The answer is probably "very little", but I wonder what a May rising instead of an Easter rising on its own, not even considering the lean of the organizers, would do for Irish socialist sentiment. Having a national touchstone associated with a labor symbol as opposed to a religious one. Very interesting update!
The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe
- Thread starter Curby
- Start date
- Timeline Post-1900
Bisexual-Mart
Far from the shallow ground
- Location
- The Great State of Warshington
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not to mention the possibility of Irish-Americans contributing to the rebuilding of Dublin.
Speaking of Irish-Americans, what about a Boston banker who at about this time IOTL was welcoming a very special baby boy.
Speaking of Irish-Americans, what about a Boston banker who at about this time IOTL was welcoming a very special baby boy.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
I was surprised with A-H actually reforming themselves to a degree.
The Military History of the War, 1917
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
- Pronouns
- He/They
This will be the last update for 1917, since I've come to the conclusion that internal politics and labor unrest in France and Italy are best covered in future posts. This one is a bit shorter than most, since the essential lineaments of the military campaigns of 1917 have already been covered in several of the previous entries. At the very bottom is a comparison of the strength of the various armies compared to OTL; this is important to setting the stage for the battles of 1918.
At this point, we are starting to leave the merely historical and enter the present - or at least, what the individuals in this timeline feel to be of palpable importance to their own lives. Of course, to some extent this applies to the entirety of the war, but it is particularly true of its last few years. Consequently, I'm going to give up the device of the omnipresent, omniscient narrator for future entries; more posts will be framed as debates between historians rather than as mere neutral retellings of events. Ideology will lay a thicker and more lustrous sheen on how the vast struggles of 1918 are retold. In a sense, I think this better approximates the actual spirit of the era; it was a time when it was difficult to be fully apolitical. Civilians and soldiers alike feel the need to take a stand, and their perception of events are indelibly linked to the positions they stake out. It was impossible to live through these events as a mere observer; it stands to reason that it is impossible to understand and narrate them as mere neutral spectators.
Thank you again to everyone who has been reading and providing feedback on the timeline. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm excited to hear what people think about the events to come! I've added a new poll at the top of the timeline to gauge what readers are most interested in hearing about; if it leans in one particular direction, it will probably structure the way that I do future updates.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1917 was the first year in which all of the great powers abandoned the hopes of winning the war in a decisive offensive campaign. Its principal battles occurred in peripheral theatres, with smaller numbers of troops and more limited goals. In the wake of the mammoth campaigns of Lille and Verdun, none of the principal combatants felt comfortable launching another grand attack in the west.
The British did win a number of victories in the winter. But they were incapable of winning the war alone, without the support of their exhausted allies. In truth, the decision to direct their reserves toward the Balkans rather than France was an indication that even the British believed that there could be no decisive, war-winning victory anymore. In 1917, the Entente and Central Powers targeted each other's allies, attempting to knock out the weaker members of the opposing coalition so that they could more easily concentrate their forces on the stronger ones.
Insofar as this was the strategy, none of the great powers were successful. Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey all weathered assaults from superior armies. Some of these minor powers suffered worse than others, but all were able to remain in the war. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the year came in March, when an Austro-German force defeated in detail several Greek and Romanian armies outside of Sofia, breaking the siege of the city and ensuring that Bulgaria stayed in the fight.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff believed that the "eastern problem" of Romania had to be dealt with as soon as possible; they worried that more Romanian successes might prompt Russia to launch an offensive. In this, they likely overestimated the morale of the average Russian soldier, but it ended up dictating German war policy throughout the year regardless. Germany and Austria agreed to a set of offensives in May, one to retake eastern bulgaria and split the Entente forces in Constantinople from those in Romania, and another that would drive into the Po Valley and force an Italian surrender.
The Italian offensive achieved much more immediate success than the Bulgarian one. On May 7th, twin assaults began in the Trentino and Isonzo, the former toward Asiago and the latter toward Caparetto. For three days, dug-in Italian forces stubbornly resisted the assault in Isonzo until the mass use of poison gas drove them out of the trenches. The breakthrough in the north happened on the very first day, and Asiago was seized on the 11th. News of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Austro-German mountaineers led to panic among the Italian soldiers in the Isonzo sector, who feared encirclement from the west. Udine fell by the 11th; by the 19th, Austrian forces had crossed the Piave, threatening the cities of Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. If they broke through here, the way would be open to the rest of the industrial Po Valley. Attempts to relieve the struggling Italians were foiled by the Irish revolt and a Central Powers offensive in Bulgaria.
The Balkan offensive ran into much more trouble than the Italian one. A week into the operation, there was no decisive breakout by the Central Powers. Well-equipped Romanian and British troops repeatedly threw back waves of German and Austrian soldiers advancing toward Pleven and Pazardzhik. It was only Romanian reluctance to divert its reserves to Bulgaria and British logistical trouble which eventually forced the Entente armies in Bulgaria to retreat.
This was not a rout. The retreat of Romanian-British forces was an orderly, fighting defense which inflicted crushing casualties on the invaders, particularly the Austrians, who were still not as well-equipped as their German counterparts. British forces in the region were able to hold onto the Ottoman city of Adrianople, while Romanian forces and a British army entrenched in Dobrudja. The remainder of the Romanian army successfully retreated behind the Danube river well before any attempt to bridge it could be attempted.
The Greek Army was missing from these operations, largely because Greece proper was in a low-level civil war. Peasant revolts in the mountainous north disrupted the army's supply chain and forced it to divert divisions to its rear. The ruling government of Venizelos was wracked by assassinations of cabinet ministers, labor stoppages, and food deficits. In the event of a concerted German-Austrian assault, the nation may very well have been forced to surrender, but neither the German nor the Austrian command considered it an important enough target.
In Italy, the valiant defense of several reserve mountaineer divisions outside of Vicenza bought enough time for France to transfer eight divisions to shore up Italian morale. By June 29th, the new front stabilized along an axis that ran in the west from Verdona through Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. The eastern portion of this defensive line was the most vulnerable to assault; the Italian government feared that another Central Powers offensive would force it to surrender Venice.
Although the Austrians hoped to dedicate the next phase of the offensive to Italy, Ludendorff believed it was still imperative to deal with Romania. In mid-august came a fresh offensive. In the west, a mixed Austro-German army invaded Transylvania, targeting heavily defended mountain passes held by elite Romanian troops. Further south, the Bulgarians assaulted Dobrudja, while Austrian troops stationed in Eastern Galicia and Western Ukraine marched into Moldova.
Falkenhayn's western armies found themselves thrown back time and again from the entrenched Romanian troops in Transylvania. In the northeast, an Austrian column led by Franz Confrad von hötzendorf made its way from Galicia into Moldovia, but was plagued by supply problems and guerilla activity. On the 21st, the German high command considered calling off the assault, but Conrad assured them that his army would soon break out of the forests of Moldavia into Wallachia, rendering the position of the Romanian mountaineers in Transylvania untenable.
By the 24th, Conrad had indeed made some progress in clearing Moldavia of its British-Romanian defenders; Jassy fell on the 22nd, and Kishenev two days later. But his efforts were soon rendered futile by a mutiny in the exhausted Bulgarian Army, many of whose soldiers had been fighting for over five years. Taking advantage of the chaos, two Romanian-British armies counterattacked, decimating a Bulgarian division, capturing several more, and then heading south towards Varna.
Shortly thereafter, the OHL called off the assault, relieved Falkenhayn of his command, and placed August von Mackensen in charge of halting the counteroffensive in the south. Meanwhile, the British Army in Dobrudja swung north to confront Conrad's force; Conrad, still confident of his position, ignored the instructions of the high command and continued south toward the town of Focsani. Romanian reserves released from Transylvania cut into his northern flank, while a British assault fixed his army in place. By the time he ordered his army to retreat, Romanian soldiers occupied much of the position to his rear. The battle of Foscani led to the loss of over 100,000 Austrian troops, the vast majority of them captured. Shortly after the defeat, Conrad von Hotzendorf was dismissed from the Austrian General Staff.
The failure of the Romanian offensive led the German general staff to shift its troops over to the defensive until a peace deal with Russia could be secured. It was widely believed that the Russian government would soon collapse, which would provide another opening to begin negotiations. Increasingly, hopes were placed in the upcoming campaign of submarine warfare, which high command believed could force the western powers into a harsh peace without requiring a costly offensive in France.
In reality, Britain was aware of the possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare for some time. Suspicions were first raised when German submarine activity declined precipitously in March and April despite the imposition of the blockade, prompting British naval officers to speculate about a future campaign of more concerted submarine warfare. British intelligence later revealed a build-up in submarine manufacturing in Germany. In July, a joint franco-british offensive was planned into Flanders to seize the Atlantic Ports from which German submarines operate, though it was a mostly hypothetical operation with no set date.
Then, in October, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare actually began. 165 submarines operating mainly from Flemish ports began to target merchant shipping in the English Channel and Atlantic. The insurrectionary activity in Saxony and Berlin convinced the British high command to push forward the planned Flanders offensive. It was hoped that low morale among the Germans would allow for a quick breakthrough. Massing in Ypres, two french armies and six British divisions prepared for the assault. By the time they were ready on October 23rd, the October Rising in Germany had been largely suppressed. But the entente had another trick up their sleeve: the first combat use of the new Franco-British landship, a hulking behemoth of mobile armor armed with the British 6-pounder naval gun and several machine guns. While its reliability and actual combat effectiveness left a great deal to be desired, the mass deployment of the vehicles had a crushing effect on German morale. Over the next month, the bloodiest battle since Verdun unfolded on the western front as the entente seized around half of the Flanders ports, creating massive logistical problems for German submarine operations.
Compared to OTL...
The German Army is around the same strength, having taken around 2-3% less casualties.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is considerably stronger, having suffered around 25% less casualties. It is also somewhat better equipped.
The Bulgarian Army is incomparably weaker: years of fighting have depleted its manpower reserves.
The Turkish Army is considerably weaker. It has taken around 25% more casualties, and is by this point much worse equipped than any other army.
The French Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties; they are beginning to have trouble replenishing battlefield losses. It is slightly worse equipped; the French government is in a worse fiscal situation, meaning munitions production is starting to face some financial bottlenecks.
The British Army is considerably stronger, with more enlisted men, more artillery pieces and shells available, and around 15% less casualties taken.
The Russian Army is considerably weaker, having suffered around 25% more captured, injured, and killed soldiers compared to our timeline.
The Italian Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties. It is around as well-equipped as IOTL.
The Romanian Army is considerably stronger. It is around 20% larger, and much better equipped than IOTL.
At this point, we are starting to leave the merely historical and enter the present - or at least, what the individuals in this timeline feel to be of palpable importance to their own lives. Of course, to some extent this applies to the entirety of the war, but it is particularly true of its last few years. Consequently, I'm going to give up the device of the omnipresent, omniscient narrator for future entries; more posts will be framed as debates between historians rather than as mere neutral retellings of events. Ideology will lay a thicker and more lustrous sheen on how the vast struggles of 1918 are retold. In a sense, I think this better approximates the actual spirit of the era; it was a time when it was difficult to be fully apolitical. Civilians and soldiers alike feel the need to take a stand, and their perception of events are indelibly linked to the positions they stake out. It was impossible to live through these events as a mere observer; it stands to reason that it is impossible to understand and narrate them as mere neutral spectators.
