The German government and general staff precipitated a risk of escalation of the tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and audaciously calculated on the possibility of launching what they considered would constitute a preventive strike against Russia and France, and thereby breaking the influence of the Entente. The German General Staff government planned to overcome the encirclement by the Entente, opted for the risk of war. If war did not break out, German authorities at least hoped to weaken the Entente and win a moral victory that would increase the prestige and stability of Germany and the Hapsburg Empire. There is a lack of evidence is to establish that they deemed a European war to be inevitable in view of war preparation matters. The German government’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war was certainly larger than that of the French and British governments, but Austro-Hungarian and Russian moves, was not be exculpated in view of their aggressive actions. Austria-Hungary played a decisive part in driving the crisis to escalation by choosing to a punitive strike against Serbia to stabilize their empire, regardless of the risk of an outbreak of European war with the support of the German authorities who were concerned about preserving German and Austro-Hungarian great power status. Wilhelm II announced to the Reichstag: “I do not know any parties anymore,” and spoke of Burgfrieden, a national truce as if there were to be peace in a castle and Germans had to stand together to defend it for the duration of the hostilities in the face of the widespread pessimism about the outbreak of the war. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg claimed that Germany was the victim of unprovoked aggression, and the invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg as a regrettable measure that would be rectified once Germany’s military objective had been attained. The Reichstag passed war credit unanimously, and the Bundesrat was empowered with putting the economy on a war footing, and then adjourned prior to approving war credits a second time on 2 December 1914 in the interest of seeking to avoid punitive defeat.
All of the European states did not envisage the forthcoming war to be one of attrition that would require marshalling enormous amounts of resources. New technological developments, in terms of rapid mobilization, massive gunpower, fast communications through the telegraph, and the support of railroads seemed to have made war between industrialised nations relatively short. The Franco-Prussian War and Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 confirmed the common belief that a conflict would not be a prolonged one. Another decisive underlying factor was the increasing degree of fatalism among European peoples and decision-makers, which led many to believe that war inevitable due to the recurring diplomatic crises, which usually worked to the disadvantage of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Most leaders and much of public opinion considered to be a “necessarily evil,” particularly if it meant to continue politics by other means, which was a prevailing notion in all European countries. When a new crisis approached in 1914, the governments in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and St. Petersburg were less willing than before to finding a compromise solution.
While the fleet as a weapon against British navy proved to be almost completely ineffective, the German mobilization effort in August 1914 moved forward efficiently, and the great operation against France began with impressive successes after first invading through Belgium, refusing to recognise its neutrality, which in turn led to Britain declaring war on 4 August. The German armies advanced wherever there were available railway tracks, which could be destroyed during a retreat, to move forward on the strength of the critical element of speed for the Schlieffen Plan anticipation for a knockout strike to succeed by deploying seventy-three German divisions to bypass the heavily defended French border with Germany through initially invading Belgium, regardless of Britain guaranteeing its neutrality, and encircling Paris with three armies from the north and thereby inflict a defeat on France within six weeks. Liège fell on 7 August after a nearly two-week battle, which required being seized in two days to maintain the railway schedule for the planned advance. German armies made a strong advance through Belgium, while the French launched their offensive into Alsace and made a thirty-five kilometre advance, only to be forced to retreat two days later due to a successful German counterattack during the fighting in Belgium. Another French assault was staged in Lorraine on 14 August, which was likewise thwarted by German defences, and was followed by a counterattack on the 20 August, which led to a stalled advance by 24 August.
