemy might be persuaded to end it.
The United States had entered the war in April 1917, Wilson insisting on the (largely symbolic) term “cobelligerent” rather than “ally” to define his country’s status in the conflict, but up to now the US had been not so much a “cobelligerent” as a noncombatant. Except at sea, and in the air, US forces had seen little fighting. The American Expeditionary Force (AEF), under General John “Black Jack” Pershing, was still in formation and training. The US army was having to expand even more rapidly than had the British Army in the first year of the war, the intention being to put a million men into the field by the end of 1918, and this from a regular army strength of at most 150,000.
Wilson’s light to tread safely into the unknown was in the form of the “Fourteen Points”, which he put to Congress on January 8, 1918. The US, he said, had entered the conflict as “a war for freedom and justice and self-government”. While also an appeal to domestic idealism, his intention was to exploit the fragility of the enemy’s “multinationality”. The Central Powers principally comprised three multinational empires: the German Hohenzollern (the most homogeneous, but not without internal tensions), the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg (the most polyglot, culturally and religiously diverse), and the Ottoman Turkish, which even before the war resembled the Roman empire in its over-extended, terminal stages.
Wilson deliberately played to the growing ethnic unrest in the Austro-Hungarian empire by promising independence and self-determination for all the nationalities involved, extending this to include those of the former Russian empire, which since the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 was in a state of incipient civil war and had withdrawn from the Allied war effort to negotiate a separate peace.
A recruitment poster from 1917GETTY IMAGESEight of the Fourteen Points addressed specific territorial issues, the most important of which was that Alsace and Lorraine should be returned to France. The other six addressed the future conduct of international relations — an end to secret treaties; reciprocal and free trade; limits on national armaments; impartial adjudication of competing colonial claims; and “freedom of the seas”, an objective that would have the distinction of being opposed by Britain, France and Germany alike.
Most significant, however, was Wilson’s 14th point, that “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” — the League of Nations.
“The day of conquest and aggrandisement is gone by,” he declared, and that it was “this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view.”
In Wilson’s call for a just and stable peace there were echoes of Pope Benedict XV’s “peace note” of August 1917 in which he called for “peace without victory”, but which received short shrift from the Allies and the Central Powers. In truth, though, while Wilson’s Fourteen Points offered a measure of succour to nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian empire, who increasingly equated peace with their coming independence, they would likewise do little to hasten the end of the war. They would, however, form the agenda for the peace conference in Paris that followed.
For the time being, largely at the urging of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, the Allied leaders strove to get a more unified strategic approach to the war. At their emergency meeting at Rapallo in November after the debacle at Caporetto, when the Italian army was thrown back almost to the Venetian lagoon, the French, British and Italian prime ministers approved the creation of a “Supreme War Council” at Versailles to co-ordinate military policy, initially with respect to Italy, but also with a view to the strategy for the Western Front in the coming year.
Lloyd George would rule out any idea of a renewed offensive in Flanders, advocating a policy of strategic defence until such time as the AEF could take to the field in strength, preferring any offensive to be against the Turks in Palestine and Mesopotamia instead. With intelligence of the transfer of increasing numbers of German troops from the Eastern to the Western Front, and knowing that the Germans could not afford to let the relative strengths (by some measures, 192 divisions to 169) turn decisively against them, especially with the continued attrition of civilian morale in Germany itself, all the Allied leaders expected that the German chief of staff, effectively commander-in-chief, Erich Ludendorff, would mount a key offensive in early spring, and that, in Field Marshal Haig’s words, the “crisis of the war would be reached in April”.
President Wilson’s Fourteen Points plan was put to Congress on January 8, 1918For those in the trenches and the rest areas, however, January 1918 was just another month to be endured, the chief vexation now being not so much the Germans but the weather. Leonard Ounsworth, a gunner in a heavy battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery, recalled how “The thaw started on January the 15th, with rain as well — so complete that the ground just collapsed. The end of the dugout just fell in and buried one of the cooks — he’d have suffocated if we hadn’t got him out in time. Four of the guns were moved to Sorel [Somme] that day. They couldn’t have picked a worse one for it, because by the time we got there the ground was an absolute quagmire.”
