Here is the authorial overview of the end of TTL’s WW1 – feedback welcome!
Collapse in the East – The Last Two Months of the Great War
When Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Karl communicated their promise of national self-determination, they still hoped against all hope to be able to shape and steer this development towards a new architecture of power in Central Eastern Europe in which their empires still played an important role – or at least would survive the end of the Great War. After all, for all the unrest which brooded, all the scarcities which haunted army and civilian economy alike and for all the panic which the ultimate offensive engagement of US troops on the Western and Alpine Fronts caused, Germany still controlled vast territories East of its borders with over a million troops who had not been significantly beaten by the Russians in open battle since 1916; Austria-Hungary still had not experienced widespread revolution; and Bulgaria was still shielding the Balkan flank. It had become quite clear to the two monarchs and their respective governments that the military leadership had been misleading them with regards to the possibility of pushing inimical belligerent nations out of the war and enforcing a favourable peace treaty on the rest of the Entente through final offensives. Especially Ludendorff was widely blamed for this disastrous strategy. But, the modestly reshuffled leadership of both empires hoped, there would still be time to mend the mistakes one had made: Poland would be built up as an actually independent buffer state. The flabby Russian socialists would be offered the peace without annexations and indemnities which they had clamoured for. The disgruntled tribes of the Balkans and the Carpathians would be appeased with greater autonomy and thus motivated to hold the line long enough for the other Entente nations to realize that a frontal assault on the Hindenburg Line and the Alpine defenses was too costly, and the offer made to them in Krakow was not so bad after all.
Four breakthroughs in August 1918 would prove them wrong. While the collapse of Bulgaria was the militarily most important of them all, the Battle of Villers on the Western Front, the liberation of Petrograd, and the breakthrough in Romania all were immensely important, too, for a number of different reasons: Villers not only restored the Entente’s supply lines along the Western Front; losing the bulge in the front which had been announced as the final offensive to end the war and which had been paid for with almost a hundred thousand dead German soldiers was a demoralizing blow to the morale of the defenders of the Hindenburg Line. Petrograd was a pivotal point for public opinion in Russia – together with the successes of the Pyotr Baluyev’s Fifth Union Army and their allies in Romania, it helped swing public opinion from the fear that the new revolutionary army would not be able to hold its ground, let alone score offensive successes against its enemies, to a cautious optimism that the Union of Equals could really make its own contribution to bringing about the downfall of the invading Central Powers, and even a feathery hint of republican pride. After these breakthroughs, there was no doubt that the Entente would not accept anything even closely resembling the Krakow Communiqué’s offer, and that they would push on until total victory was achieved.
This would not take as long as a number of fearful contemporary commenters, who had grown accustomed to the horribly costly stalemates of the entrenched fronts, would anticipate. Throughout the second half of August, Entente forces mounted an onslaught against the remaining Central Powers of a massive scale, which produced very few concrete advances except in South-Eastern Europe, but which caused the war machine of their exhausted opponents to begin to buckle.
On the Western Front, primarily American, French, and British forces launched co-ordinated artillery, air and tank
offensives against the Hindenburg Line and defensive positions in
the Argonnes which inflicted such a high blood toll on the German defenders which, when news of it trickled back to the home front in spite of comprehensive censorship, caused such panic and protest against the mildly reformist government that Kaiser Wilhelm II. and Quartermaster-General Groener saw themselves forced to start a political offensive of popular concessions: Chancellor Hertling stepped down, and Wilhelm allowed the Reichstag to nominate the general secretary of the SPD,
Friedrich Ebert, as his successor, bringing with him a majority of SPD ministers, along with reform-minded members of Zentrum and FVP. Wilhelm II. octroyed a
new Prussian constitution (like his great-uncle had done in 1848), which reduced the Herrenhaus to a merely ceremonial institution and abolished census suffrage for the Abgeordnetenhaus. Without consulting his fellow heads of German states, he announced elections for a national assembly which would put the Reich on a new constitutional foundation.