As the fighting in Alsace and Lorraine was ongoing with indecisive results, five German armies were ready to start the decisive campaign to achieve the encirclement of the enemy by 18 August, while the French had not deployed sufficient amounts of troops to the Belgian border to counter this threat. The French had broken into Upper Alsace, but beginning on 20 August, the Sixth and Seventh German armies drove the French army back across the frontier from Lorraine with overwhelming force, and thus brought French plans to invade Germany a standstill. The German advance came to a standstill at the French frontier fortifications, and the Fourth and Fifth armies defeated the French offensive attempting to counter the German threat from Belgium from 21 August, only to be forced to retreat in the face of overwhelming force two days later. Meanwhile, the northern German armies advanced steadily toward and into northern France, defeating the French at Namur and the English at Mons on 22-23 August. The fortress of Namur capitulated on 25 August, but two months of stiff Belgian resistance that the German general staff had underestimated and destroying train tracks also extended the six-week timeline for the bulk of the German to advance to crush the French forces, and thereby enable the successful execution of the Schlieffen Plan that completely depended on the German army’s mobility through train transports to circumvent mounting frontal offensive operations against well-established defensive positions, and avoiding having to prevail against the combined resources of the allies while fighting a two front war. Schlieffen had envisaged launching a colossal envelopment through a wheeling across northern France in a wide arc complemented with a retreat of German forces in the south to lure the French forces into a “reversal of fronts” and trapping them in a strategic “revolving door” in which advancing German forces would crush them from the rear However. Moltke did not follow all of these prescriptions upon taking office in 1906, in terms of addressing logistical shortcomings by shortening the supply routes to the vanguard units, and also disavowing allowing French forces, leading to reinforcing the unit strengths along the French-German border, at the expense of reinforcing the units advancing from the north, which weakened the spearhead of the offensive movement to generate a “revolving door” effect as key principle of the Schlieffen Plan.
Moltke believed from the victory reports that the final success of the campaign to inflict a decisive defeat on France was within reach, and therefore ordered two army corps on the northern right wing to be dispatched to the eastern front to stem more rapid than had been anticipated Russian mobilization that led to an assault on East Prussia, until encouraging reports later arrived on 27 August. The German northern wing was further weakened by the detachment of troops facing the French assaulting toward Alsace and Lorraine. The Germans were no longer strong enough to envelop Paris from the west due to the earlier setbacks in Belgium and Russia. Moreover, the tenacious allied retreat from the Sambre to Le Cateaun slowed the German advance to an extent that General Alexander von Kluck commanding the First German army advancing on the right flank deviated from the Schlieffen Plan prescription by turning east rather than west of Paris to encircle the city, choosing to attempt to destroy French forces before they could be reorganised. This change in the advance enabled the French commander-in-chief Marshal Joseph Joffre to deploy reserves in Paris to launch and attack on the German forces flank and rear by 5 September to stem the German advance by countering von Kluck’s movements through attacking the far right wing of his forces that were weakened by heavy casualties and sheer exhaustion while the main artillery lagged behind its advance and the infantry was undersupplied. The French along with the BEF then opened a counterattack against the whole German front on 6 September with fifty-two French divisions against forty German divisions holding the front, which forced the German forces to establish a defensive position along the Marne River, which destabilised the successful execution of the Schlieffen Plan. Moltke also departed from this key plan to win a rapid victory against France by staging an assault toward Nancy, rather than keeping the left wing of the German forces in a solely defensive position, and therefore fought two uncoordinated battles along the Marne River and in Lorraine that could not be sustained, and left without a continued strategy to supersede what would become a war of attrition.
The first battle of the Marne River about thirty-five miles northeast of Paris, which established German superiority. However, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of eighty-thousand troops led by General Sir John French had landed in France, and headed toward Mons in Belgium where they confronted the German advance at a four to one disadvantage. The BEF entered a gap between the first and second German armies that made the German positions appear precarious, prior to the BEF retreating southward to the Marne River. At the same time, Moltke had been directing the whole campaign from headquarters that were too far behind fast moving German front lines to allow him to see a clear picture of the events, and also failed to transfer troops from Lorraine to the exposed right wing, which induced the commander of the first and second armies to retreat from the Marne on 8-9 September in the face of the British advance that supported the French army in a counterattack against the German right wing and helped prevent the anticipated encirclement of French troops. This was then followed by a counterattack on 9 September against the retreating Germans, which led to Moltke ordering further withdrawals of the northeastern German armies, narrowing the encirclement movement that had been weakened, while he was concerned about a possible French breakthrough.