Thank you again to everyone who has been reading and providing feedback on the timeline. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm excited to hear what people think about the events to come! I've added a new poll at the top of the timeline to gauge what readers are most interested in hearing about; if it leans in one particular direction, it will probably structure the way that I do future updates.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Military History of the War, 1917
1917 was the first year in which all of the great powers abandoned the hopes of winning the war in a decisive offensive campaign. Its principal battles occurred in peripheral theatres, with smaller numbers of troops and more limited goals. In the wake of the mammoth campaigns of Lille and Verdun, none of the principal combatants felt comfortable launching another grand attack in the west.
The British did win a number of victories in the winter. But they were incapable of winning the war alone, without the support of their exhausted allies. In truth, the decision to direct their reserves toward the Balkans rather than France was an indication that even the British believed that there could be no decisive, war-winning victory anymore. In 1917, the Entente and Central Powers targeted each other's allies, attempting to knock out the weaker members of the opposing coalition so that they could more easily concentrate their forces on the stronger ones.
Insofar as this was the strategy, none of the great powers were successful. Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey all weathered assaults from superior armies. Some of these minor powers suffered worse than others, but all were able to remain in the war. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the year came in March, when an Austro-German force defeated in detail several Greek and Romanian armies outside of Sofia, breaking the siege of the city and ensuring that Bulgaria stayed in the fight.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff believed that the "eastern problem" of Romania had to be dealt with as soon as possible; they worried that more Romanian successes might prompt Russia to launch an offensive. In this, they likely overestimated the morale of the average Russian soldier, but it ended up dictating German war policy throughout the year regardless. Germany and Austria agreed to a set of offensives in May, one to retake eastern bulgaria and split the Entente forces in Constantinople from those in Romania, and another that would drive into the Po Valley and force an Italian surrender.
The Italian offensive achieved much more immediate success than the Bulgarian one. On May 7th, twin assaults began in the Trentino and Isonzo, the former toward Asiago and the latter toward Caparetto. For three days, dug-in Italian forces stubbornly resisted the assault in Isonzo until the mass use of poison gas drove them out of the trenches. The breakthrough in the north happened on the very first day, and Asiago was seized on the 11th. News of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Austro-German mountaineers led to panic among the Italian soldiers in the Isonzo sector, who feared encirclement from the west. Udine fell by the 11th; by the 19th, Austrian forces had crossed the Piave, threatening the cities of Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. If they broke through here, the way would be open to the rest of the industrial Po Valley. Attempts to relieve the struggling Italians were foiled by the Irish revolt and a Central Powers offensive in Bulgaria.
The Balkan offensive ran into much more trouble than the Italian one. A week into the operation, there was no decisive breakout by the Central Powers. Well-equipped Romanian and British troops repeatedly threw back waves of German and Austrian soldiers advancing toward Pleven and Pazardzhik. It was only Romanian reluctance to divert its reserves to Bulgaria and British logistical trouble which eventually forced the Entente armies in Bulgaria to retreat.
This was not a rout. The retreat of Romanian-British forces was an orderly, fighting defense which inflicted crushing casualties on the invaders, particularly the Austrians, who were still not as well-equipped as their German counterparts. British forces in the region were able to hold onto the Ottoman city of Adrianople, while Romanian forces and a British army entrenched in Dobrudja. The remainder of the Romanian army successfully retreated behind the Danube river well before any attempt to bridge it could be attempted.
The Greek Army was missing from these operations, largely because Greece proper was in a low-level civil war. Peasant revolts in the mountainous north disrupted the army's supply chain and forced it to divert divisions to its rear. The ruling government of Venizelos was wracked by assassinations of cabinet ministers, labor stoppages, and food deficits. In the event of a concerted German-Austrian assault, the nation may very well have been forced to surrender, but neither the German nor the Austrian command considered it an important enough target.
In Italy, the valiant defense of several reserve mountaineer divisions outside of Vicenza bought enough time for France to transfer eight divisions to shore up Italian morale. By June 29th, the new front stabilized along an axis that ran in the west from Verdona through Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. The eastern portion of this defensive line was the most vulnerable to assault; the Italian government feared that another Central Powers offensive would force it to surrender Venice.
Although the Austrians hoped to dedicate the next phase of the offensive to Italy, Ludendorff believed it was still imperative to deal with Romania. In mid-august came a fresh offensive. In the west, a mixed Austro-German army invaded Transylvania, targeting heavily defended mountain passes held by elite Romanian troops. Further south, the Bulgarians assaulted Dobrudja, while Austrian troops stationed in Eastern Galicia and Western Ukraine marched into Moldova.
Falkenhayn's western armies found themselves thrown back time and again from the entrenched Romanian troops in Transylvania. In the northeast, an Austrian column led by Franz Confrad von hötzendorf made its way from Galicia into Moldovia, but was plagued by supply problems and guerilla activity. On the 21st, the German high command considered calling off the assault, but Conrad assured them that his army would soon break out of the forests of Moldavia into Wallachia, rendering the position of the Romanian mountaineers in Transylvania untenable.
By the 24th, Conrad had indeed made some progress in clearing Moldavia of its British-Romanian defenders; Jassy fell on the 22nd, and Kishenev two days later. But his efforts were soon rendered futile by a mutiny in the exhausted Bulgarian Army, many of whose soldiers had been fighting for over five years. Taking advantage of the chaos, two Romanian-British armies counterattacked, decimating a Bulgarian division, capturing several more, and then heading south towards Varna.
Shortly thereafter, the OHL called off the assault, relieved Falkenhayn of his command, and placed August von Mackensen in charge of halting the counteroffensive in the south. Meanwhile, the British Army in Dobrudja swung north to confront Conrad's force; Conrad, still confident of his position, ignored the instructions of the high command and continued south toward the town of Focsani. Romanian reserves released from Transylvania cut into his northern flank, while a British assault fixed his army in place. By the time he ordered his army to retreat, Romanian soldiers occupied much of the position to his rear. The battle of Foscani led to the loss of over 100,000 Austrian troops, the vast majority of them captured. Shortly after the defeat, Conrad von Hotzendorf was dismissed from the Austrian General Staff.
The failure of the Romanian offensive led the German general staff to shift its troops over to the defensive until a peace deal with Russia could be secured. It was widely believed that the Russian government would soon collapse, which would provide another opening to begin negotiations. Increasingly, hopes were placed in the upcoming campaign of submarine warfare, which high command believed could force the western powers into a harsh peace without requiring a costly offensive in France.
In reality, Britain was aware of the possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare for some time. Suspicions were first raised when German submarine activity declined precipitously in March and April despite the imposition of the blockade, prompting British naval officers to speculate about a future campaign of more concerted submarine warfare. British intelligence later revealed a build-up in submarine manufacturing in Germany. In July, a joint franco-british offensive was planned into Flanders to seize the Atlantic Ports from which German submarines operate, though it was a mostly hypothetical operation with no set date.
Then, in October, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare actually began. 165 submarines operating mainly from Flemish ports began to target merchant shipping in the English Channel and Atlantic. The insurrectionary activity in Saxony and Berlin convinced the British high command to push forward the planned Flanders offensive. It was hoped that low morale among the Germans would allow for a quick breakthrough. Massing in Ypres, two french armies and six British divisions prepared for the assault. By the time they were ready on October 23rd, the October Rising in Germany had been largely suppressed. But the entente had another trick up their sleeve: the first combat use of the new Franco-British landship, a hulking behemoth of mobile armor armed with the British 6-pounder naval gun and several machine guns. While its reliability and actual combat effectiveness left a great deal to be desired, the mass deployment of the vehicles had a crushing effect on German morale. Over the next month, the bloodiest battle since Verdun unfolded on the western front as the entente seized around half of the Flanders ports, creating massive logistical problems for German submarine operations.
Note on the state of the armies by the end of 1917
Compared to OTL...
The German Army is around the same strength, having taken around 2-3% less casualties.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is considerably stronger, having suffered around 25% less casualties. It is also somewhat better equipped.
The Bulgarian Army is incomparably weaker: years of fighting have depleted its manpower reserves.
The Turkish Army is considerably weaker. It has taken around 25% more casualties, and is by this point much worse equipped than any other army.
The French Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties; they are beginning to have trouble replenishing battlefield losses. It is slightly worse equipped; the French government is in a worse fiscal situation, meaning munitions production is starting to face some financial bottlenecks.
The British Army is considerably stronger, with more enlisted men, more artillery pieces and shells available, and around 15% less casualties taken.
The Russian Army is considerably weaker, having suffered around 25% more captured, injured, and killed soldiers compared to our timeline.
The Italian Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties. It is around as well-equipped as IOTL.
The Romanian Army is considerably stronger. It is around 20% larger, and much better equipped than IOTL.
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- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
Will we see a discussion on the Health situation in Europe? With Turkey, France, Russia and Italy suffering more casualties will there be a breakdown in public health and the agriculture sectors?
Bisexual-Mart
Far from the shallow ground
- Location
- The Great State of Warshington
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Romanian Army being better equpped leads me to wonder if Romania is going to have a better go of it in TTL's 20th century than in OTL's 20th century.
Obviously, anything that avoids Nicolae Ceausecu's rise to power, is going to make Romania's 20th century better.
My (admittedly semi-serious) idea is that with Italy and France in ruins at the end of the War ITTL, instead of Peugeot, Renault, Citroen, and Fiat, we see Dacia.
Obviously, anything that avoids Nicolae Ceausecu's rise to power, is going to make Romania's 20th century better.
My (admittedly semi-serious) idea is that with Italy and France in ruins at the end of the War ITTL, instead of Peugeot, Renault, Citroen, and Fiat, we see Dacia.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
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- Pronouns
- He/They
Ireland will indeed be taking a rather different path ITTL. The figure of Larkin (who shortly after the rising is captured, tried, and executed) is obviously going to be important, but the largest force shaping the Irish Independence struggle here is the much harsher regime of British wartime austerity. In practice, this means that economic concerns over the militarization of labor and declining standards of living play a much more prominent role in the independence struggle; as unrestricted submarine warfare picks up and starts causing real problems for Britain, matters are only going to get more inflamed.
Of course, the destruction of much of Dublin will also set the revolutionaries on a more radical course, though I think this is (mostly) a point of continuity to OTL, in which it was also the British response rather than the initial rising that caused Irish opinion to harden.
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I think this, plus the most significant Irish Republican being syndicalist, are what'll probably be what pushes the Irish independence into a much more radical far left slant. It's one thing to have your kid conscripted in an occupiers war, its another when you have to deal with an increase in taxes and services being cut while the standard of living goes down.
Well the difference is that the British didn't level the entirety of Dublin during the Easter Rising like they did in the May rising. During the Easter Rising the British military only razed the Central parts of Dublin. While this caused public opinion to turn against the British, I think them razing all of Dublin is what's going to make public opinion turn against the British much quicker and make the Irish Republican movement much more radicalized. Another difference is that due to how organized the May rising was, the British may decide to initiate a harsher crackdown upon the Irish Republicans which may also further radicalize the Irish independence movement and cement Anti-British sentiments.
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The Ludendorff Dictatorship: Three Perspectives.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
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In a Communist Revolution, individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also merely to safeguard their very existence.
-Karl Marx
Neumann, Franz. 1942. "Capital's True Face: On The Ludendorff Dictatorship." The Journal of Social History.
-Karl Marx
Neumann, Franz. 1942. "Capital's True Face: On The Ludendorff Dictatorship." The Journal of Social History.
The Ludendorff Dictatorship arose as an emergency government of a bourgeoisie frightened by the prospect of imminent revolution. The proletarianization of German society and the quick advance of revolutionary consciousness necessitated a military government to discipline and stymie the self-activity of the working masses. With the German laborer refusing to give his consent to the war, parliament failed to be an adequate tool of class power; no longer capable of securing the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, it now fell to the military to enforce it at the end of a bayonet. Ludendorff's new government included the industrialists Hugo Stinnes and Alfred Hugenberg, as well as the reactionary catholic trade unionist Adam Stegerwald. Not content to simply control the machinery of state through finance-power, the bourgeois now seized its commanding heights; it now increasingly bore the mark of direct class rule.