What these measures achieved was to weld the MSPD firmly to the government and its desperate defensive military efforts, with its loyal party officials doing their utmost to prevent a general strike, which was now prepared across the entire Reich by the
Revolutionäre Obleute, who certainly had closer ties to the USPD than to the MSPD, but who did not see themselves bound in any way by anything which that party would decide, either.
On the Italian Front, a renewed offensive managed to push as far East as and
capture Fiume / Rijeka, from where General Diaz purportedly planned to push as far into practically undefended Istria and then Dalmatia as possible, but he was vehemently urged by his American, British and French allies to concentrate all his efforts on a Northward offensive instead, which, being a much more challenging enterprise, did not begin until the end of September. Both the Krakow Communiqué’s promise of national autonomy and the advance of the Italians contributed to hastening the supporters of Yugoslavism among the Slovenes, Croats etc. in their steps towards achieving independence and then unification with the Kingdom of Serbia. As the last update has shown, though, there is considerably more heterogeneity and dissent among the various anti-Habsburg groups among the Slovenes and especially the Croats than IOTL. Regardless of this lack of unity, Habsburg rule over its South Slavic lands collapses quickly: hundreds of thousands march through the streets demanding this or that new form of state and society, a wave of strikes and even more widespread desertions paralyse the land and leave it defenseless, unrest erupts in the countryside where the Green Cadres are helping peasants to emulate their Russian counterparts and oust their landlords. To all this, Kaiser Karl reacts with what can only be described as depressive apathy.
In the Balkans, Bulgaria’s surrender opens the path for an unprecedently fast Entente advance. British, French and Serbian divisions are pushing North-Westwards against k.u.k. armies who are merely putting up resistance when their orderly retreat across Serbia is endangered and they are threatened with capture. A predominantly Greek army group, with minor British, French, and Russian contingents, moves across the formerly Bulgarian parts of Thrace and attacks the last Ottoman lines of defense in Europe. On September 2nd, as the thunder of artillery can already be heard in Istanbul,
Sultan Mehmet VI. accepts the humiliating terms which a delegation of the advancing Entente armies have offered him: the Ottoman Empire is to demobilize its army entirely, vast swathes of its territory shall be occupied “for the time being” by various members of the Entente, Constantinople and the Straits shall be controlled by a joint Entente mission, all ethnic and religious minorities shall be given utmost protection and freedom of expression, the Ottoman fleet is to be handed over to Entente control, and a long list of wanted war criminals, among them former pashas Enver, Djamal, and Talaat, are to be handed over into Entente custody, to be put on trial for their atrocious crimes.
As another member of the Central Powers has dropped out of the war, Bulgaria, which had been the first one to fold (like IOTL), is gripped by revolutionary unrest. Immediately after the surrender, Tsar Ferdinand has abdicated, and his son Boris has succeeded him on the throne. He and his bourgeois coalition government exert very little control over their territory, though: all over the countryside and within the armed forces, revolution has broken out, calling for the end of the monarchy, land reform, Yugoslav unification, universal franchise, court-martials against the generals, free bread for all the workers and, well you can imagine… The revolution is led by the agrarian BANU and supported by the Broad Socialists, although many who participate are not affiliated with any political party. Blagoev’s Narrow Socialists initially remained reserved (because they rejected the agrarian agenda as petty bourgeois and did not want to subordinate themselves to BANU leadership), but when their rank and file was swept by the tide of revolutionary fervor, they jumped aboard, too. The military is divided, but with demobilization fully under way, neither side manages to pull it onto their side successfully. Tsar Boris’s government, as Meštrovic has criticized in his last update, literally appeals to his yesterday’s enemy and today’s occupying force, the Serbian government, to assist him in putting down the revolution – and the Serbians comply, seeing as it is the tsarist government which has agreed to surrender to them and guarantees Bulgarian demobilization. They begin to commit a number of massacres among revolutionaries in Western Bulgaria, until outraged protests by their UoE allies – who are covertly sending in ideologically enthusiastic members of the Republican Guards to help assist and build up the BANU’s Orange Guards and socialist Red Guards – compel them to tread more cautiously. By the end of September, Tsar
Boris dismisses his government and abdicates, too, and Bulgaria’s short civil war ends with a victory for the revolutionaries, causing an exodus of thousands of opponents of the revolution into neighboring countries or, in some cases, even as far away as France or the US.