The German lines had stabilised again by 14 September, and entrenched themselves in new positions, from which the French and British had failed to dislodge them. The gap between the first and second armies being closed with new troops, while it became apparent that Moltke had failed to execute the Schlieffen Plan for a rapid defeat of the French through encirclement. Dispatching two army divisions to the east from Belgium to the Russian front, where a modernised Russia army mobilised faster than had been expected, and launched successful offensives against the Austro-Hungarians who retreated in disorder, and a second offensive against East Prussia weakened the western German advance. This miscalculation and thereby added further inflexible timetable pressure on the German armies on the western front at a crucial time, where the French and British stemmed the German advance at this first battle of the Marne, which made surrounding Paris impossible.
General Paul von Hindenburg was called into service from retirement on 23 August 1914, to replace the German commander General von Prittwitz-Gaffron who hesitated about confronting the Russian advance and considered withdrawing behind the Vistula River. Ludendorff was appointed chief of staff to Hindenburg, who decided to attack at once with 166,000 troops against the Russians’ 200,000. They directed the battle of Tannenberg from 25 until a decisive defeat was inflicted on 30 August, which fulfilled Schlieffen’s ideal for a battle of encirclement that annihilated three-fifths of the Russian army. The Battle of Masurian Lakes on 9-10 September led to the defeat of another Russian army that failed to coordinate its movements with the other at Tannenberg. East Prussia was thus fully back in German hands by mid-September,. This Russian advance had also prompted Moltke to take two army corps out of the western front in Belgium and send them to the eastern front, since Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria refusing to deploy his troops that were posted on the French-German border, which also weakened the success of the Schlieffen Plan. These two corps also arrived after General Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff General Erich von Ludendorff had won a decisive victory against the Russians at the battle of Tannenberg, and therefore did not exercise any influence on this initial outcome of the fighting on the eastern front Nevertheless, even if the German troops had not retreated, they could not have won that strategically decisive victory. Their casualties had been heavy, and five weeks of continuous marching pushed them to the limit of their endurance. The numerical superiority of the French was also growing, and the Germans could not push further to the south with Paris behind them.
The German generals had overestimated the fighting force of the Russian armies that proved to be ill-prepared for a modern war with outmoded and insufficient equipment. One of the worst consequences of the Schlieffen Plan drawing Britain into the war as a result of the German invasion of neutral Belgium and Luxemburg made British involvement inevitable. The rapid deployment of British forces to France helped the French avoid the encirclement of Paris, as well as imposing an effective naval blockade imports of raw materials and vital food imports by closing off the passages to the North Sea as well as the Mediterranean Sea upon the outbreak of the war, operating at distances away from sea ports where allied shipping would not be threatened by new forms of technology such as sea mines and torpedoes, while the German High Command could not circumvent through drawing on adequate amounts of available resources on the continent. Whereas the Schlieffen Plan essentially entailed enveloping the French forces along the French-German borders with eighty percent of the German army forces moving through Belgium according to a pre-scheduled timetable to maintain the advance, without allowing for costly railway transport delays, while smaller forces would remain on the borders of France and Germany to contain French assaults. However, stiffer than had been expected Belgian resistance, and the French destruction of railways that strained the Germans sustaining transporting resources to the front lines, slowed the German advance with its poor logistics that largely depended on horse drawn transport, whereas the allies made effective use of railways. In contrast, the French who were aware of the Schlieffen Plan, nevertheless did not make any preparations to deploy a strong troop contingent at the Belgian border to stabilise the expected front line there, or enter Belgium, while they expected the British to defend in the event of a German invasion. According to the provisions of their Plan XVII, the French general staff concentrated eighty percent of their forces to invade Alsace and Lorraine, which called for launching a major offensive to inflict a defeat on the Germans before they could recover further strength while also drawing German forces away from fighting Russia, and then continue pressing into western Germany, just as Schlieffen had anticipated. The failure of both of these plans ended in a stalemate on the western front, leaving them to reassess a coherent strategy that would break overcome what would be a battle of attrition on the western front, for which Germany was unprepared due to the absence of plans or stockpiles for a war lasting longer than several months.
