PUBLIC OPINION (New York) combined with THE LITERARY DIGEST Published by Funk & Wagnalls Company (Adam W. Wagnalls, Pres.; Wilfred J. Funk, Vice-Pres.; Robert J. Cuddihy, Treas.; William Neisel, Sec'y), 354-360 Fourth Ave., New York Vol. LIX, No. 4 New York, October 26, 1918 Whole Number 1488 T TOPICS - OF- THE DAY CAUSES OF THE GREAT GERMAN DEFEAT ac HAT "ONLY MILITARY REASONS" could have compelled the groveling Teuton pleas for peace was clear enough even if a leading German newspaper had not made the open confession. "Only military reasons," in the shape of Allied victories "from Dixmude to Damascus,' counted for the reported revival of gaiety in Paris while neutral observers told how in Berlin "everybody wants to group together just as before great disasters." Only military reasons, editors assure us, can account for the revolutionary outbreaks in the Central Empires and the Teutonic governments' panicky moves toward self-democratization. These October days have been fruitful enough in significant military events. Early in the month the Hindenburg line, "the impregnable Zion of Prussian Militarism," as one editor calls it, with its trench system, and redoubts, and gun-emplacements, and dugouts, and luxurious officers' quarters, "became a reminiscence," to use another newspaper phrase. So quickly and completely was it smashed by Haig, and so quickly did the foe withdraw from his long-held positions, that a Cambrai dispatch significantly reported: "The infantry is marching in columns of four through villages hastily abandoned by the enemy." On the 11th newspaper readers could scarcely believe the statements to the effect that Belgian authorities were directing Belgian residents in England to be ready to return to their homeland: within two weeks the German armies were leaving West Flanders. In the first weeks of October, the Brooklyn Eagle notes, the battle to decide whether or not the enemy would stay in France and Belgium this winter” was fought and won. Not only have the Allied forces broken through the Hindenburg line, taken the Chemin des Dames and Laon, and forced the Germans from the Flanders fields, but all along they have been, as the same paper puts it, "giving the Hun his daily defeat." As the Germans give up western Belgium and northern France, Foch is making their retreat costly in man-power and war-materials, and "in plain words," says the Newark News, "such reductions mean the destruction of the German armies." It is largely a question of weather, writes Mr. C. H. Grasty from Paris to the New York Times: "with enough good fighting days before the mud slows everything down, the wounds that the German beast will lick in his winter quarters will be wounds he won't recover from." With the German host outflanked in Belgium and the Champagne, the battle-line, as one press-writer remarks, assumes the shape of a vast trap thrusting its jaws out to engulf the German armies." No wonder, observes Mr. McPherson in the New York Tribune, that Ludendorff "sent Prince Maximilian into the market to buy a truce for him on the best terms possible," as he saw the German defense everywhere "getting more brittle," German units getting "hopelessly intermixed," the big German fighting machine "beginning to function awkwardly and painfully," and "no line of safety in sight, even on the French and Belgian border." Foch has been concurrently taking territory and destroying the German military establishment, this authority continues. His natural ambition, we are told, is to make the retreat of the German armies still a long way from home soil— "if not as costly as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, at least as costly as his retreat from Leipzig. Germany's power to continue the war ought to be definitely snuffed out before Ludendorff extricates himself from northern France and Belgium and establishes what are left of his two hundred odd divisions of March last on a line covering the west bank of the Rhine." In one of the darkest moments for the Allied cause last spring, General Foch confidently told Mr. Lloyd George that even then he preferred his own position on the map to Hindenburg's. Our editors remember this now as they ascribe "the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field " to Foch's military genius and foresight and Hindenburg's or Ludendorff's lack of those qualities. Americans like to compare Foch to Grant. The Boston Transcript recalls Grant's "hammering blows," and quotes these words from the Union commander's final report as a perfectly good definition of the Foch strategy: "I, therefore, determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed forces of the enemy, preventing him from using the same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Secondly, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until, by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left for him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the constitution and laws of the land." We are reminded by the Detroit Free Press that Foch saw the fatal weakness in the German plan of offensive to be the need of long pauses for rest and preparation between the gigantic blows. In these pauses the Allies were able to rally and reform, and so eventually to work the Germans' undoing. Foch devised a strategy of delivering blows on a smaller scale, whereby he has been enabled "to work concentrations and preparations with sufficient forces for fresh blows to fall constantly in new sectors immediately upon the cessation of fighting on other fronts." By this method, continues the Detroit Free Press, "he has been able to shift his blows from the Vesle to the Ancre, from the Ancre to the Somme, from the Somme to the Oise, from the Oise to the Lys, from the Lys to the Somme again, from the Somme to the Scarpe, and now from the Scarpe to the Aisne.” Instead of "three periods" of intensive fighting of approximately a week each, such as Hindenburg staged, what we have had is three