I need evidence that Germany could still win in March 1918

[phil andrade]

Would it be grossly simplistic to suggest that Haig saw the 5th Army as the door that was going to swing back, while the northern sectors of the British front represented the hinge that must be held to the last ?

 

Priority being to secure the Channel Ports.

 

Threat in Artois and Flanders evinced the” Backs to the Wall” order of the day, although losses had been far greater in Picardy.

 

Therein surely lay one of Ludendorff’s best chances : that the Entente armies would diverge as they sought to protect their respective territorial priorities.

The fact that they coalesced must not obscure the real possibility that this was not a “given “....just as there was no “given” in Givenchy.

 

Resolute leadership by Foch and outstanding defensive fighting by Lancashire men held sway in a moment of great peril .

 

Again , I cite Pétain’s words as evidence that this could certainly have gone the other way.

 

Phil 

[phil andrade]

16 hours ago, David Filsell said:

 

Shortage of sound junior officers and experienced senior non commissioned officers

 

There is one account of officers being fragged. 

Soldiers' Councils were created because of high command's concern about the state of morale.

There are accounts reporting breakdowns in commanding troops during the Spring Battles. 

 

 

 

 

David,

 

There is an aspect of the monstrous German casualty list for the spring battles that demands attention and interpretation : an extraordinarily high proportion of officer casualties.

 

Phil

[David Filsell]

I have not looked into this aspect, but happy to accept what  you say. I suspect NCO casualties were equally so. Whilst important in all  armies I have a feeling that they seem  had greater prestige and responsibility in the German army. I have absolutely no doubts that the war was effectively lost in the field by the circumstances I outlined and others that I did not. 

The spring offensives may have been effective but no breakthrough was made. Even if it had there seem only to have been poorly developed strategic plans for exploitation. The fact seems to me that the German Army had for the logistical reasons I stated, and the clearly delineated decline in morale evident in German writing about the war, simply shot its bolt. 

Add to that that the British Army in had developed an all arms combat ability and defeat was simply inevitable and many on the other side of the wire knew it.

 

Edited 20 March , 2020 by David Filsell

[phil andrade]

David,

 

You state that “ defeat was simply inevitable “.

 

Inevitable ?

 

Such a big word : it denies the role of conduct and choice.

 

I’m banging on about this a bit, I know, but you’ll forgive me, I hope.

 

Phil

 

 

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

6 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

David,

 

You state that “ defeat was simply inevitable “.

 

Inevitable ?

 

Yes.

I agree with David on this.

The only way to see the alternative scenario happening, a German victory (a draw would have been impossible), would be to string together a sequence of 'what ifs', highly unlikely improbabilities, and insoluble impossibilities.

[phil andrade]

What a sad day it would be if we were to agree on everything.

 

History would become very dull, inevitably 😂

 

Phil

[Muerrisch]

3 hours ago, Dai Bach y Sowldiwr said:

 

Yes.

I agree with David on this.

The only way to see the alternative scenario happening, a German victory (a draw would have been impossible), would be to string together a sequence of 'what ifs', highly unlikely improbabilities, and insoluble impossibilities.

 

Inherent military probability ................ German breakthrough leading to attainment of objective chances very poor ........ but what was the objective?

Dreadful German losses and for what?

[EL KAISER]

Well after much reading, I can conclude that Germany’s offensives could have caused much more damage, perhaps even knock ut France from the War, and the British from France, if executed more correctly (attack here at this time instead of there tomorrow) or in a more organized fashion, or with a clear strategy in mind, etc. However, with the presence of American troops, the possibility of winning in France is very VERY small. Most likely, the offensive would have been stopped at some point, and Germany would eventually seek peace terms. So its crucial mistake was to drag the U.S. into the war. WWI could have ended VERY differently if the U.S. hadn’t entered the war. By “differently”, I mean positively on the German side. I subscribe to the idea that it was the American Expeditionary Force that stopped the German advance, not France or the British. If the USA hadn’t been in France with its massive equipment, finance and manpower, Paris would have surely fallen, and the British would have surely got kicked out of France. It was thanks to the USA that the spring offensives did not manage to knock out France. Without the U.S., defeating Germany was impossible. And Germany had much more chances of defeating the U.K. and France. Of course, without the U.S., the rationale for said offensives would have not existed in the first place.