Although the Russian army launched its offensive earlier than had been anticipated on 15 August, its commanders also made dramatic mistakes in East Prussia that forced them to withdraw from their earlier advances, resulting in the fighting along the Russian front also failing to lead to a decisive strategic victory. The Russians intended to direct their first major thrust against Austria-Hungary and postpone their offensive against Germany to the time that they could assemble their Siberian divisions, after having had mobilized much faster than the German generals had expected, and overran parts of East Prussia in August at an alarming speed as the Russian commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, sent twenty-eight divisions to invade East Prussia from the east and the south to relieve the French.
By that time, disaster had struck on the Balkan front, while the German and Austro-Hungarian general staffs did not coordinate their military plans. There was not any formal military convention between Germany and Austria, and nor did they have a common war plan, while Germany assisting Austria depended on France’s defeat first. By the time a limited number of German troops could be transferred to the east after the end of September 1914, the Austro-Hungarian army was in a desperate situation. The Austro-Hungarian chief of staff Count Conrad von Hötzendorff lost time by believing that he could strike down Serbia before Russia could intervene, while Russia was building up vastly superior armies in the east that began beating back the Austro-Hungarian armies, beginning with the first serious setback in the first Battle of Lemberg (present day Lviv) on 29-31 August, and again in the second Battle of Lemberg from 5 to 13 September, in which the Austro-Hungarian army lost 300.000 in dead, wounded and prisoners with a grave loss of officers, and no future Austrian army attained the standard of the army of 1914.
Attempts to break through the new lines on the western front after the Battle of the Marne proved extremely costly and futile. The next great battle was at Ypres from 17 to 30 October under the command of new chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn who had replaced Moltke on 14 September, in which the Germans suffered grievous losses. Falkenhayn became convinced by 3 November that a decisive battle could not be won in the west, and therefore turned his attention eastward, where in October Austrian and German armies advanced to the Vistula, but were then overcome by the buildup of overwhelming Russian strength by the end of the month. Hindenburg felt confident he could annihilate the forty-five Russian corps by attacking the northern and rear flanks of the Russian armies, but Falkenhayn missed this opportunity since he feared that a limited tactical withdrawal of troops in the west to reinforce those in the east could be interpreted as a sign of German weakness. Hence, reserved were launched into the First Battle of Ypres in which nothing was achieved before the fighting ended on 18 November, after the moment for decisive action in the east had passed. From then on, the western front had stabilized, and Falkenhayn thought that Germany’s enemies could at best be exhausted by a war of attrition, and it became apparent in the first two years of the war that Germany could not attain a decisive victory after the failure of the Schlieffen plan. As the western front stabilized, the German army entrenched itself in a long line from the British Channel to the Swiss Jura mountains in long lines of trenches, facing British and French trenches on their side. Leaving Germany with occupying nearly all of Belgium and the industrial region of France. There emerged a deadlock that would become nearly impossible to break for years, in spite of repeated attempts to break the deadlock, including the second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, the combined French-British offensives in Champagne and at Loos in September 1915 led to indecisive results.
The European nations appeared to be capable of surviving a long war. Industrialization and correspondingly reducing agriculture had made national economies increasingly dependent on international trade. Nevertheless, many people in Europe, and in Germany in particular, thought that war would be short, and that averting it was not altogether necessary, and was likewise an opportunity to clear international tensions that had extended for several years and ended in diplomatic stalemates. (See H-German: Bernhardi: The Next War). However, the overall situation did not favour offensive warfare, while the armies whose size were unprecedented in history were irrevocably locked in a new form of trench warfare in the face of the introduction of the machine gun and long-range artillery situated behind trenches as defensive front lines. There were new developments to break trench warfare deadlocks through the introduction of new weapons, such as the first use of poison gas in April 1915, and warplanes that helped direct artillery fire. Germany initiated the use of huge zeppelin airships that could operate over long distances and heights of up to twenty thousand feet and drop nine thousand kilogram bomb payloads from the air, with the first attacks on Britain with bombs dropped on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn on 19 January 1915, and then Paris on 21 March 1915. They could initially outpace slow armed enemy aircraft, until they became virtually obsolete by 1917 as fighter aircraft became increasingly faster than their maximum speed of eighty-four kilometres per hour and became vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns, and were superseded by the development of the first fixed wing bomber aircraft. Offensives cost armies both sides enormous losses, although there was less fighting on certain static front sectors in which there were sometimes tacit truces.