solid months of continuous battling with never a rest for the enemy. Now the smash-through between Cambrai and St. Quentin wins the applause of the onlooker, now the attack on the right wing in Champagne and the Argonne seems all important, again the mighty blows which drive the Germans from the coast cities of Flanders seem to be decisive. But in the end, observes the New York Evening Post, "it will be hard to say which has been the decisive stroke in the storm of blows which Foch is raining down with right and left hand. From which- soldiers after all." A military authority already quoted, Mr. William L. McPherson, says that Germany's present defeat is primarily due to the general who devised the German west front campaign of last spring-presumably Ludendorff. According to this writer "If the Germans in March last had elected to stay in the Hindenburg lines they would not now be begging for peace. Allied unity of command would probably not yet have been achieved. The flow of American troops to France would not have been accelerated. The Macedonian front would not have crumbled. Germany would have had troops to spare to defend Macedonia and Palestine and keep Bulgaria and Turkey at least partially contributing members of the Quadruple Alliance. She would also have had enough troops left to develop and organize her power in the conquered Russian provinces-perhaps to exploit those provinces to her own military benefit. From the New York Herald." REDEEMING THE FLANDERS FIELDS. Marshal's purpose is to "canalize the German retreat as he canalized the German advances" "He is evidently determined to make Germany go.out the way she came in, through the narrow Belgian pass. Germany chose it because it was the easy way to come in, but it will be a difficult way to go out, and it will carry Ludendorff's armies to the lowlands of the Rhine, which do not lend themselves to strong defenses." Germany suffered in the field from the combination of Foch's superior methods of attack and "the inherent faults of Ludendorff's strategy" last spring, contends Mr. Walter Duranty in one of his dispatches to the New York Times. As we read: Attack "Ludendorff had promised victory by the use of shock divisions formed by emasculation of the rest of the army. after attack was pushed home to the point of exhaustion, but always the Allies were able to bar the road ere it was too late. Finally Foch judged the German Army to be sufficiently exhausted and struck in turn. Since then the enemy has had no respite. Instead of intermittent offensives launched after long preparation the Allied attacks have been continuous. The dispirited Germans, to whom a victorious end of the war had been promised before August, have been hammered incessantly. Salient after salient created has bitten holes in their line and sooner or later compelled wide and costly retirement." Another writer in the same newspaper avers that the break in German morale both at home and in the field has been in no small measure due to the discovery that they are beaten in the department of military science and not merely by the weight of numbers; "their once worshiped chiefs are only second-rate "Germany's real hope of victory lay in solidifying her grip in the East and in playing for a deadlock in the West." While some writers have praised Germany's retreat tactics, Mr. McPherson finds them sadly at fault. In getting out of his" salients" in France, Ludendorff lost after July 18, 260,000 prisoners and 3,700 guns, only to find himself in equally vulnerable new salients caused by Allied penetration at weak points. We read further: "Every German retreat since July 18 last has been dilatory and lumbering. Hence the excessive losses in prisoners and guns. Ludendorff has not mastered the art of retirement. In 1914 von Moltke the Younger got a group of defeated German armies back from below the Marne to the north of the Aisne at maximum speed and with scarcely any losses. He knew where he was going and why. Ludendorff, on the contrary, has always shown great indecision and confusion of purpose in his retreats and has had to pay an enormous price for these shortcomings. Yet some mysterious influence keeps him in command. For which the Allies have every reason to be thankful. Nothing could suit Foch better than to have Ludendorff run true to form in the grand withdrawal to the French and Belgian border which is now starting." But as several American editors point out, Germany is being beaten by inferiority of resources as well as by inferiority of leadership. Foch, they remark, apparently has all the tools he needs, he has the divisions to maneuver with, the guns with which to blast his way through, the tanks with which to defy the German machine guns, abundant airplanes and means of transport. The New York Evening Post thinks it far from improbable that Hindenburg did, as rumored, initiate the German peace plea "because of the drying up of the sources of munitions and war-material; Germany has reached the end of her resources." It was known in Holland last August, according to a New York Tribune correspondent, that Ludendorff had "stated privately that the failure to get raw material was making the situation serious, and added that only the captures of the March offensive saved a crisis earlier." A German officer, recently taken prisoner, could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw the great masses of artillery and motor-transports behind the Allied lines and said, "we are well off as to shells, but you seem to have an endless supply." Captured German orders, says Mr. Duranty in the New York Times, "show the shortage of horses, artillery, and the lack of war-material of all sorts." One such order, for instance, "refers to the jamming of machine guns due to substitution of iron for copper cartridge-cases and the inferior quality of ersatz grease, wherewith the guns are lubricated." In another dispatch this writer says that the number of guns per German battery