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Armistice Day, the 11th of November, 1918.
Documentary explores the complex events leading to the 1918 Armistice, revealing the harsh terms and key figures shaping WW1's bitter end.
Key Takeaways
- The 1918 Armistice imposed severe terms on Germany, effectively ending its capacity to wage war.
- Erich Ludendorff's leadership was pivotal in Germany's war efforts and eventual defeat.
- Key battles like Tannenberg, Verdun, and the Somme defined the brutal nature and stalemate of WW1.
- The war's conclusion directly influenced the geopolitical landscape leading to WW2.
- Understanding the Armistice provides critical insights into the consequences of WW1 and the origins of later conflicts.
Summary
- The film examines the Armistice Day on November 11, 1918, marking the official end of WW1 at 11 am.
- It explores the harsh terms imposed on Germany, including evacuation of conquered territories and surrender of military assets.
- Erich Ludendorff, Germany's military dictator after 1916, is highlighted as a central figure whose decisions influenced Germany's defeat.
- The documentary traces back to 1914, detailing Germany's initial war strategy and the critical battles on both eastern and western fronts.
- The German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 is portrayed as a morale boost amid early war struggles.
- The prolonged and brutal battles of Verdun and the Somme in 1916 are discussed, showing the immense human cost and strategic stalemate.
- French General Philippe Pétain's leadership at Verdun and British General Douglas Haig's controversial role at the Somme are analyzed.
- The film emphasizes how the war's ending sowed the seeds for future conflict, highlighting the importance of understanding the Armistice.
- It presents the Armistice not just as a ceasefire but as an enforced German surrender with significant territorial and military concessions.
- The narrative underscores the interplay of military strategy, political decisions, and human factors in shaping the war's conclusion.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The First World War officially ended at 11 o'clock, a moment we solemnly mark each year in acts of remembrance.
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But less familiar to us today is how and why the Armistice came about.
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This film unravels World War One's bitter end game.
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A story of wounded egos and brinkmanship behind the lines, as generals haggled over the terms of the peace, while at the front, the soldiers fought on, sustaining ever greater losses.
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The central character is Erich Ludendorff, after 1916, effectively Germany's military dictator.
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His will drove the Reich towards total victory.
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His loss of nerve then plunged Germany to total defeat.
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Historians and journalists like to explain why wars start.
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But endings are equally important. How one war ends,
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can help explain why the next war breaks out.
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The war of 1914-18 was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
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But in its ending, it sowed the seeds of an even more appalling conflict just two decades later.
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If we want to understand that larger tragedy, I believe we need to unravel the extraordinary story of the Armistice.
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Our story begins and ends in a railway carriage.
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Here, in the early hours of the 11th of November, 1918, the Germans sat down with the Allies to sign an Armistice.
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An armistice is usually just an agreement to stop fighting, to create a breathing space in which a peace treaty can be negotiated.
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But the Armistice of 1918 went a lot further.
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The terms included not only evacuating all Germany's conquests in France and Belgium, but also allowing the Allied armies to occupy Germany west of the Rhine.
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The Germans also had to surrender 30,000 machine guns, 5,000 cannon, 1,700 planes and all their U-boats. In effect, the entire German capacity to wage war.
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These were exceptionally harsh terms.
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Germany had embarked on war, determined to become a world power equal to the British Empire, and in four years of fighting, the German army had never been pushed off French soil.
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Yet this Armistice imposed nothing less than Germany's abject surrender. The question is why?
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The answer is rooted in earlier events in the war and Germany's first bid for total victory.
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We need to go back to August 1914, to another train thundering east across Germany through the night.
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The First World War had just begun. In the west, the Germans had invaded Belgium and France.
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In the east, France's ally, Tsarist Russia, was invading Germany. Nothing was allowed to get in the train's way.
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Signals were cleared, points were set, other trains sidelined. On board were two men who would shape Germany's war in 1914, and even more decisively, four years later.
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Germany had gambled on winning the war in a few months. On its western front, a massive right hook through Belgium towards Paris was designed to knock France out of the war.
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In August 1914, that part of the plan seemed to be going well.
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But Germany was also fighting on its eastern front, and there, the situation was grim.