There was initially cause for optimism confirmed during the first weeks of fighting, when the right wing of the German western armies advanced rapidly in a surprise attack, regardless of encountering tenacious Belgian resistance composed of troops experienced in fighting in colonial warfare in Africa, before advancing further into northeastern France. Germany’s greatest asset was staging rapid action, while losing time would allow for Russia to gain advantageous positions by bringing their massive numbers of available troops to the German frontier in the east. However, the Russians mobilized much rapidly than the German general staff had expected, rapidly overran parts of East Prussia in August, including appearing to threaten Königsberg, the largest city in the province. This prompted Moltke to take two army corps out of the western front and to send them to the eastern front under the command of the generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. In late August and early September their army encircled and defeated the superior Russian armies in the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, initially without the two new corps. Transferring troops to the eastern front weakened the German advance in France. The French army under General Joseph Joffre who abandoned the earlier Plan XVII and rapidly raised a newly organised a timely counterattack, supported by a quickly formed British expeditionary force under Field-Marshal Sir John French, mounted a counterattack against the German right wing at the Marne River during the second week of September, approximately thirty-five miles northeast of Paris, which halted the German armies’ advances that was undermined by poor communications and exhaustion after long marches and hard fighting. The commander of the First German Army, Alexander von Kluge also committed the fatal mistake of manouevering his army east rather than west of Paris, which opened his left flank to Joffre’s counteroffensive that resulted in the first battle of the Marne from 5 to 12 September in a decisive victory for the allies. The Schlieffen Plan, that Moltke had undermined by narrowing the encirclement movement and by weakening the right wing on the western front, failed, which led to consolidating the front lines on the western front and static trench warfare.
There was not any realistic expectation of Germany’s potential for winning the war since military leaders kept information about the real situation to a minimum, while the government never formally committed itself to any concrete war aims. Moreover, war aims that existed on both sides made a compromise peace nearly impossible for all sides. The situation before August 1914 was regarded as highly unsatisfactory for all of the belligerents, and therefore both sides needed victory to remove or reduce the threat that had supposedly made the situation untenable before the war. The Germans did not want to go back to diplomatic encirclement and to the threat of a two-front attack. The French would not withdraw out the war without at least having won Alsace-Lorraine and weakened Germany. The British remained concerned about the British fleet and would demand the complete restoration of Belgium. Russia had been promised huge areas in the Balkans and the right to occupy the Dardanelles in secret treaties the Tsarist government concluded with the western powers. Later complicating matters further, Italy wanted territory from Austria. Britain and France promised independence to almost all of the minorities of the Hapsburg monarchy. After the Russian revolution had broken out, the Bolsheviks promised a future Polish national state that included German territory, and the British and the French made arrangements for Jewish and Arab autonomy in Palestine, a Turkish province.
Not any of these goals could be reached before the enemy was defeated, and already after a few months of the initial bloody and costly fighting, it seemed impossible for any government to advocate a return to the status quo of 1914, and there remained hope on both sides that the war could be won, while neither side was willing to make concessions in view of huge war expenses. Repeated attempts by neutrals, the American government and the papacy to mediate peace all likewise failed. The problem with the U.S. was that it was not a completely neutral country before it entered the war, having sent armament shipments and loans only to the Entente, and tolerated the British blockade. Besides, when President Wilson later encouraged peace negotiations in 1916, he demanded that the Germans cede Alsace-Lorraine even before negotiations even started. This was impossible for a German government to give up German regions as a unilateral condition for a peace conference as long as the war was not lost, while the war aims and the enormous human and material costs of the war, which made it nearly impossible for government and general staffs to agree to a compromise peace.