[EL KAISER]

On 17/03/2020 at 19:29, phil andrade said:

Five days from defeat : How Britain nearly lost the First World War

 

Walter Reid

 

This recently published book is a remarkable foray into the very topic we’re discussing : not least because the author has been very gracious in his candour and has admitted that he’s changed his mind.

 

His earlier book Haig, Architect of Victory lavished praise on Haig as a commander.

 

Now the presentation is very different, and Haig is rendered culpable for a crisis of extreme gravity, and focuses on the five days from March 21st to 25th 1918.

 

Such a treatise , of necessity, implies that the Germans did indeed stand a chance of winning, and came pretty damned close to achieving that result .

 

I haven’t yet read the book, but thought it should be cited as evidence of sorts.

 

Phil

 

I'll have to get that book. It would be evidence of the kind that i seek. However, after much reading, I already made up my mind about this whole issue: the Germans had a small chance of capturing Paris, or drive the British out of France, or both. But in all probability, they would eventually lose the war because of the presence of the AEF, with its massive manpower, equipment, finance, etc. Precisely because of this, I can declare almost without a doubt that if Germany had not drag the U.S. into the conflict, Germany would have won WWI. The rationale of the spring offensives was that Germany was running out of time because of the U.S. sending massive amounts of everything, so if the U.S. had not entered the war, the spring offensives might have never existed. But, let's assume Germany executes them without the U.S. being present at all in France: They would have succeeded. It was the U.S. who saved the allies just in time.

[brianmorris547]

I do not believe that they would have succeeded. The German War Aim of 1918 was to defeat the British. For various reasons, mentioned in this thread, they failed. 

Brian

EDIT Please throw that Mosier book away.

EDIT 2: Apologies, It is not for me to tell you what to read and what not to read.

Brian

Edited 19 March , 2020 by brianmorris547

[MikeMeech]

4 hours ago, EL KAISER said:

 

I'll have to get that book. It would be evidence of the kind that i seek. However, after much reading, I already made up my mind about this whole issue: the Germans had a small chance of capturing Paris, or drive the British out of France, or both. But in all probability, they would eventually lose the war because of the presence of the AEF, with its massive manpower, equipment, finance, etc. Precisely because of this, I can declare almost without a doubt that if Germany had not drag the U.S. into the conflict, Germany would have won WWI. The rationale of the spring offensives was that Germany was running out of time because of the U.S. sending massive amounts of everything, so if the U.S. had not entered the war, the spring offensives might have never existed. But, let's assume Germany executes them without the U.S. being present at all in France: They would have succeeded. It was the U.S. who saved the allies just in time.

Hi

You should remember that the AEF depended on France and UK for the majority of their military equipment (artillery, Tanks etc) and aircraft.  They did not come fully equipped for a modern war.

 

Mike

[phil andrade]

EL KAISER,

 

You tell us that you’ve made up your mind.

 

Please remember that Walter Reid had also made up his mind, and then changed it.

 

Beware of the trap of seeking consistency : which  Reid himself described  as ...that hobgoblin of small minds.

 

The trap that I’ve fallen into is that I’m so averse to the concept of inevitability , that I, too, have fallen prey to the hobgoblin !

 

Phil

[EL KAISER]

12 hours ago, MikeMeech said:

Hi

You should remember that the AEF depended on France and UK for the majority of their military equipment (artillery, Tanks etc) and aircraft.  They did not come fully equipped for a modern war.

 

Mike

 

This article explains fairly well why the French and British were (most likely) doomed without the U.S.