Far from auguring an end to the worker's resistance, the October insurrection merely heralded its most radical phase. The arrest or exile of the leaders of the worker's movement did not halt the spread of revolutionary consciousness or the self-organization of the working class. All through 1918, strikes, slowdowns, and wrecking hampered the German war machine, even amidst increasingly draconian labor discipline. The attempt of right-wing, social-fascist elements to wrest control of the trade union apparatus failed time and again despite their seizure of the leadership.
Shortly after the October Insurrection, the social-fascist trade union leader Carl Legien used the opportunity to purge the upper heights of the trade union bureaucracy of left-wing, antiwar officials. In their place were the lackeys of Cunow, Haenisch, and Lensch. When workers made their discontent known through a series of wildcat strikes in January, they were crushed with the assistance of the freekorp brigades. A series of "reforms" were pushed through that same month which curtailed the democratic election of shop stewards and union delegates while requiring the leadership to be consulted before a strike would be considered authorized by the union.
The centralization of the trade unions and consolidation of power in the hands of the social-fascist clique forced the workers into other modes of self-organization. This was the immediate impetus of the council movement. The first councils were simply unofficial meetings of workers, typically held in factories in which a trusted shop steward had been recalled. Workers would designate a new steward (sometimes, but not always, the old one) who would be in charge of establishing contacts with other councils. The first general meeting of the revolutionary shop stewards occurred in Berlin in July 1918.
Over time, the role and purposes of the councils grew. By the middle of 1918, minutes of council-meetings indicated that they typically stretched upward of an hour and dealt with issues both mundane and political. New methods of resistance to the war were frequently discussed, as was news that was censored in the war-time press, such as the trade union reforms, battle-field losses, and events in revolutionary russia. Not infrequently, the revolutionary shop stewards were interrogated about their progress and replaced with a different member of the council if it was found unsatisfactory. A growing proportion of the councils were dedicated to the reading of Marxist theory, both in the form of the traditional Marxist mainstays of left-wing social democrats and the new pamphlets smuggled in from Russia and written predominantly by the left-communists Luxemburg and Zetkin.
Ludendorff's government had difficulty preventing the council-meetings, which often occurred outside of the workplace in the domicile of the local steward. Instead, increasing pressure was placed on Legien and the trade unions to enforce labor discipline and halt the spree of wildcat strikes that were slowing down industrial production. The trade unions were only partially successful in this task, and their efforts ended up unwittingly radicalizing many of the mid-level trade union officials. Centrist in their political orientation, many were radicalized by the mass purge of their superiors and the role they were meant to play in maintaining labor discipline. A number of links were forged in late 1918 between these officials and the revolutionary shop stewards.
We should not neglect the growing unrest spreading in the traditionally reformist and bourgeois trade unions. With the threat of social revolution still present, Adam Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, pressed for the merger of all of Germany's traditionally non-socialist unions. These were principally the nationalist-reactionary German National Clerks Union, the progressive-liberal Hirsch-Duncker Unions, and finally the largest grouping, the Catholic Association of Trade Unions. The planned merger ran into problems from its very beginning. The previous two years witnessed the National Clerks Union steadily bleed membership to the Hirsch-Duncker Unions as white-collar discontent with the war metastasized. Many of these union members were also a part of the now disbanded national-social association. They refused to affiliate with the nationalist clerks union until Stegerwald agreed to use the newly-formed union to press for the government to relax press censorship and call the Reichstag back into session. In practice, this was an impossible demand for Stegerwald to fulfill.
Although the leaders of the Catholic Trade Union movement were aligned behind Stegerwald's push for a merger, many of the rank and file were more skeptical. The key figure in coordinating opposition to the war among Catholic workers was Vitus Heller. Prior to the war, Heller worked as a secretary in the Volskweiren, an anti-socialist catholic worker's association. His service in the war and the dictatorial repression of the Ludendorff regime radicalized his politics. After being discharged in 1918, he returned to his work in the Volksweiren but began writing a secretly distributed newspaper, Das Neue Volk. By the end of the year, the paper was advocating for the formation of a united front of socialist and catholic workers to oppose the Ludendorff dictatorship; in declamatory, pugilistic articles, it denounced Stegerwald's role in oppressing the catholic worker and called for a break with the Catholic Centre Party.
In September 1918, Heller's Christian-Socialist group organized a series of strikes to protest the planned merger between the Catholic Trade Unions and National Clerks Union. The wave of strike action rapidly spread to many workers outside the group's reach; many likely did not know of the goals of the original strike, but instead viewed the agitation as a means to protest the labor mobilization bill and worsening workplace conditions. Stegerwald was forced by Ludendorff himself to meet the primary demand of the strikers and call off the planned merger of the unions.
The Trade Union Struggles of 1918 were conditioned by a government that refused to brook any compromise, however meager, between labor and capital.The tyrannical labor mobilization bill was put to its full effect in the war's final years, as military officials increasingly oversaw industrial production, trying workers who did not submit to labor discipline in military courts. All available indices demonstrate that the pace of this repression picked up considerably in 1918; more than double the number of workers were tried in military courts than in the previous year, and more than triple were given prison sentences. The previous compromises forged by the centrist social democrats were outright ignored by the dictatorship, which expelled centrist and left-wing trade unionists from the war planning boards, replacing them with Legien's compliant lackeys. Is it any wonder that many workers lost faith for good in a trade union movement that had been utterly co-opted by the bourgeois state?
Fischer, Fritz. 1961. "Consent and Coercion in the Ludendorff Dictatorship." in Reassessing the Great War.
…Previous works of history have treated the two years of the Ludendorff dictatorship as an alien imposition upon a German society eager for revolution. This account contains a grain of truth; the Ludendorff dictatorship was certainly sustained in large measure by violent repression, but it was not and likely could not have maintained power by force alone. A close examination of the era reveals the cooperation of large sectors of the patriotic middle and working class; national liberals continued their support of the government, patriotic movements arose with rapidly growing memberships, and the parties of the progressive left had trouble raising support for measures to protest the military dictatorship.
…The question of much previous historiography has been: why did the Ludendorff regime last as long as it did if it was sustained primarily by repression? In light of the unsatisfactory answers thus far proffered, we have changed the terms of the question: If the Ludendorff regime did indeed have the support of many Germans, what precisely sustained this support? Here, we must be attentive to the growth of the Freekorps movement, the emergence of national-socialism, and the regime's efforts to pacify domestic discontent through propaganda.
1918 witnessed the proliferation of clandestine worker councils, middle-class corresponding societies, and an internal war within many of the main German trade unions over control of the labor movement. Yet concurrent with each of these developments were opposing ones: the politicization of German society was not so much a polarization against the government as it was a splitting of individuals into two opposed groups. The domestic political opposition to the antiwar movement was certainly massaged by the government, but the sentiments and loyalties it depended on would have existed without Ludendorff and Hindenburg.
These sentiments were the following: fear of social revolution, loyalty to the crown, identification with the martial heroism of Ludendurff, and a belief that the war could still be won at an acceptable cost. As the workers movement gathered steam in the final two years of the war, support for the government often did not indicate belief in the war, but instead resolute opposition to the prospect of worker's power. Of course, by the end of 1919 a growing number of even middle-class Germans had concluded that social revolution was preferable to a continuation of the war; but in the early days of the Ludendorff government, it could count on broad support among the Protestant middle-class.
The October Insurrection convinced many Germans of the need for a more stern, disciplined government to maintain order in the country. Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the progressive wing of the Catholic Centre Party, consistently failed to muster support for his movement to reopen the Reichstag. Frequent but unorganized strikes by workers calling for the reopening of the Reichstag were rarely joined by larger protests. Insofar as middle-class antiwar activity occurred, it was in the form of secret letter-writing. The "corresponding societies" which formed during 1918 did attest to a rise in antiwar feeling, but their failure to devise any political programme attest to a lack of real conviction and organization.
By any accounting, the national-socialist leagues and freekorps brigades had orders of magnitude more members throughout 1918 than any of the antiwar groupings. Booming membership in each of these organizations attest to the durability of pro-war sentiment in the German body politic. Lensch, Cunow, and Haenisch's right-wing social nationalist clique were the force behind the national-socialist leagues. Originally aimed at the blue-collar urban workers who were the core of the labor movement, they ended up having most success with patriotic clerks, secretaries, small businessmen, and farmers.The failure of the recruiting drives for the group in factories, mines, and technical institutes indicate the strength of antiwar feeling among the socialist working class and segments of the educated middle class; conversely, the phenomenal growth of the leagues among farmers and the petite-bourgeoisie demonstrates that the regime could still had a base of support among the masses.
What precisely was "National-Socialism"? The historians of the Socialist Republic have been surprisingly silent on this matter; even many Luxemburgists have been hesitant to treat National-Socialism as anything other than an aberration in the development of Social Democracy. It is true that Lensch, Cunow, and Haenisch took leadership in extraordinary circumstances; it is equally true, however, that they constituted a bloc of the party which became increasingly influential in the years leading up to the war. The emergence of corporatist social fascism was a direct consequence of adopting a policy of triangulation toward German Imperialism; it is bound up with the politics of Ebert and Scheidemann, however much they would dissociate themselves from the authoritarian nationalism of the Lensch-Cunow-Haenish Trio.
National-Socialism substituted the solidarities of the nation for those of class. It preached a doctrine of conciliation with the German bourgeoisie, and held that socialism could only be achieved in the framework of a national community. War was believed to have a purifying, unifying effect on the community. There is little daylight between national-socialism and the "Prussian Socialism" of Oswald Spengler, save that the former had a modestly more proletarian social base.
The principal purpose of the national-socialist leagues was to serve as a propaganda arm of the Ludendorff government. Their marches and donation drives served to spur flagging patriotic sentiment and mobilize resources for the war effort. They also acted not infrequently as strikebreakers, and appeared alongside the freekorps as a paramilitary arm of the government. Their activity surged throughout 1918, before beginning to decline in 1919, at first slowly and then precipitously.
The more well-known group is the freekorps brigades. Composed at first of demobilized veterans or right-wing soldiers given a temporary reprieve from the front, they recruited mostly from the upper-class youth. In contrast to the corporatist social fascism of the national-socialists, the symbolism and ideology of the freekorps expressed loyalty to the old imperial order. They were also far better organized and funded than the national-socialists, and despite their smaller numbers, they were a far more disciplined and effective paramilitary force.
The Ludendorff Government acted to shore up its legitimacy at the beginning of 1918 by creating a National Council. This body had real power to run the day-to-day affairs of the country, but its decisions had to be approved by the OHL, and it possessed no executive authority. Its first chair, Gustav Stresemann, was from the left wing of the National Liberals. By all accounts, Stresemann was an effective administrator who believed fervently in the importance of his work. His success in rationalizing food distribution and correcting the failures of the Hindenburg programme were both instrumental for the German war effort. It was also Stresemann's diplomacy that convinced the Catholic Centre Party and Progressive Liberals that Ludendorff was indeed prepared to step down from power following victory in the war.
Other appointees to the national council included the Catholic Trade Unionist Adam Stegerwald, the press baron Alfred Hugenberg, and the industrialist Hugo Stinnes. The importance of the appointment of these latter two figures should not be overestimated; each served as advisors to Ludendorff for the previous two years, and the commanding positions they already occupied in the war planning boards meant that their appointment to the governing council was more a symbolic gesture than anything else.
