The Rise of Hitler

Abstract

After the failure of the German plan for a lightning war in 1914, both the Western and Eastern Fronts congealed into three years of static trench warfare in which most of the 8 million fatal battle casualties occurred. Attempts at a wide strategic outflanking movement by the British in attacking the Turks in Gallipoli (1915) and Mesopotamia (Iraq, 1914–17) failed. First to crack were the Russians — both cause and effect of their 1917 Revolution. The Germans, free to concentrate on the Western Front, very nearly broke it in March 1918, but the Allies counter-attacked in August, including fresh troops from the British Empire and the newly arrived expeditionary force from the USA, which was in action for the first time. The US government warned the Germans that this force was just the beginning, and that they were geared to continue the war into the 1920s. The morale of the exhausted German troops, already depressed by the failure of their spring offensive, began to collapse. The naval blockade, now also reinforced by the US navy, was causing severe shortages in Germany. Faced with the growing spectre of a Communist revolution, Field Marshal Hindenburg (Chief of the General Staff — effectively supreme commander on behalf of the Kaiser — since 1916) persuaded the Kaiser that Germany must ask for an armistice before their troops were driven back in chaos onto German soil¹.