 

Ahundred years ago today, September 26th, the greatest artillery bombardment in U.S. history—more shells in a few hours than had been fired in the entire American Civil War—fell silent and 350,000 American soldiers got to their feet and began to advance across no-man’s-land toward the German trenches in the Meuse-Argonne. With the French and British stalled in their sectors, the Doughboys aimed to cut the German army’s principal supply line on the Western Front and end World War I.

 

The American role in the First World War is one of the great stories of the American Century, and yet it has largely vanished from view. Most historians tell us that the U.S. Army arrived too late on the Western Front to affect the war’s outcome, an outcome determined by Allied grit, better tactics, the British blockade of German ports, and, ultimately, German exhaustion and revolution.

 

It must be baldly stated: Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. Army not intervened in France in 1918. The French and British were barely hanging on in 1918. By year-end 1917, France had lost 3 million men in the war, Britain 2 million. The French army actually mutinied in 1917, half of its demoralized combat divisions refusing to attack the Germans. 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.

 

By 1918, French reserves of military-aged recruits were literally a state secret; there were so few of them still alive. 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, 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.

 

1918, eventually celebrated as the Allied “Year of Victory,” seemed initially far more promising for the Germans. 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. 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. Lloyd George feared social revolution in Britain if casualties continued to mount, and lamented that Haig “had smothered the army in mud and blood.”

 

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.

 

What saved the day? The Americans. The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, drafted a million-man army (the A.E.F.) in the ensuing months, and deployed it hurriedly to France in the winter of 1917-18. In June 1918, the Germans brushed aside fifty French divisions and plunged as far as the Marne River, just fifty miles from Paris.

 

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. 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?”

 

The Americans saved Britain and France in the spring and summer and destroyed the German army in the fall. 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.

 

 

They were anything but. After rousing success in August and September, the British and French offensives had stalled. Haig suffered nearly half a million additional casualties in 1918, and so did the French. 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. 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. 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.

Verdun had always been a thorn in the German side, forcing the German front in France to bend sharply around it—compressing Hindenburg’s vital railways into a narrow space—and offering great opportunities to the Allies, if only they had the manpower, to thrust upward from Verdun to cut the famous four-track railroad line through Sedan and Mézières that conveyed most of the German army’s men, matériel, and supplies.

 

The American battle in the Meuse-Argonne, from September 26 to November 11, 1918, pierced the most redoubtable section of the Hindenburg Line, reached Sedan on both banks of the Meuse—denying the Germans the river as a defensive shield—and cut the vital four-track railway there, which carried 250 German trains a day. With it, the Germans had moved five divisions every two days to any point on the Western Front; without it, they could barely move a single division in the same span. The American offensive was, a British war correspondent concluded, “the matador’s thrust in the bull-fight.” It cut the German throat.

 

The Doughboys won the war by trapping the German army in France and Belgium and severing its lifeline. Looking at 1918 in this new way, restoring the enormous impact of the U.S. military to its proper scale and significance, achieves two important things. First, it fundamentally revises the history of the First World War. Second, it brings out the thrilling suspense of 1918, when the fate of the world hung in the balance, and the revivifying power of the Americans saved the Allies, defeated Germany, and established the United States as the greatest of the great powers.

 

 

13 hours ago, brianmorris547 said:

I do not believe that they would have succeeded. The German War Aim of 1918 was to defeat the British. For various reasons, mentioned in this thread, they failed. 

Brian

EDIT Please throw that Mosier book away.

EDIT 2: Apologies, It is not for me to tell you what to read and what not to read.

Brian

 

The following article explains fairly well why the French and British were (most likely) doomed without the U.S.

P.S.: The source is not John Mosier

 

Ahundred years ago today, September 26th, the greatest artillery bombardment in U.S. history—more shells in a few hours than had been fired in the entire American Civil War—fell silent and 350,000 American soldiers got to their feet and began to advance across no-man’s-land toward the German trenches in the Meuse-Argonne. With the French and British stalled in their sectors, the Doughboys aimed to cut the German army’s principal supply line on the Western Front and end World War I.