It is also difficult to underestimate the effects of the military successes of 1918 in boosting civilian morale. After a year of sclerotic campaigning, Ludendorff managed to knock two of Germany's adversaries out of the war in quick succession. Many were convinced that victory was finally at hand, especially when news leaked of peace talks between the Entente and Germany…
Bamgarten, Frida. 1961. "Against the New Revisionism." In Reassessing the Great War.
A spate of recent articles argue that the Ludendorff dictatorship was maintained as much through consent as coercion. This represents an important challenge to the standard great war historiography, which contends that repression replaced propaganda as the primary means of social control in the second half of the war. Ludendorf's rise to power has long been understood as the archetypal example of this process. Arguments that the dictatorship was supported by large segments of the patriotic middle and working classes, if successful, would force historians to rethink some of their larger assumptions about the war. It therefore seems prudent to address them.
…One of the key premises of the revisionist challenge is the so-called "Middle-class panic" thesis - the notion that, in the aftermath of the failed insurrections of October 1917, the non-socialist masses rallied to the government. Despite the relative quiescence of middle-class protest throughout 1918, there is little evidence that antiwar sentiment was substantially enervated by the fear of social revolution. In fact, 1918 witnessed the quickest growth of the socialist white-collar unions on record, and a hemorrhaging in members of the nationalist clerks association. Only a few diaries and private letters indicate a genuine reversal of opinion; instead, among the anti-war middle-class, much more common throughout 1918 were feelings of revulsion for both the Ludendorff dictatorship and the Socialist movement. There was a growing fear, not entirely unfounded, that the Ludendorff government was in fact paving the way for socialist revolution.
How are we to make sense, then, of the failure of middle-class groups to engage in meaningful political activity throughout 1918? In part, this may be explained by the loss of organization: the disbanding of the national-social association closed off the primary channel for non-socialist opposition to the war. Unlike the socialist workers, they did not have the same traditions and habits of collective organization, which meant that rebuilding networks of resistance was more difficult. Many were also less certain of their convictions and more hesitant to engage in illegal activity, though this compunction began to fade by the end of 1918.
Revisionists frequently cite the freekorps brigades and national-socialist leagues as evidence of the broad support for the regime. The latter group were certainly large in number, but there is not much indication that they were anything more than the nationalist fringe of German society. Many of their members were longstanding participants in the annexationist pan-german league; there was some working-class participation, but this remained a decided minority which steadily declined throughout the organization's existence. Similar points could be made about the Freekorps, which represented a small social constituency that was already liable to support Ludendorff.
…Why has the myth of mass enthusiasm for Ludendorff's government exercised such a hold over the imagination of European historians? Firstly, because it offers a convenient explanation of the regime's improbable survival, which in truth had more to do with the failure of the socialist movement to muster coordinated resistance following the decapitation of its leadership. Secondly, because it demonstrates the reactionary proclivities of the middle classes and offers a warning about the pitfalls of social nationalism, two lessons well in-line with Orthodox Luxemburgist historiography.
Finally, the changing popular responses to the war in 1918 and 1919 might appear to give credence to the revisionist interpretation. In 1919, a more broad-based opposition to the government suddenly burst forth after a year in which resistance was expressed almost solely through wildcat strikes and industrial action. For revisionists, this is easily understood as a change from tepid support to boisterous opposition. However, it is better viewed as a shift from disengagement to active political struggle. The Ludendorff Dictatorship never had broad support, but it could count on the apathy, fear, and propriety of enough of the population to maintain its hold on power throughout 1918. In the following year, the fear of starvation and illness eclipsed the fear of repression, and the Dictatorship collapsed under the weight of a renewed proletarian assault.
I like the multiple perspectives being shown here. The most interesting thing in history has always been the "why" of things, the story; having such radical differences in opinion even as they all agree on the dry facts is like catnip to me.
One thing I find interesting is how they're saying "fascist" instead of another term such as "reactionary" or similar. I had been under the impression that post-revolution Europe included Italy, which would seemingly preclude the Fascists from ever coming to power and therefore keep their name from being attached to the movement. I noticed that the proto-Nazis were always called "national socialists", presumably because they stopped being relevant before they could make a big historical splash, but something kept the fascists from the same fate. Did Mussolini trigger his coup early? Did he escape to become a philosopher? Did someone else decide to use the same imagery, possibly inspired by the Italians? Did the initial revolution miss Italy altogether? I can hardly wait to find out.
One thing I find interesting is how they're saying "fascist" instead of another term such as "reactionary" or similar. I had been under the impression that post-revolution Europe included Italy, which would seemingly preclude the Fascists from ever coming to power and therefore keep their name from being attached to the movement. I noticed that the proto-Nazis were always called "national socialists", presumably because they stopped being relevant before they could make a big historical splash, but something kept the fascists from the same fate. Did Mussolini trigger his coup early? Did he escape to become a philosopher? Did someone else decide to use the same imagery, possibly inspired by the Italians? Did the initial revolution miss Italy altogether? I can hardly wait to find out.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
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Thank you!
A couple notes on national socialism and fascism, ITTL and IOTL.
The "National Socialists" here aren't those of our timeline. Of course, the choice of that particular name is hardly coincidental, and indicates the complicity of some of the Social Democrats in some pretty dark ideas, but there's not the same ideology of "Aryan" racial supremacy nor the fanatical racial antisemitism (though there is plenty of the more garden variety sort). Many of the elements of OTL's German hard-right circa 1918 are still there, such as a commitment to a colonial project in the east and a seething disdain for Bolshevism, but of course, these aren't exclusive to Fascism even if they are frequently conterminous with it.
In terms of "Fascism" writ large, the fascism of this timeline is going to be a meaningfully different phenomenon than our own. It will share plenty of elective affinities with the Fascism of OTL's interwar Europe, but because it arises in different social conditions and with a somewhat different class composition, it is going to hew a bit closer to the other, more "mainstream" authoritarian-right ideologies (Integralism, Falangism, Reactionary Military Dictatorship, etc.). For those familiar with OTL's historiography of Fascism, it would likely count as fascist in a broad but not a narrow sense.
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"Blow upon Blow, until Paris Falls and the British Return to their Island": The War in 1918
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
- Pronouns
- He/They
Below is a summary of the main military events of 1918. There will probably be further posts exploring the details of the military operations mentioned here, and there will definitely be entries on the social and political fallout. Expect the following updates to cover domestic politics in France, Italy, and Britain with a particular focus on the socialist labor and antiwar movements. I also have a post on industrial/economic mobilization and changing conditions at the homefront(s) in the works. At some point, I will also cover the Russian Civil War, which will likely include a discussion of the Red German exiles (Luxemburg, Zetkin, Mehring) and their interactions with the leaders of the Soviet government. Cheers!
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All of the Great Powers believed that 1918 must be the last year of the war. After rampant civilian unrest in Italy, Austria, Germany, and parts of France, it was thought that domestic populations could not endure another year of conflict. The Entente planned a joint offensive into Belgium and Northeastern France that would shatter the German lines and allow a favorable peace to be negotiated. Ludendorff, however, wished for nothing less than a "total victory" to vindicate the years of "total war". Underlying this was not simply German nationalism, but Germany's increasingly dire fiscal situation, which would require years of either austerity or war reparations to make good. Given the labor unrest in Germany, the former appeared a sure recipe for social revolution.
Three developments at the beginning of the year appeared to favor the Central Powers. Firstly, a peace deal was reached with Russia in early February, freeing German troops from the east. Secondly, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had begun inflicting real damage on merchant shipping and reduced Britain's capacity to import food and raw materials for its industries. Finally, both Britain and France started to experience a marked uptick in anti-war pacifist protest, a development that would continue apace throughout the remainder of the year.
Fearful of a massive German offensive in the west, the British and French made secret peace overtures. In what was likely a political mistake, neither of the parties involved publicized these, fearing that the concessions they offered would harm civilian morale. In any event, the attempts to make peace were rendered pointless by Ludendorff's aversion to a negotiated settlement. Harsh conditions, impossible in practice for the Entente to fulfill, were imposed on the beginning of any formal talks. Ludendorff sensed the possibility to win the war and secure German hegemony on the continent.
In military circles, it has long been debated whether an earlier western offensive may have won the war near the beginning of 1918. Some believe that the French Army in particular could not withstand another massive, frontal assault. Others argue that Ludendorff's strategy likely was necessary to preserve Austria-Hungary's disintegrating Empire for another year.
Ludendorff's plan called for the Central Powers to marshal its forces and knock out the members of the Entente one by one with steadily growing offensives. Each victory would secure vital resources that Germany required to continue the war. This new strategy was at least in part one of plunder, but it was also intended to prop up Austria and demoralize the British public.
The first hammer would fall in the southeast, on Romania. Two to three months after the conquest of this grain-rich territory, a German offensive would break through the Italian lines, stream into the Po Valley, and seize the key industrial cities in Romagna and Lombardy, forcing a surrender. Then, a so-called "victory offensive" would assault Entente positions along the Somme river, encircling the Entente armies in Flanders and then capturing Paris. With France knocked out of the war, German soldiers would seize Constantinople before beginning a triumphant march toward British Egypt.
Such, at least, was the plan. The Entente, meanwhile, hoped to harden the Romanian and Italian fronts while marshaling their resources for a war-winning "Final offensive" into Flanders and German-held northeastern France which would end the u-boat threat, liberate Belgium, and threaten Germany proper. It was hoped that the exhaustion of the German Army would allow for the imposition of a favorable peace which would return Alsace-Lorraine, set limits on German naval production, and secure modest war reparations in exchange for a recognition of Germany's empire in the East.
In March, Ludendorff himself traveled to Galicia to take charge of the Army due to attack south into Moldova and Bessarabia. In the west, August von Mackensen prepared for a renewed assault on Transylvania, while a mixed Bulgarian, Austrian, and German force in Bulgaria led by Hans von Seeckt readied for a feinting maneuver to cross the Danube. The Central Powers had assembled around 1 million men for the invasion.
With superiority in numbers and materiel, the invasion proceeded in a steady, attritional style, careful to avoid the mistakes of 1917. Despite valiant Romanian resistance at the Danube and in Transylvania, the seemingly inevitable advance of Ludendorff's Galician army forced first a retreat of the western mountaineers and then another retreat from the troops along the southwestern Danube. Within a month and a half, Bucharest was surrounded and the British expeditionary force was desperately attempting to flee from the Black Sea port of Constanta. The debacle of the British evacuation demonstrated the strain that had been placed on the British navy by the u-boat campaign, and had important effects on British domestic politics. In all, around 45,000 of the 125,000-man British force were captured.
Romania held a great bounty of riches for the conquering German army. American agricultural equipment provided a crucial boost to German agriculture, and American artillery helped make up equipment deficits caused by rampant strike action and skirmishes in the west. Germany treated the decision of the Romanian government to flee rather than surrender as a carte blanche to loot and plunder the country, though a more formal arrangement of "reparations" may not have differed very much in its results.
In the aftermath of the success in Romania, both Bulgaria and Turkey lobbied for a German offensive toward Constantinople. Growing pressure from both countries, including threats to leave the war, finally forced the OHL's hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg had contemplated attacks to retake the straits, especially because of the increasing British aid to White cossacks, but concluded that the dug-in British forces in the area would inflict losses too punitive to make such an offensive strategically worthwhile. The prospect of Bulgaria and Turkey leaving the war changed this calculus.
Nonetheless, the Thrace offensive was never a priority. The OHL would not allow it to divert their timetable for the assault on the Po Valley, and as a result it was the dregs of the German Army which was allocated to the operation. It was set to begin at the same time as the Italian offensive, in late June. The hope was that the concurrent offensives would paralyze the British and delay any diversion of reserves.