The Romanians and Baluyev’s Fifth Army are
breaking through to the Danube in the second half of August, allowing for both armies to send small contingents Southwards into demobilizing Bulgaria, where the Romanians are securing Southern Dobrugea for themselves while the UoE sends in more “aides” to help decide Bulgaria’s civil war in favour of the revolutionaries. The bulk of both armies, though, is pushing Westwards, where their advance is going to be facilitated to a great extent by two consecutive decisions taken in capitals farther to the West: Hungary’s declaration of independence, which causes irritation and moments of outright dissolution among Austrian regiments on the Romanian Front, and a week later the German OHL’s decision to
recall the entire Army Group Mackensen upriver on the Danube to secure Germany’s new outer line of Alpine defenses.
Farther North on the Eastern Front, the line of Central Power defenses mostly holds throughout August, in spite of localized revolts and mutinies. North of the Carpathians, the Czechoslovak Legion and the Polish Corps, Ukrainian Territorial Defense divisions, the Third and Fourth Union Armies and a small number of Republican Guard units have probed the Austro-German defenses in several places with combined offensives, but found them too solid still to risk an all-out offensive. Yet farther North, the First and Second Union Armies, great numbers of Republican Guards and the Baltic Fleet are cautious, too: they are fully restoring infrastructural connections with Finland and establishing a number of bridgeheads in Estonia in the back of Hutier’s army group, but here, too, caution prevails, coming straight from the top, for Supreme Commissioner Kamkov is holding magnificent speeches about the brave citizens redeeming their comrades and liberating the republic at last, but in practice he is not willing to rock the boat by risking hundreds of thousands of new casualties in a massive offensive against a still solid enemy yet.
All of this changes in September. The SPD minister for Labour and the Economy, Gustav Bauer, manages to get the leaders of the congress of trade unions, Carl
Legien, and industrialists, Hugo
Stinnes, to agree on a
pact which is immediately legally enshrined and encompasses the eight-hour workday, increased paid sick leave, the enshrining of free negotiations between unions and employers and their universally binding nature, co-determination on the basis of parity in the workplace and unemployment insurance financed on the basis of parity, too. (IOTL, this happens immediately after the revolution.)
But none of these reforms can stop the signs of disintegration on the Western Front when, at a staggering human cost on both sides, Entente forces are
breaking through the Hindenburg Line in several places. As the military leadership attempts to reorganize the front, stop the numerically superior Entente troops from advancing too far and their own troops from disintegrating, Paul von Hindenburg concedes in a telegraph to Kaiser Wilhelm II., which leaks to the public almost immediately, that “we have all erred gravely in our judgments” and that “we have no choice now but to look the facts in the eyes”, which has been generally understood as a sign that defeat has become imminent and terms must be sought immediately – a conclusion which does not materialize yet for more than six tragical weeks, bitter truths sometimes take longer to sink in… but primarily yet another blow to the morale of the retreating defenders.
As the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and just as importantly also the Czechs and Slovaks are
declaring their independence from Vienna in early September, following Hungary’s lead, and German OHL orders the retreat from South-Eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary practically descends into chaos. This is the degree of weakness for which the generals of the Union Armies, and especially the Advisor to the Joint Command over the Western Front (to the CP, it is, of course, the Eastern Front) Alexey Brusilov, have waited for. On September 6th, Brusilov, egged on by the various ethnic legions as well as by news of an intensifying revolt in Latvia and encouraged by Hindenburg’s fatalistic message, finally gives the green lights for not one, not two, but
three major offensives to be launched against the positions of the Central Powers.