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The Russian armies were surging into German territory in East Prussia, and German field commanders had panicked, talking of wholesale retreat.
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Now, new leaders were needed to save the Reich.
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One of the men the German Supreme Command turned to was a figurehead to raise morale.
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Paul von Hindenburg was a retired veteran of Prussia's great victory against France in 1870, and renowned as a diehard patriot.
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The other general was very different, an up-and-coming strategist, Erich Ludendorff, had just impressed the German Supreme Command by capturing the Belgian stronghold of Liège.
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Ludendorff was a complex personality, meticulous, workaholic, and regularly top of his class as a military cadet.
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He drove hard, compromised rarely, and lived on his nerves.
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But Ludendorff also had a very vulnerable human side. He'd fallen in love in his 40s with a divorcee, Margarethe.
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He'd married her and become a devoted father to three stepsons.
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As patriotic Germans, the boys all fought in the war for the fatherland.
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And in time, their fate would be entangled with Ludendorff's.
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Ludendorff and Hindenburg took command of the shaken and vastly outnumbered German Eighth Army.
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Instead of being cowed by the pincer-like approach of two Russian armies, Ludendorff quickly saw the chance of dealing first with the one in the south, and then turning on the other army in the north.
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The battle lasted just five days.
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By the end of August 1914, the Russians had been surrounded and destroyed.
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Just a few miles from the battlefield was the hamlet of Tannenberg.
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Where in 1410, the Teutonic Knights, some of them Hindenburg's ancestors, had been obliterated by the Slavs.
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A second battle of Tannenberg with the tables turned, was then sweet revenge for the Germans.
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For the Germans and their allies, this success came at exactly the right time.
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Germany's bid for a decisive victory in the west had been blocked by the French and British, so the German people, now facing a long war, seized on the good news from the east.
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And the Supreme Command hyped it up as a massive triumph.
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For two years, Ludendorff and Hindenburg won a series of victories against Russia on Germany's eastern front.
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But none of these battles was decisive, because Germany was still concentrating most of its resources on crushing France.
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During 1915, the Western Front had bogged down into a static war of attrition in the trenches.
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But in 1916, the Germans once again went for the jugular.
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Seeking the victory that had eluded them so far.
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They mounted an all-out assault on Verdun.
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France's most sensitive point.
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Verdun, on the Meuse River, was a great fortress since the days of Louis XIV.
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Once committed here, the French, they were sure, could be bled white.
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The Germans brought up fearsome artillery, more than 1,200 guns, including massive Big Bertha mortars. Code name for the operation was Gericht, place of execution.
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And it was.
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France's high command had been astonishingly complacent.
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They'd ignored signs of a German buildup and failed to strengthen outlying forts.
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The French were soon reeling.
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But rather like Ludendorff at Tannenberg, one general turned the crisis around.
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When the call came to defend Verdun, Philippe Pétain was absent without leave.
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His aide had to rush to Paris to drag him away from his mistress.
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Pétain was unconventional. He came from peasant stock and had led at the front by example.
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This was a soldier's soldier, harrowed by the eyes of men returning from combat, who, said Pétain, stared into space as if transfixed by a vision of terror.
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Practical and realistic, Pétain reinforced key forts and organized the French artillery into a concentrated system of firepower directed at wherever the Germans attacked.
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Equally important, he turned the clogged narrow road that led to Verdun into a meticulously run supply lifeline.
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But more was needed.
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To divert German resources from the assault on Verdun, the French demanded that their ally Britain launch a major offensive to the north.
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This was the Battle of the Somme.
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60,000 British troops were killed or wounded on the opening day, the greatest disaster in the history of the British Army.
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The battle then dragged on fruitlessly for months, becoming a byword for mindless slaughter.
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The British commander, Douglas Haig,
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bore much of the blame.
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A dour Scotsman, he was a veteran of Sudan and the Boer War.
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But on the Western Front, he seemed tied to a plan.
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It was tactics before troops,
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rather like Ludendorff.
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Politicians in London called Haig the Butcher.
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Yet for all the criticism, the Somme did serve its purpose.
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It helped to relieve pressure on the French back at Verdun.
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There, both sides were now evenly matched in firepower, and the casualty levels became appalling.