By June 21st, around 25% of all German heavy artillery was stationed on the narrow Italian front. The presence of mountains and rivers meant that the Entente soldiers in the area only had to defend a line of around 60 miles. The buildup of the 1.25 million man Austro-German army was impossible to ignore. Delays in troop transportation caused by railway strikes and civil unrest in Austria meant that the offensive did not begin until July. .
Facing the 900,000 German and 350,000 Austrian soldiers were around a million Italian and 250,000 British and French troops, most of them recently arrived. The Italian lines were heavily fortified, but they were also completely outgunned. Growing allied technological superiority in the West (in the form of airplanes, tanks, and artillery) was not present in the Italian front.
On July 3rd, the largest artillery salvo in human history heralded the beginning of the Italian offensive. July 1918 would go down as the deadliest month of the Great War. The momentous battles recalled the mammoth offensives of 1916, but they were now fought with planes, tanks, and even higher concentrations of heavy artillery. New tactics of infiltration and assault had been devised which made warfare more mobile and returned some degree of parity between offense and defense.
Three days after the assault on Italy began, the hard-pressed Entente decided to begin their planned offensive early to take pressure off the beleaguered Italian army. On June 9th, the largest battle of the Western Front began when 1 million French and British troops started the assault in Flanders and Lille.
The Frontlines in mid-1917 and Plan of Attack for the July Offensive
Somewhat ironically, this operation was termed the "July Offensive" even though it was initially slated to proceed in late August. It aimed to surround the city of Lille with a British attack from the north and a French thrust in the south; further north, a joint Franco-British force would launch delaying attacks on a sizable German army concentration in Flanders. After Lille was seized, the French-British armies would march northeast to the Dutch border and pin the remaining German forces in Flanders against the sea.
Over the previous year, Entente landship and aircraft production had ramped up considerably, allowing the Franco-British forces to achieve a technological advantage along many of the sectors in the western front. The extensive use of reconnaissance planes allowed weak spots along the line to be identified, toward which the massed use of landships could be directed. The main weakness of the Entente armies in the west was the stubbornly persistent tactical superiority of the German officer, which had been exacerbated by the death of the majority of the most promising French NCO's at Verdun.
From its very beginning, the July Offensive was different from those of the past two years. The initial breakthrough of the German trenches in the south was met with vicious counterattacks from the retreating German forces rather than an attempt to simply retrench. When the Germans surrendered Lille on the 15th, they sabotaged the city's railway lines, causing logistical issues for the advancing Entente armies. As the fighting continued, it sucked in soldiers from the rest of the front; by the 18th, around 40% of all troops on the western front were situated on an axis running from Passcendaele to Lille. Despite the intransigence of the German defense and the horrifying casualties suffered by all the armies, the Entente advance, backed by superior firepower and intelligence, slowly continued toward the Belgian Border from Lille. In terms of the size of the armies, the mobility of the warfare, and the immense losses sustained by each side, the battles recalled those of the first months of the war.
On July 21st, the Italian army finally broke beneath the weight of German artillery fire, and one million Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians began to stream into the Po Valley. The exhausted Italian Army had effectively collapsed; the failure to engage in a more orderly, paced retreat meant that when the breakout came, the morale of the Italian soldier had already collapsed. In Turin, Milan, Umbria and Romagna, strikes and protests broke out; syndicalists occupied factories and wildcat strikes among workers of the main trade union, the CGdL, paralyzed Italian industry. Fearing a social revolution, the Italian government agreed to an armistice later that week.
News of the Italian surrender came as a harsh blow to morale in the west. On the 24th, a document was released showing France and Britain repeatedly turning down German offers of a status quo peace. In truth, the document was doctored by German military intelligence, though based off real telegrams that were exchanged in negotiations earlier that year. The ruse enraged French and British leaders, who quickly denounced it. But it was the final straw for the collapsing morale of the French Army, who began to mutiny on the 30th; by August 3rd, the offensive stalled along the Belgian border as over 150,000 French troops refused to advance into foreign territory. The nationalist press at home denounced the rabble at the front, while the French Socialists began to splinter as syndicalist strikes broke out across the war industries.
The French government faced a very real crisis of legitimacy. Sensing his opportunity, Ludendorff pushed for the planned Somme offensive to proceed as soon as possible. The battered German armies in the west would need reinforcements from Italy, as well as artillery pieces and shells. By the time that the offensive was ready, however, a government of national salvation had already been formed in France by George Clemenceau, the strikes quieted with a mixture of concessions and repression, and the mutineers placated by a shakeup in the high command which placed Philippe Petain as the new Chief of Staff and Robert Nivelle in control of the largest concentration of soldiers in the northeast.
On September 16th, the Second Battle of the Somme began. Ludendorff calculated that the chaos in the government and the mutineers at the front would allow him to achieve a quick victory. The presence of large numbers of troops from the colonies in the Somme sector was also thought to indicate French weakness in the area.
Ludendorff miscalculated. The new government and high command had reassured French troops and French society, and perhaps most importantly, it had been decisively established that the supposed "peace offer" was a German hoax. The ruse had prompted the French and British governments to release documents revealing the full extent of German war aims in the secret peace overtures; rather than demoralizing troops and civilians, this invigorated pro-war sentiment and stirred up anti-German feeling. Moreover, the mutinying troops had never refused to defend French territory; though German counterattacks in late August forced a retreat back toward Lille from the Belgian border, their success derived from the chaos at the front and mistrust between soldiers and officers rather than the collapse of French resistance.
Many historians believe that if Ludendorff took the time to fully marshal his forces, he may have been able to seize the city of Abbeville by the end of the Somme offensive, making the Entente position in Flanders untenable. The men that assaulted Arras, Montdidier, and Albert at the end of 1918 were many of the same that participated in the defense of Lille and the Italian offensive. They were exhausted and undersupplied. Opposite them, they faced a smaller but more determined and better-supplied enemy. The colonial troops fought with the same vigor as their colonial overlords. The initial success of the assault on Arras and Albert concealed a large disparity in casualties. A week after capturing the two initial objectives of the campaign, Ludendorff called off further attacks amidst fears of mutiny in the German Army. The capture of French territory allowed him to spin the offensive as a victory domestically despite the 145,000 German casualties.
The remainder of the year saw continued skirmishes around Lille and Passchendaele. It increasingly looked as if the entire notion of seizing the rest of the ports in Flanders was a pointless one; losses of experienced u-boat crews had crippled the German submarine campaign, and British naval production allowed the convoy system to be extended to more distant waters.
In the east, the Central Powers offensives in Anatolia and Thrace broke down after a few weeks of stubborn British resistance. Turkey appeared willing to make peace, but the conviction of their leaders that Germany would soon win the war in the west meant that they proposed terms which the British would not accept. Something similar went for Bulgaria, which was motivated to continue the war by the belief that the French Army was on its last legs.
In retrospect, the battles of 1918 were less than unambiguous victories for the Central Powers. Despite French mutinies, the July offensive seized a swathe of valuable territory in the northeast and sapped much of the offensive power of the German Army in the west. Compared to Ludendorff's attack in the Somme, it achieved more of its operational objectives with a more favorable disparity of losses. The loss of Italy deprived the Entente of another front on which to press the Central Powers, but in real terms the Italian Army was frequently a liability, and many of the troops which were tied up in Trentino and Venetia were Austrians who would never have seen action in the west.
At the time, this was not how events were processed. In Germany, the press hailed Ludendorff as the second coming of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Many civilians in Britain and France concluded that the war could simply not be won. In America, the stock market began to cave as financiers feared that Britain would not be able to repay American loans. Hopes spiraled in Germany for an end to the war by the end of the year.
Yet the war continued. Ludendorff showed no willingness to relax his goal of establishing a German condominium over Europe, and in any event the civilian leaders of the Entente no longer believed that negotiation was possible. Clemenceau vowed "to fight on until the grisly work is finished, because there shall be, and cannot be, any compromise with the teutonic plague". Winston Churchill called for "The full mobilization of all of Britain to preserve the sacred flame of English Liberty". As 1918 faded imperceptibly into the final year of the war, none of those occupying the commanding heights of bourgeois Europe were prepared for the storm that was to come.
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"Blow upon Blow, until Paris Falls and the British Return to their Island": The War in 1918
All of the Great Powers believed that 1918 must be the last year of the war. After rampant civilian unrest in Italy, Austria, Germany, and parts of France, it was thought that domestic populations could not endure another year of conflict. The Entente planned a joint offensive into Belgium and Northeastern France that would shatter the German lines and allow a favorable peace to be negotiated. Ludendorff, however, wished for nothing less than a "total victory" to vindicate the years of "total war". Underlying this was not simply German nationalism, but Germany's increasingly dire fiscal situation, which would require years of either austerity or war reparations to make good. Given the labor unrest in Germany, the former appeared a sure recipe for social revolution.
Three developments at the beginning of the year appeared to favor the Central Powers. Firstly, a peace deal was reached with Russia in early February, freeing German troops from the east. Secondly, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had begun inflicting real damage on merchant shipping and reduced Britain's capacity to import food and raw materials for its industries. Finally, both Britain and France started to experience a marked uptick in anti-war pacifist protest, a development that would continue apace throughout the remainder of the year.
Fearful of a massive German offensive in the west, the British and French made secret peace overtures. In what was likely a political mistake, neither of the parties involved publicized these, fearing that the concessions they offered would harm civilian morale. In any event, the attempts to make peace were rendered pointless by Ludendorff's aversion to a negotiated settlement. Harsh conditions, impossible in practice for the Entente to fulfill, were imposed on the beginning of any formal talks. Ludendorff sensed the possibility to win the war and secure German hegemony on the continent.
In military circles, it has long been debated whether an earlier western offensive may have won the war near the beginning of 1918. Some believe that the French Army in particular could not withstand another massive, frontal assault. Others argue that Ludendorff's strategy likely was necessary to preserve Austria-Hungary's disintegrating Empire for another year.
Ludendorff's plan called for the Central Powers to marshal its forces and knock out the members of the Entente one by one with steadily growing offensives. Each victory would secure vital resources that Germany required to continue the war. This new strategy was at least in part one of plunder, but it was also intended to prop up Austria and demoralize the British public.
The first hammer would fall in the southeast, on Romania. Two to three months after the conquest of this grain-rich territory, a German offensive would break through the Italian lines, stream into the Po Valley, and seize the key industrial cities in Romagna and Lombardy, forcing a surrender. Then, a so-called "victory offensive" would assault Entente positions along the Somme river, encircling the Entente armies in Flanders and then capturing Paris. With France knocked out of the war, German soldiers would seize Constantinople before beginning a triumphant march toward British Egypt.
Such, at least, was the plan. The Entente, meanwhile, hoped to harden the Romanian and Italian fronts while marshaling their resources for a war-winning "Final offensive" into Flanders and German-held northeastern France which would end the u-boat threat, liberate Belgium, and threaten Germany proper. It was hoped that the exhaustion of the German Army would allow for the imposition of a favorable peace which would return Alsace-Lorraine, set limits on German naval production, and secure modest war reparations in exchange for a recognition of Germany's empire in the East.
In March, Ludendorff himself traveled to Galicia to take charge of the Army due to attack south into Moldova and Bessarabia. In the west, August von Mackensen prepared for a renewed assault on Transylvania, while a mixed Bulgarian, Austrian, and German force in Bulgaria led by Hans von Seeckt readied for a feinting maneuver to cross the Danube. The Central Powers had assembled around 1 million men for the invasion.