has been reduced by from three to four in many cases and many artillery units have been supprest. In three months, he continues, "the Allies have destroyed or captured over 5,000 cannon—a full quarter of the total artillery force of Germany. At the same time the forced 'combing out' of workmen from the factories has seriously lowered production, and this weakness grows daily more pronounced and dangerous." A dispatch from Bern received by way of Paris and Washington says that even in ordinary times German factories had difficulty in keeping up the supply of artillery; "but since the Allies' advance, with the capture of 4,000 cannon and of nearly 25,000 machine guns, Germany is no longer able to make up for her losses, as the dearth of the particular kind of steel used in the making of guns begins to be felt." Germany's ability to keep on fighting is, of course, largely a matter of resources, and it is significant that the coal-mines around Lens and Laon have been recovered by the British and French and that General Pershing is striking at the iron-mine region in the Argonne and is within artillery-range of the ironmines around Metz. Moreover, Germany's hold on the mineral resources of the Balkans and Asia Minor is being broken. German loss of man-power is estimated by the New York Evening Post, on the basis of the dispatches, at 900,000 between the middle of July and the middle of October, 300,000 in prisoners and 600,000 in killed and wounded, and, even allowing for the return of the slightly wounded, it is plain to this newspaper "that the Germans have permanently lost more than the entire strength of their 1920 class," which General Malleterre, the French military expert, writing for the New York World, sets at something under 500,000. In the meantime American troops are reaching France at the rate of 250,000 a month, as officially announced in Washington. Probably 2,000,000 of our men are already on French soil. Most of these, of course, are still in training, but two field armies have been formed and are fighting under the command of Generals Liggett and Bullard, respectively, while a third field army is in process of formation. As to the quality of the Allied troops, little perhaps needs to be said. One correspondent has seen the French poilus grow young again at victory's fountain of youth. A captured German officer at the point of death said that as a professional soldier he admired the French "as the world's finest soldiers." The British achievements at Cambrai won eager plaudits from the French, and never, writes General F. D. Maurice, "have British grit and valor accomplished more." But without exaggerating our own importance or deeming our men better fighters than the Frenchmen or the British, we. naturally take most interest in the achievements of our own soldiers, whose first appearance in the Allied battle-line at Cantigny and Château-Thierry marked the turning of the tide which now runs so strongly against Germany. They won their spurs in large-scale fighting at St. Mihiel, after "The whole Allied forward movement from the North Sea to the Meuse is the swinging back of a huge door, with the Allies, from Belgium to Gouraud, pushing irresistibly against the broad surface of the door, but the Americans on the Meuse hammering on the hinges. The door can yield, as it has been yielding everywhere along its broad front from the North Sea to the Aisne, but if it gives on the hinges it mears German disaster. Before the German frontier is reached, the door may swing back eighty miles from Ostend to Antwerp, sixty miles before it reaches Brussels from Courtrai, sixty miles before it reaches Namur from Solesmes, fifty-five miles before it reaches Mézières from Rethel. But less than twenty miles from where the Americans stand to-day would bring them to Montmédy and Longuyon and the cutting of the German line of communications and the loss of the Briey region. That is why German resistancé is most desperate in front of Liggett's men. Having seen at Château-Thierry what they could do in the way of keeping a door shut, Foch has now given the Americans the chance of showing what they can do in the way of bursting a door open." Besides this army, small American units are fighting at various points along the line "like the sharp teeth in a buzz-saw," to use one enthusiastic correspondent's vigorous phrase. These "unnoted American victories," says the New York Evening Sun editorially, must not be overlooked, for these American troops who are barely mentioned in dispatches have played a gallant and essential part in the breaking up of the German line in Champagne and near Cambrai. Germany is daily expecting an American attack in Lorraine or Alsace, according to the dispatches. While she is becoming increasingly aware of the activities of American airmen, the bombardment of the Rhine cities has so far largely been the work of British airmen. But, says the Kansas City Times, "when America takes the air in force with the great squadrons of planes now assembling in France, the Rhine Valley, which is the great supply-artery of the whole German military system, will be brought under the Allied guns and put out of business," and "Mayence, Coblenz, Düsseldorf, Essen, will share the fate of the Lower Rhine towns." In this connection, we may note that it has recently been brought out in testimony before a committee of the House of Representatives at Washington that we already have 8,390 trained American fliers. Mr. John D. Ryan, in charge of our aircraft production, was with our forces at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne, and is quoted as saying that "in both these offensives the air forces were stronger in numbers and perhaps as high in efficiency as in any battle of the war." A detailed chronological statement of the successive events of the campaigns in France and Flanders, as well as in the other theaters of war, will be found under the heading of "Current Events," on page 62. |