3/15/2018 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
One hundred years ago
this month, all hell broke loose in France. On March 21, 1918, the German army
on the Western Front unleashed a series of massive attacks on the exhausted
British and French armies.
German General Erich
Ludendorff thought he could win World War I with one final blow. He planned to
punch holes between the French and British armies. Then he would drive through
their trenches to the English Channel, isolating and destroying the British
army.
The Germans thought
they had no choice but to gamble.
The British naval
blockade of Germany after three years had reduced Germany to near famine. More
than 200,000 American reinforcement troops were arriving each month in France.
(Nearly 2 million would land altogether.) American farms and factories were
sending over huge shipments of food and munitions to the Allies.
Yet for a brief moment,
the war had suddenly swung in Germany's favor by March 1918. The German army
had just knocked Russia and its new Bolshevik government out of the war. The
victory on the Eastern Front freed up nearly 1 million German and Austrian soldiers,
who were transferred west.
Germany had refined new
rolling artillery barrages. Its dreaded "Stormtroopers" had mastered
dispersed advances. The result was a brief window of advantage before the
American juggernaut changed the war's arithmetic.
The Spring Offensive
almost worked. Within days, the British army had suffered some 50,000
casualties. Altogether, about a half-million French, British and American
troops were killed or wounded during the entire offensive.
But within a month, the
Germans were sputtering. They could get neither supplies nor reinforcements to
the English Channel. Germany had greedily left 1 million soldiers behind in the
east to occupy and annex huge sections of conquered Eastern Europe and western
Russia.
The British and French
had learned new ways of strategic retreat. By summer of 2018, the Germans were
exhausted. In August, the Allies began their own (even bigger) offensive and
finally crushed the retreating Germans, ending the war in November 1918.
What were the lessons
of the failed German offensive?
The fortunes of war can
change in days. In late March 1918, the Germans thought the war was won. Three
months later, they knew it was lost. Often, the worst moments of war come right
before the end, as the last-gasp battles of Waterloo, the Bulge and Okinawa
remind us.
In 2016, an ascendant
Islamic State bragged that it had formed a vast new Islamic caliphate. By the
end of 2017, ISIS had been bombed to smithereens and routed.
Long-term strategy
matters. Without a strategic vision, short-term tactical success means nothing.
The advancing Germans had no real idea of what to do next -- even if they
reached the English Channel. There was never any chance that the British would
quit. The British had survived worse at the earlier battles of the Somme and
Passchendaele.
In our time, America
has never quite determined its strategic aims in the nearly 17-year-old Afghan
war. Is it to crush the Taliban? To build a democracy in Afghanistan? To rid
the country of terrorist havens? To stop the opium trade? To make Afghanistan
economically and militarily self-sufficient? To simply not lose? All that and
more have been mentioned as American goals.
Alliances are critical.
What did it matter that Germany had finally defeated Russia if at nearly the same
time it had provoked an even stronger new enemy in America? The key to
denuclearizing North Korea is creating a frontline partnership of Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan and the U.S. -- and to flip either China or Russia to our side to
ensure that sanctions strangle Pyongyang.
War is decided as much
by economics as by soldiers. Germany unleashed a lethal army against the
Allies, but its soldiers did not even have enough food or munitions to sustain
the offensive after a few weeks. Germany had neither the food nor the factory
capacity to conduct war against the combined might of Britain, France and the
United States. In many ways, 1918 Germany was like today's Russia -- formidable
on the battlefield, but only for a short duration and without the economic ability
to finish what it starts.
Leaders usually ignore
history. A little more than 20 years after the Spring Offensive, Hitler's Third
Reich fought America, Britain, France and Russia; unleashed its armies in a
two-front war in Europe; was blockaded; and lost another world war.
The final battles of
World War I will have their 100 anniversaries this year. But the lessons of how
Germany almost won and then suddenly lost are ageless.
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