With superiority in numbers and materiel, the invasion proceeded in a steady, attritional style, careful to avoid the mistakes of 1917. Despite valiant Romanian resistance at the Danube and in Transylvania, the seemingly inevitable advance of Ludendorff's Galician army forced first a retreat of the western mountaineers and then another retreat from the troops along the southwestern Danube. Within a month and a half, Bucharest was surrounded and the British expeditionary force was desperately attempting to flee from the Black Sea port of Constanta. The debacle of the British evacuation demonstrated the strain that had been placed on the British navy by the u-boat campaign, and had important effects on British domestic politics. In all, around 45,000 of the 125,000-man British force were captured.
Romania held a great bounty of riches for the conquering German army. American agricultural equipment provided a crucial boost to German agriculture, and American artillery helped make up equipment deficits caused by rampant strike action and skirmishes in the west. Germany treated the decision of the Romanian government to flee rather than surrender as a carte blanche to loot and plunder the country, though a more formal arrangement of "reparations" may not have differed very much in its results.
In the aftermath of the success in Romania, both Bulgaria and Turkey lobbied for a German offensive toward Constantinople. Growing pressure from both countries, including threats to leave the war, finally forced the OHL's hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg had contemplated attacks to retake the straits, especially because of the increasing British aid to White cossacks, but concluded that the dug-in British forces in the area would inflict losses too punitive to make such an offensive strategically worthwhile. The prospect of Bulgaria and Turkey leaving the war changed this calculus.
Nonetheless, the Thrace offensive was never a priority. The OHL would not allow it to divert their timetable for the assault on the Po Valley, and as a result it was the dregs of the German Army which was allocated to the operation. It was set to begin at the same time as the Italian offensive, in late June. The hope was that the concurrent offensives would paralyze the British and delay any diversion of reserves.
By June 21st, around 25% of all German heavy artillery was stationed on the narrow Italian front. The presence of mountains and rivers meant that the Entente soldiers in the area only had to defend a line of around 60 miles. The buildup of the 1.25 million man Austro-German army was impossible to ignore. Delays in troop transportation caused by railway strikes and civil unrest in Austria meant that the offensive did not begin until July. .
Facing the 900,000 German and 350,000 Austrian soldiers were around a million Italian and 250,000 British and French troops, most of them recently arrived. The Italian lines were heavily fortified, but they were also completely outgunned. Growing allied technological superiority in the West (in the form of airplanes, tanks, and artillery) was not present in the Italian front.
On July 3rd, the largest artillery salvo in human history heralded the beginning of the Italian offensive. July 1918 would go down as the deadliest month of the Great War. The momentous battles recalled the mammoth offensives of 1916, but they were now fought with planes, tanks, and even higher concentrations of heavy artillery. New tactics of infiltration and assault had been devised which made warfare more mobile and returned some degree of parity between offense and defense.
Three days after the assault on Italy began, the hard-pressed Entente decided to begin their planned offensive early to take pressure off the beleaguered Italian army. On June 9th, the largest battle of the Western Front began when 1 million French and British troops started the assault in Flanders and Lille.
The Frontlines in mid-1917 and Plan of Attack for the July Offensive
Somewhat ironically, this operation was termed the "July Offensive" even though it was initially slated to proceed in late August. It aimed to surround the city of Lille with a British attack from the north and a French thrust in the south; further north, a joint Franco-British force would launch delaying attacks on a sizable German army concentration in Flanders. After Lille was seized, the French-British armies would march northeast to the Dutch border and pin the remaining German forces in Flanders against the sea.
Over the previous year, Entente landship and aircraft production had ramped up considerably, allowing the Franco-British forces to achieve a technological advantage along many of the sectors in the western front. The extensive use of reconnaissance planes allowed weak spots along the line to be identified, toward which the massed use of landships could be directed. The main weakness of the Entente armies in the west was the stubbornly persistent tactical superiority of the German officer, which had been exacerbated by the death of the majority of the most promising French NCO's at Verdun.
From its very beginning, the July Offensive was different from those of the past two years. The initial breakthrough of the German trenches in the south was met with vicious counterattacks from the retreating German forces rather than an attempt to simply retrench. When the Germans surrendered Lille on the 15th, they sabotaged the city's railway lines, causing logistical issues for the advancing Entente armies. As the fighting continued, it sucked in soldiers from the rest of the front; by the 18th, around 40% of all troops on the western front were situated on an axis running from Passcendaele to Lille. Despite the intransigence of the German defense and the horrifying casualties suffered by all the armies, the Entente advance, backed by superior firepower and intelligence, slowly continued toward the Belgian Border from Lille. In terms of the size of the armies, the mobility of the warfare, and the immense losses sustained by each side, the battles recalled those of the first months of the war.
On July 21st, the Italian army finally broke beneath the weight of German artillery fire, and one million Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians began to stream into the Po Valley. The exhausted Italian Army had effectively collapsed; the failure to engage in a more orderly, paced retreat meant that when the breakout came, the morale of the Italian soldier had already collapsed. In Turin, Milan, Umbria and Romagna, strikes and protests broke out; syndicalists occupied factories and wildcat strikes among workers of the main trade union, the CGdL, paralyzed Italian industry. Fearing a social revolution, the Italian government agreed to an armistice later that week.
News of the Italian surrender came as a harsh blow to morale in the west. On the 24th, a document was released showing France and Britain repeatedly turning down German offers of a status quo peace. In truth, the document was doctored by German military intelligence, though based off real telegrams that were exchanged in negotiations earlier that year. The ruse enraged French and British leaders, who quickly denounced it. But it was the final straw for the collapsing morale of the French Army, who began to mutiny on the 30th; by August 3rd, the offensive stalled along the Belgian border as over 150,000 French troops refused to advance into foreign territory. The nationalist press at home denounced the rabble at the front, while the French Socialists began to splinter as syndicalist strikes broke out across the war industries.
The French government faced a very real crisis of legitimacy. Sensing his opportunity, Ludendorff pushed for the planned Somme offensive to proceed as soon as possible. The battered German armies in the west would need reinforcements from Italy, as well as artillery pieces and shells. By the time that the offensive was ready, however, a government of national salvation had already been formed in France by George Clemenceau, the strikes quieted with a mixture of concessions and repression, and the mutineers placated by a shakeup in the high command which placed Philippe Petain as the new Chief of Staff and Robert Nivelle in control of the largest concentration of soldiers in the northeast.
On September 16th, the Second Battle of the Somme began. Ludendorff calculated that the chaos in the government and the mutineers at the front would allow him to achieve a quick victory. The presence of large numbers of troops from the colonies in the Somme sector was also thought to indicate French weakness in the area.
Ludendorff miscalculated. The new government and high command had reassured French troops and French society, and perhaps most importantly, it had been decisively established that the supposed "peace offer" was a German hoax. The ruse had prompted the French and British governments to release documents revealing the full extent of German war aims in the secret peace overtures; rather than demoralizing troops and civilians, this invigorated pro-war sentiment and stirred up anti-German feeling. Moreover, the mutinying troops had never refused to defend French territory; though German counterattacks in late August forced a retreat back toward Lille from the Belgian border, their success derived from the chaos at the front and mistrust between soldiers and officers rather than the collapse of French resistance.
Many historians believe that if Ludendorff took the time to fully marshal his forces, he may have been able to seize the city of Abbeville by the end of the Somme offensive, making the Entente position in Flanders untenable. The men that assaulted Arras, Montdidier, and Albert at the end of 1918 were many of the same that participated in the defense of Lille and the Italian offensive. They were exhausted and undersupplied. Opposite them, they faced a smaller but more determined and better-supplied enemy. The colonial troops fought with the same vigor as their colonial overlords. The initial success of the assault on Arras and Albert concealed a large disparity in casualties. A week after capturing the two initial objectives of the campaign, Ludendorff called off further attacks amidst fears of mutiny in the German Army. The capture of French territory allowed him to spin the offensive as a victory domestically despite the 145,000 German casualties.
The remainder of the year saw continued skirmishes around Lille and Passchendaele. It increasingly looked as if the entire notion of seizing the rest of the ports in Flanders was a pointless one; losses of experienced u-boat crews had crippled the German submarine campaign, and British naval production allowed the convoy system to be extended to more distant waters.
In the east, the Central Powers offensives in Anatolia and Thrace broke down after a few weeks of stubborn British resistance. Turkey appeared willing to make peace, but the conviction of their leaders that Germany would soon win the war in the west meant that they proposed terms which the British would not accept. Something similar went for Bulgaria, which was motivated to continue the war by the belief that the French Army was on its last legs.
In retrospect, the battles of 1918 were less than unambiguous victories for the Central Powers. Despite French mutinies, the July offensive seized a swathe of valuable territory in the northeast and sapped much of the offensive power of the German Army in the west. Compared to Ludendorff's attack in the Somme, it achieved more of its operational objectives with a more favorable disparity of losses. The loss of Italy deprived the Entente of another front on which to press the Central Powers, but in real terms the Italian Army was frequently a liability, and many of the troops which were tied up in Trentino and Venetia were Austrians who would never have seen action in the west.
At the time, this was not how events were processed. In Germany, the press hailed Ludendorff as the second coming of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Many civilians in Britain and France concluded that the war could simply not be won. In America, the stock market began to cave as financiers feared that Britain would not be able to repay American loans. Hopes spiraled in Germany for an end to the war by the end of the year.
Yet the war continued. Ludendorff showed no willingness to relax his goal of establishing a German condominium over Europe, and in any event the civilian leaders of the Entente no longer believed that negotiation was possible. Clemenceau vowed "to fight on until the grisly work is finished, because there shall be, and cannot be, any compromise with the teutonic plague". Winston Churchill called for "The full mobilization of all of Britain to preserve the sacred flame of English Liberty". As 1918 faded imperceptibly into the final year of the war, none of those occupying the commanding heights of bourgeois Europe were prepared for the storm that was to come.
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PrognosticHannya
Far Too Enthusiastic About Etymology
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Holy shit this looks like it's going to be an absolute slugfest.
QueenOfRoses
Athena Promachos
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No wonder you got the death toll up to sixty million
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Wait, where was that number mentioned? I missed that part.
I'd say that it's WW1 in a nutshell but Jesus christ this waaaay worse than that. Like no wonder revolution happened when, despite it being very clear how much the war has cost. Speaking of.
Jesus sunk cost fallacy is one hell of a drug. Like on side it's pretty clear that the war is unwinnable at that point but a lot of the Entente leaders, whether out of sense of foolhardy nationalism or just not wanting to admit the obvious, continue to commit to the war and on the other you have Ludendorff who wants to continue pursuing delusional nationalist goals despite the cost of said goals being way to high for Germany to bear. Like this video from Alternate History illustrates the whole thing perfectly as while the Central Powers may win the economy is utterly broken that they might as well have lost.
Welp that revolution's coming whether the Entente and the Central Powers like it or not. Honestly though I find it utterly unsurprising that the two alliances are utterly unprepared for the coming storm because they've deluded themselves so much that they think they can continue throwing men into a meat grinder without any consequences. Everyone reaches their breaking point, in Russia that was 1917, for the rest of Europe its 1919. Again the prologue states that French and German officers react to the impromptu truce by ordering the men involved be executed. When its clear that the men above would rather kill you to further a pointless conflict rather than end it well that's how revolutions happen.
QueenOfRoses
Athena Promachos
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Slightly misremembered but it's in the alt!Schlesinger quote in the first post of the TL
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Oh there it is. Jesus.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
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Thanks for drawing my attention to this - I just realized that the original post is intended to refer to casualties rather than deaths. It's still around 15 million more than IOTL; short of supercharging the Spanish flu, I'm actually not quite sure how the number of deaths could get that high. Assuming a similar death to casualty ratio, that would mean over 110 million causalties, a truly unbelievable number.
