lecture 15, "the home front"
john merriman

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1917 and 1918--the mutinies.

the mutinies have to be seen in the context of all this, but in particular they have to be seen in the context of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which was the darkest period in four years of dark days.

began on July 1st, 1916--on the first day, almost 40,000 British soldiers were wounded, 20,000 were killed. there was a casualty for every half-meter of the front line. there were more British soldiers killed in the first three days of this battle than there were Americans killed in WWI, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq combined(!). those are phenomenal losses.

it's easy, perhaps, to poke fun at Oxbridge class society--but, in WWI, the flower of British youth perished in these battles.

1917 is the crucial year in determining the outcome of a war that seemed like it was going to go on forever. by the end of 1917 and into March 1918, the military planners begin to think that they'll win the war by 1920, 1921. as so many people died, to win a few kilometers, there were wags who said we'll reach the Rhine by 2007(!).

but two things happen in 1917, that are crucial.

(1) Bolshevik Revolution, after the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar--people wake up and discover that the Emperor has no clothes. Kerensky's provisional government keeps Russia in the war. But by October the Bolshevik's take power, and withdraws Russia from the war by March 1918 at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (there was a deceleration in the war effort before this; and there were any way quite a number of desertions, though less than you might have thought.) (2) the other thing that happens is that the Americans enter the war. they were officially neutral, though the majority of the population supported the Allies, but it's not really that that brings the US into the war. the German High Command had decided that the only way they could win was to knock Britain out of the war. and the way they were going to do that was to sink ships supplying munitions, etc. to the British (a submarine campaign). they placed warnings at ports in US and Philadelphia. sunk the Lusitania on her maiden voyage on 1915, killing 1,200 civilians. (in the 1960s/1970s divers found that the ship was carrying munitions, and that was the German claim). over the long run, the man that was going to keep the US out of the war, Woodrow Wilson, ends up taking the US into WWI (despite widespread domestic opposition--Wilson couldn't get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by Congress, after returning home).

what did the entry of the Americans really mean? not so much troops--troops don't really make the difference, really. the big difference is that the curves cross--the ability of the Germans to supply their own war-machine cannot compete with the combined power of American industrial might. factories easily transformed into the production of arms. and it's at that point when many people in the French and British High Command realize that they will win the war--though they're still unsure at what cost.

all this helps set up March 1918, when the Germans decide that "it's now or never"

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what about the mutinies?

most people in France did not want war in 1914. but because it was easy to portray Germany as the aggressors, the vast majority of the population recognized the urgency of the fight.

to be sure, there are tensions within French society re: the war. there was tremendous resentment. at the Opera, they distributed coal as per rations--as people waited in line, they saw the fancy people in their big cars going off to the restraunts (people who had profited tremendously from Big Business' role in war). so there is class tension fueled by the War.

more than that, you have tensions felt by peasants, who are conscripted without any real possibility of refusing (unless they've already had two brothers killed!).

you have refugees, as well--refugees from the North (sometimes even German-speaking, and Flemish), settling in other areas, as a strain on local resources. you have grumbling, then, about these "Germans" of the North.

many women and men also go on strike in 1917 (689 strikes, affecting 300,000 workers--as compared to 98 strikes in 1916)--not defeatist strikes, but they're agitating for better conditions. why should you work in terrible conditions when the "Big Hats" are simply getting more wealthy?

there are attempts to break these strikes.

but, in sum, 1917 is a year when morale on the home front is lower than ever. (prof just noting that conditions are worse in Berlin than they are in Paris; better in London than in either place)

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what about the mutinies? how serious?

there were probably only two totally reliable divisions standing between Paris and the Germans, after these mutinies.

nobody on the home front really knew about them (part of this is that letters sent home were censored, remember). nor did the Germans, nor did the British.

it's not too hard to say why these mutinies take place when they do. or why they take place at all. it is not defeatism, but these tactics of trench warfare were killing hundreds of thousands of people for nothing--for no reason. there isn't any hope, in this sense.

the mutinies were, indeed, widespread--refusals to "go over the top" simply spread like wirefire. soldiers say they don't want to get killed any more for five cents a day (in some places red flags go up--in some places black flags). though remember socialists had joined the war effort (jules guesde ends up a minister in 1915).

two regiments decide that they're going to march on Paris, and convince the Chamber of Deputies to stop the war. most of the Generals foolishly claim Bolshevik propaganda behind this.

in May and June about 40,000 soldiers were involved in collective acts of refusal (other statistic goes as high as 70,000). the first signs that the soldiers supposed to go "over the top" started ba-ing like sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse. there was socialist and anarchist literature that had gotten into the trenches, but it was obviously not a Bolshevik conspiracy.

a General ends the policy of these mad attacks, over the tops. there were some people who were put up against the wall and shot, for sure, but we don't know. there were 3427 condemnations--about 10% of the people who were court-martialed. 49 were condemned to death, which were carried out immediately.

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in the Spring of 1918, the Germans launch a major offensive (Ludendorf Offensive)--their first since 1914.

at the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is having all sorts of problems (Franz Joseph I, Emperor-King since 1867, dies in 1916). all the predictable cracks are opening up--the Germans are quite unsure whether the Austrian-Hungarian Empire will be able to hang on, fighting against the Italians, for example.

the Americans have, by the Spring of 1918, 325,000 soldiers.

so Ludendorf decides on a massive offensive. encouraged by the fact that there are younger soldiers, barely 18, that have newly arrived in the ranks. and older troops have arrived, as well. so on the 21st of March, 1918, after a relatively brief bombardment of 5 hours, 1.6 million men attack the allied defenses in five separate offenses across a front of 40 miles. and they do break through--some pass 40 miles to the other side.

on Easter Sunday, shells fall on Paris, and they begin taking lives.

but what happens, is predictable. as on a small scale, the Germans begin to outrun their cover and supplies. they begin to encounter stiff resistance at all of these five points. in July, they try a final offensive, they fail, and know that they're simply not going to win.

at that point, morale plunges dangerously in Germany. in January 1918, 250,000 workers had anyway defined the government by going on strike. in July, the British, French, Americans counter-attack quite effectively, using tanks. on the 8th of August, 1918, the German army's darkest day, a British force moves 8 miles(!). at this point, Ludendorf tells Wilhem II that "it's all over but the shouting."

and, at the end, Willhelm the II will slink over the Dutch border, and sign an armistice in a railroad car north of Paris. the war ends on the 11th of November, 1918 (people were killed, afterward, because they didn't know that the armistice had come along).

and, alas, the Spanish Flu comes on the tail of the War. the biggest pandemic since the Black Death.

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the statistics, which are simply staggering:

Russia (1.8 million dead, 5 million wounded--nothing like WWII, of course, when 25 million died)
France (at least 1.4-1.5 million dead, 4.3 wounded)
British, including the Empire (908,000 dead, 2 million wounded)
Italy (508,000 dead)
Serbia (208,000 dead)
Belgium (38,000 dead)

Germany (2 million dead, 4 million wounded--how do you explain losing this many and losing the war? well that's something that the Right would latch on to, in the war's aftermath. it was the socialists, of course)
Austria-Hungary (1.1 million dead, 3.6 million wounded)

in France, there are 36,000 communes, and there were only 12 that didn't have somebody killed. that's why you see war memorials everywhere.

"if God exists, how could he let this happen?"

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