The first one, in Southern Romania, cuts through the last disorganized defenders like a hot knife through butter, leading to the
liberation of Bucharest on September 10th and the establishment of Romanian/Entente control over the entire rest of
Wallachia only ten days later. (Imagine this as an equivalent to OTL’s Operation Faustschlag, only in reverse.) A sizable number of fleeing Austro-Hungarian soldiers is captured. Now, the Romanians and their Union allies have caught up with the Serbians, who complete the liberation of their home land by September 19th.
The second offensive, in the Northern piedmont of the Carpathians, does not advance quite as fast, for the German so-called “South Army” under General Felix von Bothmer had not been recalled, putting up spirited resistance to the combined onslaught of various Union, Polish, and Czechoslovak divisions. It took the attackers nine days before local breakthroughs could be transformed into a real walkover, capturing yet more prisoners and causing the remaining defenders to retreat and reorganize at a much deeper line, ceding
Galician territory as far as Przemysl to the advancing coalition troops, who need a few days to rebuild infrastructure enough to maintain and extend their lines of supply before, on September 26th and 27th, the next two offensive waves wash against Central Powers positions: the
Polish Corps are pushing North-Westwards towards Krakow, while Czechoslovak units penetrate into the mountainous forests of their Slovakian home land. Russian, Ukrainian and other Union regiments are mostly remaining in place for the time being, putting down the last pockets of closed-in defenders, restoring infrastructure and building up the new political structures of the revolutionary republic in Lemberg and its countryside.
In the third offensive, the Second Union Army and Latvian guards
push Westwards along the Daugava against crumbling German resistance by units from the Tenth Army who are experiencing an unprecedented surge in desertions and who are thus soon ordered to withdraw Southwards, allowing the Union Army and the Latvians to liberate town after town along the river and drive a wedge between German Eighth Army holding out in the Estonian countryside to the North and the rest of the German forces. The Baltic Fleet contributed to this offensive through
amphibious landings near Ventspils, from where Republican Guards marched almost unimpeded Eastwards to unite with their comrades.
The month ends with a big beat of the drum as, under the impression of the unstoppable breakaway of the Yugoslav, Hungarian and Czechoslovak lands, the renewed Italian offensive, the fast movement of Serbian and other Entente troops across Croatia, and new strikes and protests in Vienna,
Kaiser Karl abdicates on September 30th and transfers his powers to the new Staatsrat elected by the recently convened Provisional National Council for German Austria. Instructed by the three equally footed chairmen of the Staatsrat, the nationalist Franz Dinghofer, the Christian Social Johann Nepomuk Hauser and the Social Democrat Karl Seitz, the Austrian generals Webenau and Straußenberg signed the Armistice of Aßling on October 2nd, with which
all Austrian armies officially surrendered.
While this certainly weakened Germany’s defenses even more, it no longer meant as much as it would have done two months before: the Northern and Western parts of Austria had come, at this moment, under firm German military control, and were, over the next weeks, treated as occupied territory. Hungary, the last part of the old empire which had not surrendered nor aligned itself with the Entente, had been extending its feelers to all sides for over a month now, but had found no mercy, neither with the Czechoslovaks and their Union allies who insisted on Slovak secession and accession to the new Czechoslovak Republic, nor with the Romanians and their Union allies, who insisted on annexing Transilvania and joining it with Romania, nor with the Serbs, the Yugoslav Commission and their Anglo-French allies, who insisted on full secession of all Yugoslav lands and their unification with Serbia.
