S6 History - 4hr Compulsory Core 1 – Europe Transformed by WWI www.internationalschoolhistory.net

Why was Germany defeated?

The First World War - Ian Cawood and David McKinnon-Bell Chapter 8 – Victory and defeat (pp.139-143) The defeat of Germany and her allies was not inevitable until August 1918, but following the early failure of the Schlieffen Plan, it was always the most likely outcome. Germany, for all her tremendous efforts, possessed neither the financial nor the material resources to defeat such a large coalition of enemies, and the addition of the USA to that coalition in 1917 more than offset the loss of Russia, with the result that, in 1918, the balance tipped decisively against the Central Powers and defeat became unavoidable. Yet, at the outset of the conflict, as Paul Kennedy has observed, Germany had seemed better equipped to wage a large modern war than her enemies. Her army and navy were the most modern and efficient in the world, and her economy was, in many respects, better suited to the production of military materiel even than that of Great Britain, outproducing Britain in steel, for example. In the early days of the conflict, then, Germany possessed the advantages of greater preparedness (although even she was not really ready for 'Total War') and superior quality of arms and soldiery. These advantages were however only good for the short term, and the Schlieffen Plan indicates that the more thoughtful military minds in pre-war Germany appreciated the importance of a quick victory. Once the Schlieffen Plan had failed and the initial offensives of 1914 had ground to a halt, Germany's isolation and her inability to guarantee supplies of crucial raw materials and food hamstrung her war effort. All the long-term advantages were possessed by Great Britain: the world's most powerful navy, her extensive overseas empire, enormous financial power and (vitally) open trade routes to Japan, the USA and the Commonwealth. The problem for Great Britain was that she was wholly unready in 1914 for 'Total War', in material, ideological and psychological terms. Britain's early contributions to the Entente's war effort were unimpressive - she never had more than 1 million men under arms at any one time-and indeed the French and Russians were quick to notice this. British lassitude was a common theme of French and Russian complaints during 1915. It was 1916 before the introduction of conscription and the establishment of Lloyd George's coalition government enabled Britain to begin to mobilise her superior resources effectively, and more or less throughout the war Germany managed to squeeze more out of her economy and society than Britain did, although it may be argued that the lengths to which the German regime went to achieve this partly explain the war-weariness and discontent within Germany which culminated in revolution in 1918. Recently, historians have turned the spotlight away from merely military explanations of the outcome of the war towards a more integrated analysis of the inter-relationship between civil society and the military. The eventual triumph of the Western Allies is now explained in terms of their greater success in balancing the needs of these two sectors... The military-dominated government of Germany failed to resolve its economic and military needs because of a failure to appreciate the importance of meeting the needs of its people alongside those of its military. As Winter argues, 'the waging of war, in economic matters as much as in other spheres, is essentially a political matter'. Contrast this with developments in the Western democracies. In both countries, power was wrested away from the generals and enshrined in coalition governments headed by populist civilian politicians, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The British regime promised democratic reform at the end of the struggle. The French anyway were fighting to liberate their homeland from the occupying Germans and, for all their exhaustion and disaffection, they would not rest until they had done so. …Therefore, when Britain and France asked for one last effort in 1918, they got it, unlike the German government later the same year. In the crisis of the war, democratic regimes proved more capable of demanding further sacrifices than autocratic ones. This may seem paradoxical, but as Home notes, 'mass involvement . . . the consent of the ruled' is 'an increasingly vital condition of the state's effective operation'. To conclude, the military defeat suffered by Germany is only partly explicable in military terms. The German army performed remarkably well during the First World War, but the sheer size of the demands placed upon German society and the economy in order to meet the challenge of total war were ultimately too great to be overcome. This was true almost from the very beginning of the conflict, and it was only the extraordinary efforts of the German people and soldiery that staved off the inevitable for four years and brought their nation to what appeared to be the brink of victory during 1917. However, by this stage Germany was exhausted and, whereas Britain and France had access to overseas sources of grain and materiel, Germany, bankrupt and blockaded, was unable to draw upon such a reserve. American intervention merely reinforced this situation and hastened the end, Eventually, as Offer asserts, the economic imbalance between the two alliances was decisive. 'Germany was not starved into defeat - nor, for that matter was it decisively beaten on the battlefield. Its downfall was ultimately a matter of economic inferiority.' The German army was not, as Ludendorff and Hindenburg would later claim, 'stabbed in the back'. Neither did the front-line soldiers fail their leaders. On the contrary, the German leadership, military, political and economic, failed their people, and their defeat in significant measure resulted from this.

Activities 1.

On the diagram above, mark the reasons for the defeat of Germany as Political (P), Economic (E) or Military (M). It is possible to use more than one letter for each reason.

2.

Write three (PEE) paragraphs explaining the defeat of Germany politically, economically and militarily.

3.

Why according to Ian Cawood and David McKinnon-Bell are democracies more likely to win a ‘total war’?