Keeping up morale became an even greater priority, with foraging for ordnance proving lucrative, the shortage of metal in Britain putting a premium on salvage. In the Cambrai sector, Major Andrew Bain of the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Territorial battalion, recorded how “I made a sort of salvage-price list, and distributed this to the four battalions in my brigade. It said ‘For every rifle you’ll be credited with two pounds; for a shell case, six pence; for ammunition about two pence a dozen for spent cartridge cases.’ And that mounted up enormously. One month, the 6th Gordons, by just combing over the ground and picking up everything that was there, collected about six thousand pounds [£450,000 in today’s prices].”
With little prospect of serious action for a month or so, more leave could also be granted, and apparently for exigent reasons. Captain Cyril Dennys of the Royal Garrison Artillery described how although he himself was “very young”, he believed that “the sexual aspect worried some of the older men quite a lot. I mean, it made them jumpy. I remember there was one case where a captain who was getting on in age applied for special leave. You could get a week’s special leave to go to Paris or somewhere. On his leave chit he was asked for his reason. He put quite boldly sexual starvation. And to everyone’s surprise and delight he got his leave.”
GETTY IMAGESFor the American Expeditionary Force, however, it was a time to familiarise themselves with trench routine and patrolling before the expected German offensive, although Pershing feared that “the long period of trench warfare had so impressed itself upon the French and British that they had almost entirely dispensed with training for open warfare” and was determined therefore that this should be the focus of the AEF’s training as soon as they were able to look after themselves when in the line.
There were practical problems, however. With the direct approach that had characterised American military thinking for at least half a century, Pershing saw his route on to German soil — key to winning the war — as the shortest distance between two points. That was through Lorraine (or, since 1871, “Lothringen” to the occupying Germans), which meant that his starting place, and therefore the AEF’s concentration area, had to be behind Verdun and the St-Mihiel salient: “If the American army was to have an independent and flexible system it could not use the lines behind the British-Belgium front nor those in rear of the French front covering Paris.”
Applying for leave, one captain ‘put quite boldly sexual starvation. And to everyone’s surprise and delight he got his leave’
When Pershing visited GHQ on December 28, however, Haig had asked him how the AEF might help in the event of a German offensive, “the crisis of the war”, for there were now almost 200,000 American troops in France, although only one division had appeared at the front. Pershing was single-minded in his determination to keep the AEF as a discrete army under his own command, ready for the great offensive when the time came, and, indeed, President Wilson had told him to keep his distance from the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), but Pershing was also a realist. Haig recorded in his diary, with evident relief, that if the situation became critical, the AEF’s commander-in-chief said he was ready to “break up American divisions and employ battalions and regiments as draft to fill up our divisions”.
Who was to decide that the situation was critical was, of course, another matter.
There is no record of a comparable undertaking to the French, but while this does not signify any unwillingness, it does perhaps suggest a nascent, and not altogether surprising, Anglo-American “special relationship”, for it was already developing between the respective intelligence branches.
Wilson’s concern to keep the AEF at a distance from the BEF (not helped by Sir William Robertson, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had urged that American troops be incorporated in units of the BEF as if they were simply British) and to look to the French instead as the “old ally” was all very well, but the Grand Quartier General (French General Headquarters) had proved reluctant to share intelligence.
The head of the AEF’s G2 (intelligence) branch, Brigadier-General Dennis Nolan, had therefore been turning increasingly to Brigadier-General John Charteris at GHQ, whom he found a much readier collaborator (though in January Charteris would be sacked because of the findings of the committee of inquiry into the failure of intelligence at Cambrai). Besides, the language and organisational differences with the French were already proving a hindrance to training, and so later that month Pershing decided to accept Haig’s offer to take 150 battalions into the BEF to train. Initially one American battalion would be allotted to each British brigade, after which they would be progressively grouped into American regiments, the AEF’s equivalent of brigades, and divisions.
By the end of January 1918, although inter-allied bickering and the mistrust between the British military leadership and Lloyd George continued, and while there was no consensus on precisely how and when the war would end, there was at least the confidence that unless “the crisis of the war” was mishandled, there would come a peace with victory for the Allies. The secretary for war, Lord Derby, went as far as betting Lloyd George a hundred cigars to a hundred cigarettes that the war would be over by the next new year.
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