 

The American role in the First World War is one of the great stories of the American Century, and yet it has largely vanished from view. Most historians tell us that the U.S. Army arrived too late on the Western Front to affect the war’s outcome, an outcome determined by Allied grit, better tactics, the British blockade of German ports, and, ultimately, German exhaustion and revolution.

 

It must be baldly stated: Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. Army not intervened in France in 1918. The French and British were barely hanging on in 1918. By year-end 1917, France had lost 3 million men in the war, Britain 2 million. The French army actually mutinied in 1917, half of its demoralized combat divisions refusing to attack the Germans. 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.

 

By 1918, French reserves of military-aged recruits were literally a state secret; there were so few of them still alive. 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, 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.

 

1918, eventually celebrated as the Allied “Year of Victory,” seemed initially far more promising for the Germans. 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. 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. Lloyd George feared social revolution in Britain if casualties continued to mount, and lamented that Haig “had smothered the army in mud and blood.”

 

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.

 

What saved the day? The Americans. The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, drafted a million-man army (the A.E.F.) in the ensuing months, and deployed it hurriedly to France in the winter of 1917-18. In June 1918, the Germans brushed aside fifty French divisions and plunged as far as the Marne River, just fifty miles from Paris.

 

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. 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?”

 

The Americans saved Britain and France in the spring and summer and destroyed the German army in the fall. 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.

 

They were anything but. After rousing success in August and September, the British and French offensives had stalled. Haig suffered nearly half a million additional casualties in 1918, and so did the French. 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. 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. 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.

Verdun had always been a thorn in the German side, forcing the German front in France to bend sharply around it—compressing Hindenburg’s vital railways into a narrow space—and offering great opportunities to the Allies, if only they had the manpower, to thrust upward from Verdun to cut the famous four-track railroad line through Sedan and Mézières that conveyed most of the German army’s men, matériel, and supplies.

 

The American battle in the Meuse-Argonne, from September 26 to November 11, 1918, pierced the most redoubtable section of the Hindenburg Line, reached Sedan on both banks of the Meuse—denying the Germans the river as a defensive shield—and cut the vital four-track railway there, which carried 250 German trains a day. With it, the Germans had moved five divisions every two days to any point on the Western Front; without it, they could barely move a single division in the same span. The American offensive was, a British war correspondent concluded, “the matador’s thrust in the bull-fight.” It cut the German throat.

 

The Doughboys won the war by trapping the German army in France and Belgium and severing its lifeline. Looking at 1918 in this new way, restoring the enormous impact of the U.S. military to its proper scale and significance, achieves two important things. First, it fundamentally revises the history of the First World War. Second, it brings out the thrilling suspense of 1918, when the fate of the world hung in the balance, and the revivifying power of the Americans saved the Allies, defeated Germany, and established the United States as the greatest of the great powers.

[Muerrisch]

The unattributed article is frankly a load of b0llocks, embarrassing to have on the GWF.

Edited 19 March , 2020 by Muerrisch

[ejwalshe]

The original question on this thread:  "I’m searching for evidence...that proves...that Germany, in March 1918, could still win..."

 

I will answer the question, "Did Ludendorff believe he could still win"?

 

Yes.

 

During the Final German Spring Offensive there were two atrocities meant to sway British public opinion in favour of negotiating a peace with Germany.  There were other deliberate atrocities during this period, but these two events gathered perhaps the most publicity, the aerial bombardment of field hospitals at Étaples on 19 May 1918, and the sinking of H.M.H.S. Llandovery Castle on 27 June 1918.

 

It was shortly after this final atrocity that Ludendorff stopped believing he could win, for he called off this strategy. 

[David Filsell]

Who actually wrote this and what are his qualifications and his sources. 

Judging by the last sentence it seems to offer merely the usual OTT level of US military self satisfaction. I have no wish to denigrate the USA or its soldier but......