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Around 800,000 French and Germans were killed or wounded.
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Even more than the Somme, this was the First World War in all its horror.
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Like the struggle for Stalingrad in the next war, the stakes and the symbolism had become immense.
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The Battle of Verdun finally ended in December 1916, and it was the Germans who'd been bled to exhaustion.
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Germany's catastrophic failure at Verdun had far-reaching consequences.
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It forced a shakeup of the Supreme Command, the real power in the German Reich, controlling practically every aspect of German life, economy and administration, propaganda and censorship.
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It was answerable only to the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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The Kaiser now made a fateful decision. He turned to Hindenburg and Ludendorff to head the all-powerful Supreme Command.
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In reality, that meant the day-to-day control of Germany and its war had been placed in the hands of one man.
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The Supreme Command ran the show.
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And the Supreme Command was really run by Ludendorff. The Kaiser and Hindenburg were nominally his superiors, but it was Ludendorff who controlled the detail of the war, from Flanders right down to the Balkans.
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In all but name, Ludendorff was the dictator of Germany.
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And he was the dictator searching for a decisive blow to win the war.
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In January 1917, Ludendorff gambled on an all-out U-boat campaign, hoping to cut off Britain's supply lines.
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Yet U-boat aggression in the Atlantic brought America, hitherto neutral, into the war against Germany. The USA gradually mobilized all its vast economic resources for the Allied war effort, to make the world safe for democracy, in the words of its President, Woodrow Wilson.
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This was the moment when Ludendorff should probably have sought a compromise peace.
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But he still hankered after a decisive Tannenberg-style victory in the west.
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He aimed to make Belgium and northeastern France part of the German Reich. For him, anything less than that would be a defeat. If Germany makes peace without profit, then Germany has lost the war.
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Here, at his headquarters in Spa, in Belgium, Ludendorff believed he could still achieve Germany's war aims of becoming a global power to match the British Empire.
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And he calculated that he had one last opportunity.
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Ludendorff reasoned that it would take time for the Americans to make their presence felt, because the US was only just starting to train an army.
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And there was further cause for hope. In 1917, the war in the east was finally bearing fruit.
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The Russian economy had collapsed, the army was in revolt, and the country disintegrated into revolution. Russia's people had been pushed too far. This sudden collapse of a great power should have served as a warning to Ludendorff.
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But it simply didn't register.
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Instead, he saw Russia's revolution as the last chance for a German victory in the west. Ludendorff was able to pull some 40 army divisions out of the east and send them to the Western Front.
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This gave Germany numerical superiority there for the first time since 1914.
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He planned to mobilize these forces in a massive push towards Paris.
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Ludendorff worked relentlessly around the clock, personally supervising strategy and micromanaging logistics and even training.
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Ludendorff was outwardly confident, but as ever, inwardly on edge.
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When asked what would happen if the great offensive failed,
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Ludendorff glowered, then Germany will just have to go under.
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At dawn on the 21st of March 1918, the static trench war of the previous three years would change forever.
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Ludendorff unleashed the Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser's battle.
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Unlike earlier offensives, the artillery softening up was short,
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only five hours to retain surprise. Then the stormtroopers advanced, just behind a carefully calibrated creeping barrage,
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ready to capture the enemy trenches while their defenders were still under cover.
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The push along the Somme was a great success, routing the British Fifth Army.
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Ludendorff's offensive had suddenly broken the stalemate of the trenches.
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The German surge even threatened to split the British army from the French.
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In London, Prime Minister David Lloyd George was sure that would be disastrous.
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On March the 26th, the Allied commanders held a crisis meeting here at Doullens.
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Shells were falling near the town, and the atmosphere was close to panic. Pétain was genuinely demoralized.
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It seemed the British army was falling apart, and he doubted that Haig had any answers.
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Haig was under pressure.
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He knew that many in the War Cabinet in London wanted to sack him, and he had little confidence in the French generals.
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Fat tavern keepers, as he once called them.
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Certainly he lost confidence in Pétain, who seemed to him totally defeatist.
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So the initial exchanges at Doullens were very tense. Haig kept talking about his Fifth Army. Pétain said it no longer existed.