The German public did not realise the seriousness of the situation, and General Erich Falkenhayn, who succeeded Moltke following the failure of executing the Schlieffen plan when the western allies halted the German advance at the Marne, managed to stabilize the western front. The German army occupied most of Belgium and entrenched itself in a long line from the British Channel to the Swiss Jura mountains, whereas the French and British built trenches opposing them in a long-standing ensuing deadlock that began in September 1914. The British blockade that eliminated German international overseas trade from the first few weeks of the conflict led the German authorities to concentrate available technology and reorganising industrial policy in the winter of 1914-1915 to develop readily available resources to produce synthetic materials that were essential for war effort production as a result of experiencing shortages of resources that were vital for war production, for which preparations had begun before the outbreak of war. Falkenhayn as the Prussian War Minister decreed the establishment of the Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (KRA) on 13 August 1914 to alleviate potential shortages and ensure maintaining military supplies during wartime, which was undertaken by sacrificing civilian interests while dealing with the superior combined military and economic capacity of the allies.
The allies remained far superior in manpower and economic resources, especially since Britain and France could rely on resources from their worldwide colonial empires and dominions, as well as benefiting from American trade links with and loans, while Germany’ international trade was cut by the British naval blockade. Food shortages in Germany led to famines that occurred from the winter of 1916-1917 onward, and the situation for Germany and Austria-Hungary composing the Central Powers worsened while they increasingly faced the effects of the British blockade. A major sea battle took place at Jutland between 31 May and 1 June 1916, in which the German battle fleet inflicted greater damage to the British than it had incurred, but it remained impossible for the Germans to break naval blockade since this battle did not alter the strategic situation in the North Sea, and the German fleet remained contained for the remainder of the war. Time would also work against the Central Powers since the Triple Entente was far superior in manpower and economic resources that extended to drawing from their vast colonial empires and dominions, and the effect of the British blockade increased every year, while the Germans could only counter by waging unrestricted submarine warfare that had begun in May 1915.
During this time on the home front, war came as a relief after years of tensions and diplomatic-political stalemate, and a wave of national pride and optimism suddenly seemed to override bitter divisions of political and social life, and Enthusiasm for the war included the German left composed of the workers and their Social Democratic representatives, and the SPD voted for special war credits after having had called for general strikes in all countries at war, believing that autocratic Russia was the main aggressor. While the German armies still seemed victorious in early September 1914, Bethmann-Hollweg invited interest organisations and the military to draft aggressive war aims to voice their demands, with the results being industrialists wanting to annex parts of Belgium and northern France for economic reasons to acquire coal and iron reserves, conservatives were interested in eastern expansion to drive Russia back from the German border, which was supported by army leaders, in addition to hoping to resettle Polish farmers further east, business circles wanted to establish a huge European customs union, and colonialist circles hoped to establish a large central African empire under German control. This September Program remained largely unchanged throughout most of the war while German leaders came to the conclusion that the outbreak of the war had shown how vulnerable their state was, and that it needed extensive territorial guarantees to avoid being isolated and face strong enemies on two sides.
Meanwhile, German High Command military leaders repeatedly tried to seize the initiative. The eastern front was stabilized along the line of Russia’s western frontier from the Baltic to Rumania by the end of 1914. Hindenburg and Ludendorff won another great victory in the winter battle of the Masurian Lakes in February 1915, which drove the Russians out of East Prussia. However, Russia had sufficient manpower resources to replace their losses and continue the war of attrition over wide empty spaces. While the western front held out against allied offensives on defensible terrain staged by the French in the Champagne region and combined French and British offensives in the Artois region, German and Austrian troops launched a combined offensive over far wider distances with fewer natural obstacles on the eastern front in May 1915. At a time when German forces on the western front were maintaining a defensive stance, there were realistic concerns about a collapse of the Austrian defences on the eastern front, which the German High Command sought to revitalise through launching a major offensive, which could also prevent the governments of Italy and Rumania to join the Entente powers. A major combined German and Austro-Hungarian offensive using vast technical superiority was launched on the eastern front into Galicia between Tarnow and Gorlice, which broke through the Russian front lines in May, with continual advances that continued with occupying Warsaw in August, followed by driving the Russians out of Galicia, all of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia by the end of September. Another successful combined German and Austr0-Hungarian offensive was launched along with support from Bulgaria that declared war against Serbia from 14 October 1915, which led to eliminating Serbia as a threat by 25 November 1915. However, Russia proved to be capable of being able to sustain enormous losses, which made it evident that Germany could not win the war on the eastern front, and therefore offensive efforts were shifted to the west.
