To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [185]
The Germans suffered half a million casualties in the five months following the launch of their 1918 offensive, with their highly trained storm troopers taking the brunt of the toll. There were few reinforcements left except the overage and the very young, and so the retreat began. Allied troop morale rose with the flood of Americans: every month more than 200,000 in their broad-brimmed hats poured into France. Although many required additional training, to war-weary British and French eyes they seemed astoundingly well fed, almost Olympian. "They looked larger than ordinary men," remembered the writer Vera Brittain, nursing British wounded in France. "Their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed." The Americans were so impatient to fight that the U.S. Army's rear-area support units suffered an epidemic of men "deserting to the front." More than 3,000 of those combat-hungry "deserters" were killed.
The very speed of the German army's advances now left it vulnerable, for it had had no time to construct the concrete and steel machine-gun bunkers, wide fields of barbed wire, and other fortifications that had cost so many Allied lives in more than three years of trench warfare. In mid-July the French and Americans attacked together, pushing the Germans back in a series of battles. During one, Corporal Adolf Hitler got into a fistfight with a newly arrived soldier who insisted it was foolish to keep fighti ng. According to a man in his unit, Hitler "became furious and shouted in a terrible voice that pacifists and shirkers were losing the war."
On August 8, 1918, the British and French launched a powerful new offensive, which caught the Germans off guard because there was no preceding artillery bombardment. Equally surprised was Lloyd George: Haig, flaunting his control of all things military, did not bother to tell his prime minister in advance of the attack. This assault, the Battle of Amiens, offered a foretaste of twentieth-century wars to come: the Allies at last made effective use of tanks, deploying more than 500 of them, newer varieties less prone to break down. (Milner had just been to tank headquarters in France to ride in the latest models.) In the years ahead the speed and armor of the tank would allow it to supplant the cavalry in the age-old quest to transcend the limitations of the earth-bound foot soldier. Tank regiments in some armies would outrage traditionalists by usurping the crossed-swords insignia of the cavalry.
The British had finally learned how to integrate the various new technologies of war: the tanks, to crush barbed wire so the infantry could get through; triangulation spotting of German artillery fire by recorded sound waves, so as to lay down counterfire and knock out enemy guns; manufactured radio traffic, to fool the Germans into thinking large numbers of troops were being moved elsewhere; camouflage, to mislead observation planes; flights by massive fleets of aircraft, to mask the noise of troops moving into position for an attack. Planes were even used to air-drop ammunition to advancing infantry, overcoming the vexing problem of transporting supplies forward across four years' worth of craters, rusted barbed wire, and old trenches. Haig and those around him had at last come to understand that war was now a complex industrial process. Grudgingly, without acknowledging it, he was leaving the era of the horseman behind; the five cavalry divisions once under his command had been quietly reduced to three.
More important than the territory gained in the new offensive was that suddenly the Germans, legendary fighters in this war, were surrendering, often throwing down their rifles and raising their hands when