[phil andrade]

EL KAISER,

 

Did you write that article ?

 

The thrilling suspense of 1918 .....that wins my vote, for what it’s worth.

 

The revivifying power of the Americans .....beautifully expressed, and absolutely incontestable as a depiction of the significance of US intervention.

 

Are you sure about the rest of it ?

 

Phil

[EL KAISER]

5 hours ago, Muerrisch said:

The unattributed article is frankly a load of b0llocks, embarrassing to have on the GWF.

 

Oh really, why? Because you don't agree with what it says?

[EL KAISER]

3 hours ago, phil andrade said:

EL KAISER,

 

Did you write that article ?

 

The thrilling suspense of 1918 .....that wins my vote, for what it’s worth.

 

The revivifying power of the Americans .....beautifully expressed, and absolutely incontestable as a depiction of the significance of US intervention.

 

Are you sure about the rest of it ?

 

Phil

 

No. I didn't write it. I read it here: https://time.com/5406235/everything-you-know-about-how-world-war-i-ended-is-wrong/

I'm sure (we are talking a bout a "what if", so i'm not 100% sure, but, let's say, 75% sure) about the statement made: "Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. Army not intervened in France in 1918" I'm also sure about the French and British armies being in a very poor shape at the start of the offensives. It's amazing how everyone critizices Germany and its Army, citing how low was its morale, and how Germany had no replacements for its manpower, and how its people were starving, etc. while casually ignoring that France was in the exact same position, with the difference that Germany still kicked their butts WITHOUT american help, something the French could not do. The BEF was also in very poor shape as the articles mentions. Many other cite how well equiped the allies were. Yes, and because of whom? Their own money? No. Without U.S. finance the allies would be just like Germany. So it seems fair to say that without them, Germany would have drive the British off France, and France out of the war. If Germany hit them so hard and nearly broke their front despite the U.S. already being there, imagine if they weren't there. The spring offensives (which would still have been launched, since like many point out, the blockade was generating dsicontent amongst germans) would have succeeded. With all this I agree.

5 hours ago, David Filsell said:

Who actually wrote this and what are his qualifications and his sources. 

Judging by the last sentence it seems to offer merely the usual OTT level of US military self satisfaction. I have no wish to denigrate the USA or its soldier but......

 

https://time.com/5406235/everything-you-know-about-how-world-war-i-ended-is-wrong/

[AOK4]

I'm not sure whether Germany would have won without the American intervention. No one here acknowledges the French counter-attack at Verdun in 1917 (yes, after the mutinies at the point when the French army was believed to be totally incapable of anything), showing the resilience of the French army and the myth of the invinicility of the German army. I just say that the official American military involvement (the US was already involved heavily before their official entry in the war, one shouldn't forget) meant that the Spring Offensive could not even lead to a clear military victory anyway (it was stopped without serious American involvement). The American military presence just meant that a more serious German breakthrough could have been blocked using those inexperienced Americans. Yet, a very serious German breakthrough (capture of Amiens f.i.) did not happen.

 

The article posted is indeed just a typical American self-glorifying collections of facts, half-truths and plain myths.

 

Jan

 

Edited 20 March , 2020 by AOK4

[phil andrade]

5 hours ago, EL KAISER said:

 

No. I didn't write it. I read it here: https://time.com/5406235/everything-you-know-about-how-world-war-i-ended-is-wrong/

I'm sure (we are talking a bout a "what if", so i'm not 100% sure, but, let's say, 75% sure) about the statement made: "Germany would have won World War I had the U.S. Army not intervened in France in 1918" I'm also sure about the French and British armies being in a very poor shape at the start of the offensives. It's amazing how everyone critizices Germany and its Army, citing how low was its morale, and how Germany had no replacements for its manpower, and how its people were starving, etc. while casually ignoring that France was in the exact same position, with the difference that Germany still kicked their butts WITHOUT american help, something the French could not do. The BEF was also in very poor shape as the articles mentions. Many other cite how well equiped the allies were. Yes, and because of whom? Their own money? No. Without U.S. finance the allies would be just like Germany. So it seems fair to say that without them, Germany would have drive the British off France, and France out of the war. If Germany hit them so hard and nearly broke their front despite the U.S. already being there, imagine if they weren't there. The spring offensives (which would still have been launched, since like many point out, the blockade was generating dsicontent amongst germans) would have succeeded. With all this I agree.