General Erich von Falkenhayn, the minister of war who replaced von Moltke as the chief of the general staff in September 1914 determined to capitalise on the successes in 1915 with a two pronged approach against the western powers in 1916, involving waging the war at sea against the superior maritime power of the U.K., and staging a major offensive on land against France. A major offensive was launched against the French in the Verdun region on 21 February 1916, believing that he could simply and brutally force a breakthrough to overcome the French army through constant attrition attacks on a specific target area that would be of tactical importance to the Germans, and be important enough for the French to commit defensive forces to be overwhelmed with high amounts of artillery fire to be coordinated with subsequent heavy concentrations of infantry advances against this heavily fortified region that guarded the pathway to Paris. A massive concentration of firepower was to shatter French defences at this key linchpin point, which the French could not afford to retreat from, was to enable German advance that was to then provide a strategic stronghold on the western front, and induce a catalyst for dividing the British and French forces, as well as entirely encircle the French forces, and thus compensate for the failure of the execution of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914. German forces began this offensive in the Verdun region that was surrounded on three sides, which the French could only resupply from a single road from behind, at a time when the bulk of French artillery was shifted to other front sectors, and Falkenhayn expected the French reserves could be decimated in successive waves of German artillery shelling while also precluding a French counteroffensive. An additional innovative element was creating a dedicated fleet of aircraft to establish air superiority in this front sector that had been relatively quiet and considered to have minimal military value to conceal preparations for the offensive from French reconnaissance aircraft.
Initial headway culminated with attacking the fortress at Douaumont on 24 February, but the offensive lasted for much longer than had been anticipated, and eventually culminated in a stalemate by April, and then French counterattacks in May, followed by Germany counterattacks on 11 July and 3 September that failed to dislodge the defensive lines while both sides suffered from heavy losses in this concentrated region. The French incurred 377,321 troops killed or wounded, while the German casualties numbered at least 376,000. This strategy had failed to break the deadlock and resistance on the western front by August, while General Philippe Pétain and then General Robert Nivelle organised a successful defence of this sector of the western front along the Meuse River in the face of repeated German assaults by consolidating defensive positions and introducing French artillery to counter the German threats, along with organising the logistical supply lines. The French ultimately maintained the defensive line at Verdun, which consequentially sustained the defence of the entire western front.
The Brusilov offensive launched on 4 June on the eastern front and the Somme offensive in the west on 1 July only providing temporary respites for the allies. Falkenhayn was unable to spare forces to provide aid to the Austro-Hungarians in June, when the commander in charge of the Southwestern Front of the Imperial Russian Army, General Aleksei Brusilov relieved German pressure on French forces at Verdun, and helped to relieve the Austro-Hungarian pressure on the Italian front, from which Austro-Hungarian troops were diverted to the eastern front. This successful offensive Russians broke through the front at Lutzk on 7 June, and threatened the stability of the entire eastern front until it was halted on 9 August, which encouraged Rumania to declaring war on Austria-Hungary on 28 August 1916, following treaty obligations the allies signed on 17 August 1916. The combined British and French Somme offensive launched on July that was intended to achieve a decisive victory over the Germans on the western front after eighteen months of trench deadlock also demonstrated how Falkenhayn had underestimated allied capabilities, which placed German forces onto the defensive on every front. Rumania’s entry into the war against the Central Powers ultimately led to Falkenhayn’s dismissal as the chief of the general staff, and being replaced by Hindenburg in conjunction with Ludendorff.
The prolonged German offensive at Verdun ended on 18 December 1916 with merely a seven kilometre French advance, with enormous casualties on both sides. This failure led to Falkenhayn being dismissed on 29 August 1916, and subsequently replaced by Hindenburg, hitherto the commander-in-chief on the eastern front, as the Chief of the General Staff, and Ludendorff the Quartermaster-General who exercised supreme military, as well as political power by suspending the constitution in practice to mobilise Germany’s resources more thoroughly than before, which was extended from subjugating to ruthlessly exploiting economic resources in the occupied territories, in accordance with successively imposed economic requirements that became known as the Hindenburg Programme. The political authority of the chancellor as well as the emperor were thus subordinated as separate political authorities to the military high command, and were supported by the Reichstag parties for the duration of wartime conditions while sacrificing constitutional governance. In terms of exercising their new military functions, they stopped the allied counterattack at Somme launched on 1 July 1916, which, like the earlier fighting that had aimed at attaining a substantial breakthrough, degenerated into a series of inconclusive attrition battles with enormous losses of manpower.
