(^340) Chapter Nine
harvest as well. Efforts to fix agricultural prices misfired, whereupon
black marketing proliferated, undermining the legal system of food
rationing.^57 By concentrating lopsidedly on producing munitions, the
military managers of the German economy thus brought the country
to the verge of starvation by the end of 1918.^58
Subordinating everything to the immediate needs of the army in the
hope of winning decisive victory with just one more supreme effort
was not necessarily irrational. Victory did come very near in 1918,
despite American intervention. Had the Germans won, Hindenburg
and Ludendorff and their associates would have seemed paragons and
heroes. They did get more munitions. Powder production, the original
limit on German warmaking capacity, crested at 14,315 tons in Octo
ber 1918, and the German army was never seriously hampered in the
last years of the war by shortage of materiel.^59 New weapons, e.g.,
antitank guns, came off production lines as needed. Until November
1918, when manpower, food, and fuel all ran short at once, unforeseen
bottlenecks, though they came thick and fast, were always relieved by
hasty reallocation of resources.
On the battlefield intensified mobilization brought the expected
results. Russia was defeated and dismembered in 1917, and in March
1918 new tactics of infiltration broke the Allied trench lines in France.
The victorious Germans lacked the transport to keep advancing, but
without the moral and material support of the American Expedition
ary Force, some two million strong by November 1918, the weary
British and French armies could scarcely have survived the German
spring offensives. Thus until the final weeks victory hovered always
just beyond the Germans’ grasp. As Wellington is reputed to have said
of the Battle of Waterloo, World War I was “a near run thing” by
anyone’s calculation.
The suddenness with which the tide of victory reversed direction
after June 1918 gave Germans little time to adjust to defeat. This was
especially true within the army, whose leaders had long cultivated a
quasi-agonistic attitude towards civilians. Suspicion grew in the last
- August Skalweit, Die deutsche Kriegsnahrungswirtschaft (Berlin, 1927) provides
much detail of the mismanagement of agriculture. - The fact that the Allied blockade was maintained after the armistice through the
worst months of food shortage in the winter of 1918–19 made it natural to blame the
blockade for the food crisis. But Germany would have been capable of feeding itself, if
resources had been reserved for that purpose. - Ludwig Wartzbacker, “Die Versorgung des Heeres mit Waffen und Munition,” in
Max Schwarte, éd., Der Grosse Krieg (Leipzig, 1921) 8:129– Von Wrisberg, Wehr und
Waffen, 1914–1918, pp. 57, 84, although bitterly critical of the Hindenburg program
also proudly concludes that manpower and horses, not artillery and munitions, were
what limited the German army in its final offensive.