In Vienna, in the meantime, the nascent
Republic of Deutschösterreich is torn apart from the beginning by ideological divisions concerning the questions of the relations with Berlin on the one hand, and the socialist council movement on the other hand. The German OHL had received news of the Austrian surrender with defiant fatalism; it had been anticipated over the course of the past few weeks. While they continued their withdrawal behind the Alpine Defense Line and its fortification, they also offered support to the emerging
Heimwehren – German militia units, mostly officially demobilized soldiers – who prepared to take on Slovene-Croat-Serbian and Czechoslovak groups and organize resistance against a Slavicization of the border territories and their conversion into concentration areas for an attack on Germany’s heartland. In Vienna, and even more so in Carinthia, Styria and Western Bohemia, the Deutschnationals wanted to accept this arrangement and sought, in the middle term, German Austria’s accession to the German Empire. They also supported to employ, instead of demobilizing, loyal army units in a crackdown against radical councils who were beginning to take over factories and who violently opposed the formation of the Heimwehren. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, favoured a clear severing of all ties with the German Empire in its current belligerent state – including the explicit demand that the German Imperial Army withdrew from occupied Austrian territory –, and sought to rebuild a force for the protection and safeguarding of the republic from among the council militia, whom they sought to influence and steer into a moderate course of co-operation with the Staatsrat and the Provisional National Council. The council movement itself was divided between compromising left-wing Social Democrats like Julius Deutsch, Josef Frey, and the recently released Friedrich Adler, who sought to restart work in the factories across the country and supported co-operation with the Staatsrat under the condition of immediate universal, free and equal elections to a Constituent Assembly, and more radical revolutionaries around Franz Koritschoner and Elfriede Friedländer, who supported immediate worker takeovers of the factories, rejected the Staatsrat and the National Council for being based on the representation which had resulted from the unequal parliamentary elections of 1911, and favoured building up new state institutions emerging from the councils themselves. Austria’s third large party, the Christian Socials, were caught between a rock and a hard place: neither did they support submitting to “Prussian” Germany (whose anti-Catholic policies they kept in horrified memory), nor did they wish to tolerate a socialist upheaval of all social relations, and subsequently began to form “left” and right wings who favoured alliances with the Deutschnationals or the Social Democrats respectively, while the party leadership officially supported an all-party coalition of national emergency, officially stood by the full demobilization, while its members joined the Heimwehren, and officially distanced itself from Germany, while not supporting anything which would have made the German occupation of large parts of Austria any less comfortable, either.
Elsewhere, the first half of October looked terrifying for Wilhelm II., Ebert’s government and the Hindenburg/Groenen OHL, too. Desertions multiplied along the Western Front, where the Entente was advancing slowly but unstoppably and where still thousands died on every single day. In the first week of October, the Czechoslovak Legion wrestled control over
Bratislava from Hungarian contingents, from where they could travel by train across friendly territory to Prague and onwards, so that on October 19th, the day which would go down in history as the day on which the Great War ended, they were able to threaten the unprotected Saxon border of the German Empire with invasion. Up to this moment, the Romanian Army had broken through Hungarian defenses and poured into
Transilvania, while Serbian and Yugoslav Committee-loyal SHS (Slovene-Croat-Serb) as well as British and French troops had reached the South-Eastern fringes of German-speaking Austria unopposed and, with Greek and Italian assistance, completed taking over control over
Albania in the South, logistically aided by the (
formally joint Entente, de facto mostly Italian) takeover of the k.u.k. Adriatic Fleet, against which the SHS representatives put up meek protest, in which they were supported only by the UoE and the US, though, and even that only half-heartedly, for the UoE, too, had acquiesced to the Serbs, British, French and Italians sorting things out in the Western Balkans while they themselves had gained a new ally in revolutionary Bulgaria, and potentially another, should the radicals in the Austrian council movement prevail, and the US had their hands full with all the death certificates coming in from the Western Front.
But the death knell to Germany’s defense sounded in Vilnius / Wilna / Wilno. A few hundred kilometers South of this multi-ethnic historical capital of the Lithuanians,
uprisings had broken out against the Polish Regency government in Warsaw. They were spearheaded by the
Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, but very soon, the Workers’ Councils movement (for an OTL equivalent, see
here) joined in, where the two didn’t already overlap. OHL and Ebert’s government had ordered Eichhorn to divert an entire division of his Tenth Army to the South to relieve Steczkowski’s Regency government and crush the anti-German revolts. Among the German soldiers receiving these marching orders – I have already mentioned how they are, in good part, politically motivated draftees with USPD and other revolutionary proletarian backgrounds from the striking towns of January 1918 –, resentment soon broke out. It was clear to anyone but the most blind that the war was lost and would soon be over, and now they, who had already hoped to be able to await this end of the war in their relatively calm pocket, should risk their lives to kill countless civilians, protesting fellow workers (and peasants), in order to give a puppet government, which would fall in less than a month anyway, a few more weeks in power? And all that while it was clear that Eastern Europe – and perhaps the world? – was turning towards socialism and national self-determination, and that they would soon, with great likelihood, be called to account for their deeds in these last, futile days of the war.
