By the autumn of 1917 three of the now six
great powers at war were on the point of military
and economic collapse. The Austrian half of the
Dual Monarchy was desperately short of food; the
Habsburg army could not without German help
sustain the war on all fronts. The new emperor,
Charles I, was secretly seeking a way out of the
war. On the other side, the Italians were also soon
in desperate plight. Suffering 340,000 casualties,
the Italian army was defeated at the battle of
Caporetto in October 1917, but with some
British and French help recovered to man a new
line of defence.
One of the great powers, Russia, did collapse.
The revolution that overthrew the tsar in March
1917 had not taken it out of the war immediately.
The new provisional government intended to
fight it more energetically and successfully than
before. But Alexander Kerensky, war minister of
the government and later its leader, could not
with fine speeches make up for Russia’s exhaus-
tion and the mismanagement of the ‘home
front’. The Russian summer offensive which he
ordered turned into a rout. In November 1917
the Bolsheviks seized power and called for peace
immediately ‘without annexations and without
indemnities’. Russia was out of the war, a stunning
blow for the Allies.
Nineteen-seventeen was a disastrous year for
the Allies. Only on the oceans did they win what
for Britain and France was a battle for survival.
The Germans only once seriously challenged the
battleship might of the British navy. The result-
ing battle of Jutland in May 1916 was claimed by
both sides as a victory, but the German fleet did
not again challenge the British navy whereas
Britain continued to rule above the waves and
maintain its blockade of Germany. The real
danger to the Allies was the ‘blockade’ imposed
below the water’s surface by German submarines.
At first it looked as though the Germans would
sink enough ships to knock Britain and France
out of the war by cutting the Atlantic supply line,
for they sank 212 ships in February 1917 and a
record 335 ships, totalling 847,000 tons, in April.
By convoying, ships losses were reduced to 107
ships by December. This was the damage that
some 100 German submarines inflicted. What
would have happened if the Germans had con-
centrated on this effective offensive weapon
before the war instead of wasting resources on the
prestigious German battleship fleet? They were to
repeat the error in the Second World War.
During the grim winter of 1917 and 1918,
widespread disaffection and doubts whether
the war could ever be won, led to new calls
for peace from all sides. Lenin had nothing to lose
by calling the labouring masses in Europe to
revolution and to bring to an end the capitalist
imperialist war of their masters. Lloyd George,
determined to fight until the German rulers were
defeated, responded, to still the doubts in Britain,
by delivering a speech in January 1918 to the
British Trades Union Congress. Its keynote was
moderation and an insistence that the central
powers give up all their conquests so that the
sanctity of treaties be upheld. Lloyd George’s
speech was overshadowed a few days later, on 8
January 1918, by President Wilson’s famous
Fourteen Points setting out in a similar way the
basis of peace. The worldwide appeal of the
Fourteen Points lay in their lofty design for a new
era of international relations. The world led by
the US and Wilson’s ‘new diplomacy’ would ‘be
made fit and safe to live in’; every nation would
‘determine its own institutions, be assured of
justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of
the world as against force and selfish aggression’.
But the specific Russian, British and American
peace proclamations, with their insistence on
the restoration of conquered territory, all pre-
supposed the defeat of Germany. No German
could regard as a ‘compromise’ giving up all the
territory still firmly occupied.
In 1918 it appeared likely that the Allies would
be defeated rather than Germany. The generals
Hindenburg and Ludendorff had established a
virtual dictatorship in Germany and marshalled all
resources in a country exhausted by war. In
March 1918 Ludendorff mounted a powerful
offensive in the west; during April, May and June
German troops broke through and once more
came close to Paris. The cost in casualties was
again huge: 800,000 Germans and more than a
million Allied troops. This turned out to be imper-