 

https://time.com/5406235/everything-you-know-about-how-world-war-i-ended-is-wrong/

 

 

Thanks for this, EL KAISER.

 

The BEF knocked the guts out of the first major German onslaught when the attack of 28 March 1918 was so severely repulsed.

 

This was, in my view, one of the crucial events : not quite a Pickett’s Charge moment, but not that far removed.

 

This was achieved without any direct American involvement in the actual battles.

 

I heartily agree with you that the presence of Americans was of inestimable importance : without the prospect of having to face US might, those profligate German attacks might never have taken place.  The war could have dragged on and on.

 

As for the actual performance of US forces on the battlefield, the American soldiers made superb contributions, especially the Marines at Belleau Wood.

 

Were I an American, I would stand taller every time I heard that place mentioned .

 

I get the impression that the article from Time was really trying  to address a form of American amnesia about the role played by the USA in terms of the nation’s contribution to winning the Great War.  The date of the essay was no coincidence , being the centennial of the Meuse Argonne, the bloodiest battle ever fought by American soldiers, including the Second World War.  That’s another thing....not enough public awareness, let alone acknowledgement , about how bad that affair was.

 

In regard to the depiction of Franco-British morale and effectiveness , it strikes me as a shockingly disparaging and inaccurate portrayal.

 

It reminds me of President Putin’s assessment of Poland’s role in the Second World War.

 

Phil

 

 

Edited 20 March , 2020 by phil andrade

[EL KAISER]

1 hour ago, AOK4 said:

I'm not sure whether Germany would have won without the American intervention. No one here acknowledges the French counter-attack at Verdun in 1917 (yes, after the mutinies at the point when the French army was believed to be totally incapable of anything), showing the resilience of the French army and the myth of the invinicility of the German army. I just say that the official American military involvement (the US was already involved heavily before their official entry in the war, one shouldn't forget) meant that the Spring Offensive could not even lead to a clear military victory anyway (it was stopped without serious American involvement). The American military presence just meant that a more serious German breakthrough could have been blocked using those inexperienced Americans. Yet, a very serious German breakthrough (capture of Amiens f.i.) did not happen.

 

The article posted is indeed just a typical American self-glorifying collections of facts, half-truths and plain myths.

 

Jan

 

 

What are you talking about? The germans were advancing with every attack. It was the americans who finally stopped them and took from them the initiative, not the French or the British! If americans had not been there, the Germans would (most likely) have advanced more and more. The French simply had no power to stop them, nor the British.

[brianmorris547]

11 hours ago, EL KAISER said:

The source is not John Mosier

 

 Was it Mel Gibson

[AOK4]

35 minutes ago, EL KAISER said:

 

What are you talking about? The germans were advancing with every attack. It was the americans who finally stopped them and took from them the initiative, not the French or the British! If americans had not been there, the Germans would (most likely) have advanced more and more. The French simply had no power to stop them, nor the British.

 

What Americans who finally stopped them? You mean in June/July near Chateau Thierry and on the Marne. I think the French would have found some unit somewhere to plug those gaps still (as the Germans were very stretched out by that time anyway) and, on the Marne, the French knew what was coming and were fully prepared, there was basically no need for US troops there, but as they were available, they used them so that they could gain some experience.

[Muerrisch]

Article is unreferenced so accademically totally unsound.

Time line is totally confused.

It has no place in a serious discussion on a serious forum.

Opinions should not be advanced as fact.

Beyond that I shall waste no more effort on this thread as it is descending into a farcical pantomime.