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Eventually, a compromise was thrashed out. The British and French would jointly defend the crucial railway junction at Amiens,
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key to holding their front together, and to coordinate the armies and their bickering commanders, the French general Ferdinand Foch, Pétain's great rival, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces. This was a vital turning point.
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It had taken imminent defeat to make the two nations start fighting as one.
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The Allies finally held the line in sufficient numbers just outside Amiens.
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But in April, Ludendorff mounted a new assault to the north in Flanders,
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firing off some 40,000 gas shells.
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In four months from March to July 1918, he launched five great offensives, completely redrawing the Western Front, which had hardly moved since the end of 1914.
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At one point, the Germans had come within 60 miles of Paris. Yet each stab westwards was weaker than the one before, because Germany was simply running out of men.
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Of the initial assault strength of 1.4 million soldiers, more than one-fifth were killed, wounded or missing after two weeks.
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German morale began to crumble.
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Ludendorff, behind the lines in his headquarters, could not appreciate what was happening to the men.
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He had no experience of the human cost of his strategy, the blood and mud, the cold and wet, the excrement and rotting bodies.
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He read of casualty figures with icy composure.
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War consumes men.
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That is its nature.
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Ludendorff's world was one of crisp uniforms and good dinners,
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a war fought by phone, telegram and dispatches, and marked not by corpses riddled with bullets,
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but maps filled with colored pins.
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But then catastrophically for the most powerful man in Germany,
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the real war suddenly broke through.
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By the roadside, Ludendorff was met by grim-faced officers.
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They walked across a muddy field toward an open grave,
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marked by a rough wooden cross.
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Ludendorff leaned forward to read the inscription in English.
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Here rest two German flying officers.
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A soldier pointed uneasily to where the exhumed bodies lay,
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under a tarpaulin.
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Ludendorff nodded,
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and walked over slowly.
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Germany's war leader stood there pathetically,
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shoulders slumped, fighting back the tears.
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For the first time, Ludendorff was face-to-face with the intimate suffering of war.
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This was about flesh and blood, not just grand strategy.
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Ludendorff had always kept his life in separate compartments.
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But now his grief as a father began to shake his grip as a general.
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While he sought the willpower to cope with war's unknown psychological forces,
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his great offensive was running out of steam.
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With their numbers depleted, many German soldiers deserted en route to the next suicidal assault.
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This was a decisive moment for the success of the German war effort.
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The question was whether Germany's leaders, Ludendorff or his old partner Hindenburg, could see it.
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Ludendorff's intense inner anguish was becoming more and more apparent.
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When one staff officer came to his office to warn him about the collapse of troop morale,
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Ludendorff bawled him out.
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What is the purpose of your drivel?
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What do you expect me to do, make peace at any price?
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Ludendorff was in deep denial.
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And there was no one who could make him rethink.
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Certainly not Hindenburg. His forte was doing what he was told,
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not thinking outside the box.
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Confident and patriotic as ever, Hindenburg offered no alternative as Germany lurched towards disaster.
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On the streets of London, Paris and New York, there was an outpouring of relief. But in Germany, the atmosphere was very different.
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There was relief, yes, that the Great War was finally over.
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But civil war seemed about to begin.
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It started in the port city of Kiel on the North Sea, where sailors mutinied, hoisted the red flag and demanded a socialist republic.
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Within a week, the movement had spread through Germany,
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even down to Catholic conservative Bavaria.
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The common demand was for the Kaiser to abdicate.
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On November the 9th, revolution exploded in hitherto safe Berlin.
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Thousands of workers and their families, unarmed but militant, were marching on the city center.
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Soldiers were deserting to join them.
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Declaring a republic and giving the socialists power seemed the only way to avert a Bolshevik-style revolution.
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Next morning, the Kaiser was driven across the border into neutral Holland,
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where he would spend the rest of his days in exile.
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The abdication paved the way for finally signing the Armistice.
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And Germany's total collapse enabled the Allies to turn the screw,
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imposing the punitive terms that Pétain had proposed when hoping to delay peace.
Topics:Armistice DayWorld War OneErich LudendorffBattle of VerdunBattle of the SommeTannenbergWW1 documentaryFirst World Warmilitary history1918 Armistice