Following earlier reverses in September 1914, Austro-Hungarian troops overran Serbia in November 1915. Italy declared war on Austria in May 1915, while Bulgaria joined Austria-Hungary and Germany in October 1915 to reinforce this southern front. While the German forces were making efforts to stem Allied attacks in the west, the Russians launched new offensives on the eastern front that lasted from March to December 1916. Although they did not make considerable advances, they nevertheless nearly destroyed the Austro-Hungarian forces. The Germans had to deploy more troops assist them, particularly when Romania attacked the Hungarian southern flank. and stabilized the situation in the Balkans and eastern Europe.
Earlier land battles of attrition forced German forces to retreat thirty-two kilometres to staunch the in-depth defensive Hindenburg or Siegfried Line in Operating Aldrich, on a hundred and sixteen kilometre wide front between Arras and St. Quentin on 24 February 1917. They abandoned territories they had held for two years, and re-entrenched themselves in massively reinforced new and more rational positions with defensive features, such as mines and booby traps, and certain geographical advantages of having defensive positions in elevated positions, while forcing enemy advances into narrow passages. Withdrawing from the Chemin-des-Dames region forming a hundred and fifty kilometre bulge in the front was to be shortened to forty kilometres, and thereby free thirteen divisions and fifty artillery batteries for other uses in the face of Allied military personnel and resources greatly outweighing the German defenders, with a secondary defensive line behind the first one, from which they could stage a fighting retreat to stall an Allied advance that was outside the range of Allied light artillery, followed by a third fortified defensive line outside of the range of heavy artillery. This system would be ideal to stage counterattacks, which the Allies would begin attacking on 3 May, but would not penetrate until the final one hundred day offensive, beginning on 29 September 1918, with the first breach made on 5 October over a thirty-one kilometre front.
While the wartime deadlock continued, Ludendorff also adamantly insisted on reinforcing unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, which had begun in early 1915. The allies retaliated by tightening the sea blockade that prevented non-military essential goods, such as foodstuffs as well as raw and finished materials, from being imported from neutral countries, which caused greater hardship to the German civilian population by the blockade leading to food shortages on the home front and inflated food costs, which was further followed by food rationing and then acute shortages by the winter of 1916-1917 that inevitably led to malnutrition, starvation and disease, such as increased levels of tuberculosis, which caused premature civilian deaths. Bethmann-Hollweg’s protests against this demand led to Ludendorff securing his dismissal in July, who was replaced by Georg Michaelis as the de facto spokesman for the silent military dictatorship that interfered into the national economic and political administrations, which undermined their effectiveness while the German government lacked planning for marshalling all of the nation’s resources for a prolonged war effort and attempting to outproduce the allies. The German submarine warfare thus failed in view of this failed attempt to knock Britain out of the war bringing America into the war, and mobilising its enormous industrial potential, as well as numbers of military personnel who would considerably reinforce the western front, in addition to weakening the home front through causing famine and disease, which were further aggravated by shortages of farm labourers who were conscripted for military service and poor harvests.
An extremely ludicrous attempt by the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to induce Mexico to conclude a treaty with Germany, whereby the Mexico could lay claim to Texas, Arizona and New Mexico in the event of the U.S. declaring war on Germany. The British, who had control of all transatlantic cables, intercepted and decrypted this message, the Zimmermann Telegram, and leaked it to the American press, and thus strengthened pro-war sentiment and President Wilson’s resolve to enter the war. When German submarines began to attack all ships around the British Isles without warning, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and declared war on 6 April 1917. This development led to providing a vast new military reserve against the Central Powers, and enormous material supplies for the allies.
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