On the other hand, if one took account of things like excess civilian and military deaths in the revolutionary era (1919-1924), one could get a good deal closer to that number. Of course, the conflicts of the Postwar era IOTL were also exceptionally bloody and brutal affairs, but on the whole they were much shorter and more contained.
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QueenOfRoses
Athena Promachos
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It was personally a big moment in my understanding of world history when I really began to understand just how many things were set off by World War I and how wars continued in so many ways even after the Armistice. The conflagrations in Eastern Europe, the May 4th movement in China, a lot of anticolonial activists and movements getting started after the disappointment of Versailles and Wilsonian liberalism - once you start viewing it as more than just the dress rehearsal for World War 2 (which it is so often held to be in popular culture, at least in America)
Bisexual-Mart
Far from the shallow ground
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Luxembourg? Holy crap, the idea of Marxist-Leninism (and especially its interpretation by the acolytes of the seminary school dropout) being supplanted by Marxist-Luxembourgism ITTL was actually a good prediction?
With one of the leaders of Marxist thought ITTL a woman, I wonder how that changes Marxist approaches to women's rights? Or for that matter the rights of LGBT+ folks? I mean Magnus Hirschfield may find himself in a more palatable climate than OTL, so there's already that.
With one of the leaders of Marxist thought ITTL a woman, I wonder how that changes Marxist approaches to women's rights? Or for that matter the rights of LGBT+ folks? I mean Magnus Hirschfield may find himself in a more palatable climate than OTL, so there's already that.
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It might not be as different as you think. It depends. There were prominent female Soviet politicians even in the Soviet Union, which started from the base of... well, Tsarist Russia.
The problem has always been as much the execution as anything else. You can make laws stating equality, and can even have representative politicians, but just as Obama being President didn't end (or even tbh do much about) racism, one has to question a few things...
Honestly the more impactful thing might be all the different perspectives preserved by all of Europe going Red.
That said, of course I'm going to pull for Rosa Luxemburg winding up in charge of at least some chunk of everything.
Zetkin too, for that matter.
Shame about Liebknecht.
The problem has always been as much the execution as anything else. You can make laws stating equality, and can even have representative politicians, but just as Obama being President didn't end (or even tbh do much about) racism, one has to question a few things...
Honestly the more impactful thing might be all the different perspectives preserved by all of Europe going Red.
That said, of course I'm going to pull for Rosa Luxemburg winding up in charge of at least some chunk of everything.
Zetkin too, for that matter.
Shame about Liebknecht.
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Tell that to the Ottoman Empire… the population within its 1912 borders was 25% lower in 1922 than in 1912.
If everywhere looks like that Europe's going to be messy for a while…
The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: Italy in the Great War, 1915-1918
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
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"The best way to honor this soldier is to do as he would have done if he was still alive: curse the barbaric conflict which killed him and remember him as a victim of the greed of our rulers."
-Anonymous Flyer found at an Italian Memorial to the Unknown Soldier in Bologna, March 1919.
"The Liberals set out to war believing that it would make Italy into a modern nation; they succeeded beyond their wildest imagination, despite the fact that the nation they created would be one in which they were no longer welcome."
-Antonio Gramsci.
"Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."
-Karl Marx.
The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: Italy in the Great War, 1915-1918
The Beginning of the War -Anonymous Flyer found at an Italian Memorial to the Unknown Soldier in Bologna, March 1919.
"The Liberals set out to war believing that it would make Italy into a modern nation; they succeeded beyond their wildest imagination, despite the fact that the nation they created would be one in which they were no longer welcome."
-Antonio Gramsci.
"Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."
-Karl Marx.
The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: Italy in the Great War, 1915-1918
Italy had a number of qualities that set it apart from the other principal combatants of the Great War. Compared to Britain, Germany, and even France, it was systematically underdeveloped, with a disproportionately high agricultural population and a comparatively weak national identity. Although it possessed parliamentary institutions, these were more fragile than those of France and Britain, and the state itself was considerably weaker than any of the other great powers except Tsarist Russia. In this respect, it more closely approximated a truly liberal polity, which created significant difficulties for the wartime mobilization of resources. Most importantly, there was no Union Sacree or Burgsfrieden in Italy; at no point were political elites and the laboring masses unified in their support of the war. In fact, Italy was likely the only nation in which the majority of citizens and even a sizable minority of political elites opposed the war from its very beginning.
Since Italy entered the conflict in 1915, there was little question that it was an offensive and aggressive war aimed at Austria-Hungary. The hope was that Italian entry would create a permanent strategic shift in the Entente's fortunes, but several failed offensives in the Isonzo region failed to produce the desired effect. Italian troops conducted themselves valiantly but were not able to break through the Austrian lines, even after repeated assaults with British heavy artillery; by 1917, countless defeats were beginning to take their toll on the morale of the average Italian soldier.
However, all available evidence suggests that antiwar sentiment was concentrated in the Italian homefront. Socialists and political catholics were both opposed to the war. The Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) was one of the only socialist parties to adhere to the pacifist, internationalist tenets of the Second Internationale. Both the rank-and-file and the political and trade union leaders opposed entering the conflict. The Catholic Church, led by the pacifist Pope Benedict XV, abhorred the notion of sending Italian Catholics to war with Austrian ones. Liberals were the only group who supported the war, and even then opinions were divided between a nationalistic-patriotic right and a neutralist left.
Italy was brought into the war by something of a diplomatic coup by the Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, who entered a secret deal with Britain to join the conflict without consulting parliament. In the subsequent weeks, the left-liberal Giolitti faction in parliament was consistently outmaneuvered by the pro-war forces; by the time Italy declared war, the antiwar liberals were bound by nationalistic public sentiment and their own sense of patriotism to support the government.
The war was, to quote one prominent journalist, a "litany of disasters, proceeding in quick succession and illustrating with uninhibited honesty the incompetence of the ruling liberals." Despite gaining numerical superiority at the fronts in Trentino and Isonzo, the Italian Army was consistently frustrated by Austrian defenses. Counteroffensives were only staved off with British assistance. Chronic shortages of heavy artillery meant that Italy also suffered far more casualties than Austria. Moreover, the war in the southwest was perhaps the only one that Austrian soldiers were genuinely enthused to fight; many Croatian soldiers in particular felt it to be a defensive struggle against an expansionist and imperious enemy. Over the entire course of the conflict, Italy lost around 900,000 soldiers, and advanced only around 10 miles into Austrian territory.
At the homefront, Italy instituted a series of labor and civilian controls which were rivaled in their repressiveness only by the Ludendorff dictatorship itself. Even the absolutist regime of autocracy and orthodoxy in Russia could not match the degree of social control, though this is likely due more to capacity than will. Italian industrial mobilization was organized through the Instituto della Mobilitazione Industriale, overseen by the Ministry of War. Unlike the German KRA, this was run wholly by military officials, with a general at its head. In practice, the IMI favored employers. Aside from token representation on factory boards (with their representatives themselves decided upon by employers), Labor had no real input in the mobilization process. Military officials and common soldiers were frequently present on the factory floor to enforce labor discipline, and wage arbitration rarely ruled in favor of workers.
Businesses deemed critical to the war effort were designated as "Aulixary firms". In these, a particularly draconian labor regime existed. During the early years of the war, labor became increasingly feudalized: workers had to gain permission from employer and military dominated factory boards to take on a different job, and their applications were generally denied. Striking and most union activity was made illegal, and wages were kept level even as inflation skyrocketed. Although employers lost some control over their firm if it was declared as auxilary, it was nonetheless generally welcomed because it allowed for privileged access to raw materials.
One consequence of Italy's regime of industrial mobilization was capitalist super-profits. Over the war, profits in critical industries such as metalworking and mining rose over 100 percent. The state did make an effort to extract some of this money through a new tax on war profiteering, but bureaucratic incompetence and capitalist chichanery meant that little was actually collected. In practice, because industrialists had a heavier influence than the state in setting terms for procurement contracts, any tax on profits was compensated through a raising of the prices of military goods and raw materials, with the inflationary effects passed onto consumers and workers.
Patterns of military mobilization and discipline mirrored the authoritarianism of war-time labor relations. From the very beginning of the war, the Italian state relied more on coercion than consent to secure the obedience of its vast army of peasant conscripts. Somewhat bizarrely, actual propaganda designed by pro-war civic associations was forbidden from being distributed in the military; unlike in Germany and France, no systematic effort was made to explain the reasons for and purpose of the war to the average soldier. Although it is impossible to know the full extent of desertion and mutiny in the Italian Army, it is clear that military infractions were punished much more harshly than in Germany, Austria, France, or Britain. Summary executions for indiscretions as minor as returning a week late from leave were not uncommon.
The brutality of the Italian War machine was matched by a steady degradation of Parliamentary institutions. Whereas in France Parliament managed to wrest control back from the military over matters of strategy and appointments, in Italy the cabinet steadily gained power over Parliament until the latter was a mostly symbolic institution. The changes in government which did occur were more a response to popular discontent than they were to parliamentary pressure. Importantly, there were no socialists in any of the governing coalitions, despite the offer of several reformists to join.
Unlike many of the Socialist parties of Europe, the PSI did not begin the war with reformists at the helm. Although it was founded as a revisionist party, the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912 radicalized its membership and led to the expulsion of its most moderate members. Despite the control of the revolutionaries over the directorate, the party as a whole was still of a reformist cast. Compared to the Social-Democratic Parties of Germany and the French SFIO, the PSI was a much more confederal organization, with de facto power as much in the hands of the parliamentary delegation and regional chapters as in the directorate itself. These were composed primarily of moderates.
At the war's outbreak, the PSI determined on a policy of "Neither support nor sabotage". The intention was to allow workers to express their displeasure with the war without binding the party to an oppositional stance that could open it up to domestic repression. In practice, the PSI lent a great deal of moral and practical support to the war, particularly in its early years. Regional chapters and socialist mayors aided in the distribution of food and welfare, while the leaders of Italy's largest trade union, the CGL, cooperated with the authorities and aided in implementing wartime labor regulations.
However, the actual membership of the PSI and CGL were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Many industrial laborers had little sense of Italian nationalism and treated the war as a folly of the country's elites. Unlike other European socialist parties, the PSI also had a sizable base of support in more rural areas, principally among the landless day laborers in the north, who held a similar attitude to the war as their urban brethren. Discontent with the war made itself known early in a series of strikes and women's protests in the runup to Italy's entry; only a wave of violent repression and mobilization temporarily quieted this turmoil.
Following the 1916 Austrian Asiago offensive, escalating popular and labor unrest led to the resignation of Salandra's centre-right government and the creation of a new, centrist administration under Vittorio Orlando. Orlando, a somewhat more liberal figure, dismissed Luigi Cadorna, the chief of the general staff, and placed general Armando Diaz in his place. The Orlando government attempted to scale back the most repressive elements of the wartime state. The firing of the reactionary Cadorna led to internal military reforms and a new focus on propaganda. On the homefront, attempts were made to keep wages level with inflation, even if Labor was still sidelined from participation in industrial relations. The Italian soldiery shifted - it would turn out permanently - onto the defensive.