The first groups to
mutiny were stationed in Vilnius. Fraternising with those whom they had oppressed for the past years, soldiers from the XXXVIII. Reserve Corps proclaimed the “
Wilnaer Kommune” on October 5th. Their mutiny – helped along by news from Austria, too – spread like wildfire, and within a week, not only most of the Attack Group Arnold von WInckler, who had been ordered to march against the insurgents, but also most of the rest of the Tenth German Army was in open mutiny, helping in the emergence of countless local revolts and revolutionary takeovers all across Lithuania, Western Belarus, and Northern Poland (speaking in OTL’s present-day borders) instead of oppressing them. These mutinies and revolutions on the periphery were soon accompanied by a
wave of strikes in great cities in the heartland of the Reich: in Bremen, Berlin, München, Heilbronn, Leipzig, Breslau and other places, protest marches brought hundreds of thousands, if not millions to the streets, and local strikes turned into a general strike. The protesters all demanded an immediate end to the war – but beyond that, they did not agree on much: there were anarchists, staunch radical socialists, moderate trade unionists, unpolitical townfolk and even people from the countryside joining. When attempts to appease them had failed, Ebert’s Minister for the Interior, Gustav
Noske, ordered to shoot on protesters who aimed to take over government institutions in Berlin, on October 10th. One day later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Philipp Scheidemann, resigned in protest, and immediately sought communications with moderate members of the USPD leadership like Bernstein, Haase, and Kautsky, drawing plans to steer the revolutionary movement safely into a constitutional republican direction and away from dangerous anarchist experiments. Ebert and Groener would soon realize themselves, though, that the (in their eyes) worst could only be averted if the war was ended immediately, regardless on what terms. Their last desperate attempt to steer the course of events in a more favourable way was to
release Jozef Pilsudski from prison on October 13th and send him to Warsaw with a German capitulation which communicated that Eichhorn had been ordered to stop any attempts to curb the uprising, and in which the German government officially acknowledged the POW as part of Poland’s defensive force, withdrew its support for Steczkowski, and promised to a new Polish government under Pilsudski’s leadership that they would
withdraw all their forces from “Poland” – whatever that meant. In exchange, they received nothing more than Pilsudski’s personal word of honour that he would not turn against Germany and invade the Empire.
But already two days later, on October 15th, it became clear that even this would not be enough to stem the tide of imminent military threats, near-universal general strike, and breakdown of public order within the empire, and Ebert sent a delegation of three generals, endowed with a carte blanche from Kaiser Wilhelm II., to negotiate the terms of Germany’s surrender with all Entente powers. The terms they received were shocking to them, so they sought reinsurance that they should really go ahead and sign them. The shock took more than a day to sink in in Berlin as well, but the reassurance was given, and on October 18th,
the Generals Hindenburg and Groener and Admiral Hipper for the German Empire and military envoys from the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the French Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Serbia, and the Union of Equals signed the
Armistice of Absam, in which the German Imperial Army committed itself to
withdraw all its troops behind the Rhine in the West, the Bavarian border in the South, and the Oder in the East; to hand over all military equipment currently stationed in territories to be evacuated in an undamaged condition, to hand over its high sea fleet and u-boats, and to demobilize its military forces completely over the course of the next three months. The sea blockade of Germany’s ports would remain in place until a final peace treaty would be signed.
On Saturday October 19th, 1918, at 6:00 a.m., all guns fell silent along the long fronts between Germany and its enemies. The Great War ended. [1]
[1] Well, not entirely. Hungary, for all intents and purposes a member of the former Central Powers, is still fighting against Romania, a member of the Entente, in Transilvania. But just like mainstream OTL history, I’ll simply gloss over this…
