possibility of a tactical breakthrough on a scale that would restore operational
mobility and enable strategic objectives. 49 A high command increasingly desper-
ate for an endgame seized the moment.
Erich Ludendorff’s often-derided concept of ‘punch a hole and see what
develops’ resembles Erich von Falkenhayn’s concept of the 1916 attack on Verdun.
Both were ultimately focused on the level of policy: do so much damage that
France in one case, the Allies in another, would be impelled to negotiate. When
the coalition withstood the shock at policy levels, translating tactical victory to
the operational level became decisive. David Zabecki makes a convincing case
that German commanders at army-group levels and below did have a reasonable
comprehension of the still-emerging principles of operational warfare. From
Ludendorff down, however, no one with serious authority had a paradigm, a
template, for making that transition.
The system as a whole was focused more on aVernichtungsschlachtthan a
Gesamtschlacht: emphasizing the British army but neglecting the vulnerabilities in
the railway network that kept it fed, supplied, and able to move troops. Once the
initial attacks failed, objectives shifted almost at random. So did lines of opera-
tion. So did coordination among sectors.
Failure to move the offensives to an operational level was tactical as well as
conceptual. The artillery system, brutally effective in the initial stages, lacked the
organizational flexibility and the tactical mobility to keep pace with changing
situations. Too many of its heavy guns were horse-drawn, and too many of the
artillery teams had been weakened by hunger. The vaunted storm troopers
eventually exhausted first their bag of tactical tricks, then themselves. The
storm-troop principle of infiltration, bypassing strong points in the way water
seeks the easiest path, generated a downward focus in which there were no
objectives—just processes, ultimately leading nowhere in particular. The specially
prepared ‘attack divisions’ were bled white as Allied railroads and trucks rein-
forced critical sectors before the Germans could advance through them on foot.
Their training for offensive operations was, in any case, well below the standard of
the storm-troop battalions. Time and again, British and French sources report
German follow-up forces moving in what might be called ‘columns of flocks’:
masses bunched formlessly together for emotional closeness and drawing fire like
magnets. 50
By the second day of the offensives, the Germans had torn fifty miles’ worth of
hole in the British lines. By the end of the next day, they had advanced thirty
miles. But, finally, there was no exploitation force able to take the burden from
the surviving storm troopers—just more footsloggers. In his memoirs, Luden-
dorff is mildly critical of the high command’s failure to consider the concept. In
any case, the tools were lacking. Germany’s cavalry on the Western Front had been
largely dismounted. German armoured-vehicle designs were primitive, and few
in number. They had few tanks, and the best of those were captured, salvaged
British models. The army’s motor vehicles were mostly heavy trucks, designed to
operate on a network of paved streets and roads, within easy reach of mainte-
nance facilities, and correspondingly unsuited to be converted to moving men
Prussian–German Operational Art, 1740–1943 47