Orlando's attempt to placate labor was manifestly unsuccessful, a fact that would play a large role in the repression of the next wartime government. With the war still wildly unpopular, illegal strike action and protest continued at a high level throughout 1917, eventually reaching a fever pitch in February. A large women's protest in Rome demanding an end to the war and a return of their "missing men" was brutally suppressed by the local carabinieri, prompting a sympathy strike among the city's dockworkers. When news of these events reached the large industrial cities of the north, general strikes were called in Turin and Milan, demanding an end to the war. Shortly thereafter, loyal troops were sent in to crush the protestors; drawn largely from southern peasants, they considered the civilians they confronted to be as alien as the Austrians they fought at the front, and suppressed the strikers with relative ease.
The War after Caporetto
The May Caporetto-Asiago offensive of 1917 marked a permanent change in the war. Hitherto the main battles were fought primarily on Austrian territory; now, Italian armies were forced to retreat over 100 miles as the overwhelming majority of Venetia and Friuli fell into Austrian hands. The rout of the Italian Army was immediately blamed on lower-class, socialist sabotage behind the frontlines, though in truth it was the collapsing morale of the Italian soldier that had most to do with the catastrophic defeat. It was in large part the truly stupendous efforts of Armando Diaz, only now being recovered from the oblivion of history, that allowed Italy to stabilize the front in the coming months along a line that (temporarily) avoided the national humiliation of losing Venice to Austria.
Whatever the merits of his own generalship, Diaz was now on the chopping block along with Prime Minister Orlando. While there was a broad desire for firmer leadership, for a week and a half parliament was not able to decide upon a new government until Sidney Sonnino, a foreign minister in the nationalist wing of the Liberals aligned with Salandra, agreed to head a new government. Liuigi Capello, the commander-in-chief of the Italian First Army and ultranationalist rival of Cadorna, replaced Diaz.
One of the few military officers born to poverty, Cappello was in fact one of the most capable and ingenious of all the Italian generals; the decisive defeat inflicted on the Italian Army in 1918 arose less from a dearth of strategic acumen and much more from the increasingly dire state of the Italian Army. By its final year of war, Italy had grown increasingly incapable of supplying its own army; this was a somewhat paradoxical situation since, despite the authoritarianism of its industrial mobilization, the war had served as a tremendous engine of economic growth. The IMI acted as a pressure toward consolidation, leading to the birth of such industrial giants as FIAT (now known as CEETA, or the Central European Engine, Train, and Automobile Collective), Ansaldo, and ILVA (now a member of the Confederation of Central European Steel Producers). The net value of physical capital increased by over 2.4 billion dollars over the course of the war, and in major industries declared profits rose from 5-8% of invested capital to between 15 and 30 percent. Electricity, car, and airplane production all skyrocketed exponentially.
The major vulnerability of Italian industrial mobilization was its dependence on imports. Italy was not a net producer of any raw materiel besides sulfur and nitric acid; it had to import coal, iron, and other metals for its domestic industries. Italy's net imports (the total value of imports - exports) rose from around 2.6% to 19% of GDP at the end of 1917 as export-oriented industries were retooled for domestic war production. This created a chronic balance of payments crisis that could only be alleviated through foreign loans or a depreciation of the Lira that would compress domestic living standards. Given the already explosive situation in Italy's plantations and factories, its rulers chose to depend on increasingly stringent loans from Britain and America; even these dried up by the end of 1917, however, as Britain focused on maintaining the gold standard. The government had to resort to printing money to secure key import orders.
The resumption of German unrestricted submarine warfare rendered the foregoing discussion academic. With British merchant shipping facing catastrophic losses, Britain chose to slash its coal exports to Italy to maintain the critical channel trade with France and its own food imports from America. The result was a perpetual bottleneck of fuel throughout 1918 which caused a collapse of the already overburdened rail network in Northern Italy. Despite booming munitions production, Italy was simply not able to transport sufficient quantities of shells to the front. During the Austro-German Po River offensive of 1918, Italian troops were forced to ration artillery shells at increasingly austere rates until they were no longer capable of providing effective counter-battery fire. Most historians believe that the Italian lines would likely have held if their logistics were able to ensure a ready supply of shells.
The wave of strikes that erupted following the German breakthrough was initiated by the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), an antiwar syndicalist union. Many of the Italian elites and even some socialist politicians took the fact that the strike activity begun in Romagna (near the axis of Austrian advance) as evidence that it was engineered far in advance to bring down the Italian war effort; in reality, Romagna was simply one of the three provinces, along with Liguria and Marches, in which the USI had most success recruiting supporters. Despite the growing strength of the revolutionary faction within both the PSI and CGL, their inability - or simply unwillingness - to coordinate opposition to the war led many workers to turn to the syndicalist unions. Their spectacular growth was accompanied by a loss of faith of many unskilled workers in the traditionally socialist unions.
The strike soon engulfed traditional strongholds of the PSI like Turin and Milan; the war had engendered the growth of labor solidarity, and many of the workers no longer made principled distinctions between socialist and syndicalist unions. Regional PSI party chapters led by revolutionaries in Lombardy and Piedmont soon endorsed the wildcat strikes; by July 25th, the day before the Verona Armistice was signed, it appeared that a general strike was about to descend upon the entirety of Northern and Central Italy. Then, three days later, the Socialists balked. Following the armistice, it became clear that the right-wing government of Sidney Sonnino was about to collapse; the left-liberal Giolitti looked poised to come once more to power, and he offered the socialists a suite of concessions if they would bring the strike to an end. After a week of furious internal debate, on August 1st the party accepted an agreement that provided for wage increases, the shortening of the workday in most major industries, and a commitment from Giolitti to pursue tax reform and universal suffrage in return for a cessation of the strike.
The War's Aftermath
The final five months of 1918 demonstrated beyond doubt that the revolutionary attitude of the nation's workers and peasants would not be patched over by piecemeal political and social reform. When the Socialist Party and CGL instructed workers to end their strikes, a number of union locals refused and broke formally with the CGL. Most chose to affiliate with the anarchist USI as "free socialist unions". The USI was outraged by the abandonment of the PSI; the distrust the events sowed between the two organizations was to have important consequences for Italian history.
In Parliament, Giolitti's new government suffered an early failure when the Liberal Union broke apart; Sonnino, Salandra, and dozens of other sympathetic deputies left to form the "National Liberal Party", which was, as many grew fond of jesting, neither national nor liberal, drawing its support almost solely from the middle and south of the country and adhering much more closely to an authoritarian, corporatist nationalism than classical liberalism. Deprived of key parliamentary support, Giolitti could not turn to the socialists, who refused to enter into parliamentary coalitions.
Without a majority in Parliament, Giolitti struggled to pass many of his reforms. An election was scheduled for the end of the year to "clarify" the composition of the new government, but it was not yet determined if the new slate of representatives was to be elected through universal suffrage. Many of the deputies of the liberal centre and right refused to extend the vote to those who "stabbed Italy in the back". Giolitti could not muster the support to pass suffrage or electoral reforms, though he did manage to pass a war profits tax which temporarily reduced some of Italy's fiscal problems.
On September 16th, Giolitti was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Venice, which committed Italy to a demilitarization of the entirety of Venetia, the cession of Alpine border regions to Austria, and the payment of punitive war reparations. The payment, to be made in monthly installments, theoretically may have deflated Italian wages if it was financed through tax payments, but instead the Central Bank of Italy paid for it largely through printing money; by the end of the year, new inflationary pressures finally tipped the Lira over the edge, and its value collapsed amid a 232% rate of annual inflation.
A second wave of nationalist sentiment swept the middle classes upon the signing of the humiliating peace. Effigies of Giolitti were burnt in several major cities, and the King faced pressure from patriotic societies and paramilitary associations to appoint a new cabinet. Some of this sentiment made its way into the working classes, too, as is evidenced by the growth of the interventionist USI, which favored a resumption of the war with Austria.
On August 3rd, Giolitti was assassinated by a member of a right-wing militia while addressing supporters in Turin. The king used the chaos and street-fighting in its aftermath as a pretext for appointing Antonio Salandra as the new Prime Minister. The loss of Giolitti threw the Liberal Party into disarray, and several prominent deputies agreed to support the new government and even serve as ministers within it. An unlikely figure emerged as the leader of the Liberals: Vittorio Orlando, who had previously been disgraced by the Asiago-Caparetto offensive. In scathing oratory he denounced the obstructionism of the national-liberals and demanded comprehensive land reform, universal suffrage, and a progressive labor policy. The national-liberals for their part feared that they would be crushed in any election, especially because they were bleeding support in the central agricultural heartlands to the social-clerical Italian Catholic People's Party. This party, formed by an unassuming Catholic Cleric at the instruction of the church, was attracting huge support in the middle of the country, much of it from peasants and peasant organizers disposed to rhetoric scarcely less revolutionary than the PSI and USI.
Attempts to delay national elections were met with organized strike action from the PSI, which continued to participate in parliament despite its refusal to join a government. After another month of industrial and social unrest, elections were finally scheduled for September 12th.
Italian Parliamentary Elections, 1918
| Party | Vote % | Seats |
| Italian Socialist Party | 29.3 | 220 |
| Italian Catholic People's Party | 20.2 | 71 |
| Liberals, Democrats, and Radicals. | 24.5 | 172 |
| Union of National-Liberals and Nationalists | 17.1 | 40 |
| Minor Parties | 8.9 | 5 |
| Total | 100 | 508 |
The election confirmed the rise of the Italian left: combined, the clerical-socialist Italian Catholic People's Party and Italian Socialist Party nearly won 50% of the vote under a system that still disenfranchised many of their prime supporters. Ironically, the failure to reform the voting system principally benefited the socialists, who won over 40% of the seats with under 30% of the votes. Since seats were allocated on the basis of two-round majority votes in single-member constituencies, the leading party had an automatic advantage in converting votes to seats. This was particularly so for the socialists, whose supporters tended to be concentrated in the most populous parts of the country. Orlando's Liberals, Democrats, and Radicals were also beneficiaries of the electoral system - as the leading party in the south, they were able to pick up around a third of the total seats with under a quarter of the vote.
It soon became clear that no majority government would be formed. The Catholic People's Party refused to work with the Liberals, and a coalition between the Liberals and Socialists was unthinkable. There was some discussion of an alliance between the Socialists and Catholics among members of the Socialist centre, but there was no real prospect of this occurring until they moderated their traditional anticlericalism. It was clear that a decisive rebuke had been issued to the nationalist government of Salandra; after a vote of no-confidence from the new parliament, Orlando once again became prime minister, promising social and political reform.
With the help of a key bloc of reformist parliamentarians, major legislation was passed at the end of 1918 instituting collective bargaining, universal suffrage, limited land reform, and a new progressive tax system. Italy's experiment in social democracy temporarily revived hopes for a peaceful, parliamentary solution to its seemingly terminal social crisis. It was not to be. Northern industrial elites, feeling threatened by the new government, began to harden their line. Following the instruction of the church, the Catholic People's Party began a crackdown on rural activists who hewed too close to socialism.
In November, a new wave of industrial unrest prompted by the increased use of hired strikebreakers shattered the detente between the Socialist Party and Orlando's liberals; under threat of expulsion from the party, the reformist parliamentarians refused further cooperation with the new government, rendering it incapable of passing progressive legislation. By the end of the year, the PSI adopted a revolutionary program calling for the overthrow of the Italian government and the transition to a dictatorship of the proletariat. The rapid growth of the syndicalist unions, continuing apace through the period of social reform, convinced the leaders of the PSI and CGL that the party must embrace the revolutionary struggle or be consigned to the dustbin of history. But try as they might, the socialist politicians and trade union bureaucrats were incapable of matching the revolutionary ardor of Italy's workers and peasants. Time and again, Marx's dictum that it would be the workers who advanced history proved correct.
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PrognosticHannya
Far Too Enthusiastic About Etymology
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HELL YEAH BROTHER LET'S GOOOOOOO