Hundred Days

October 28, 2013
Lloyd, of King’s College London, enters the upper tier of Great War historians with this admirable account of the war’s final campaign, “an incredible story of shot and shell, of battles on a scale almost unimaginable to modern generations.” The “Hundred Days,” from August 8 to November 11, 1918, featured a coordinated series of Allied attacks that pushed the Germans out of France and led the German government finally to seek peace. Lloyd’s unfailing eye for telling anecdotes vitalize his narrative, and he avoids objectifying incidents for the sake of titillation. To set the tone, he describes in unadorned prose the death, in action, of an ordinary British private on October 27, 1918, and the consequences for his family. The text brims with archival research, depicting French and British armies like “coiled springs, taut and alert; waiting to strike.” Lloyd depicts the American army as created from nothing but “hard work, improvisation, courage and determination.” He discusses the Western Front’s “powerful emotional and psychological pull,” and the slow-growing sense that its four-year agony might be ending. German soldiers faced “chaos, disorganization, shellfire and endless fighting” against Allied armies whose commanders were concerned at their own “exhausted state.” Germany, lacking resources, cracked first, its resistance ending “fitfully, in confusion, with a whimper.” But the Allies were too worn to complete their victory and November 11, 1918, while formally ending the war, only set the stage for “two decades of missed opportunities and appeasement.”

December 15, 2013
Many more books describe World War I's beginning than its end, so readers will welcome this engrossing history covering Allied offensives from July 1918 to the German surrender in November. Lloyd (Defense Studies/Kings Coll. London; The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day, 2011, etc.) disagrees with the traditional portrayal of World War I as a series of bloody offensives launched by dimwitted generals who failed to learn from their mistakes. In reality, they paid close attention. By 1918, Allied commanders--Alexander Haig, Philippe Petain and John Pershing of the British, French and American armies--could take advantage of technological progress and bitter experience. Furthermore, tanks and aircraft were available in far greater numbers, and advances in artillery increased accuracy and made it unnecessary to "register" every gun by dropping a few shells on the enemy, thus warning of an attack. Previous debacles, from Ypres to the Somme to Passchendaele, taught that it was impossible to sustain an offensive no matter how successful since artillery and transport bogged down in the torn-up, muddy battlefield. It was far better to halt when progress slowed and enemy resistance was increasing and attack elsewhere. Lloyd describes how they proceeded with detailed descriptions of a dozen immense, half-forgotten offensives (Amiens, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne) that, despite often horrendous casualties, pushed back an increasingly exhausted and demoralized enemy. The author emphasizes that both the German economy and its army were on the verge of collapse at the armistice, but since Allied forces were still beyond the frontiers, die-hard enemies, including Hitler, could claim that Germany's army was not defeated but rather betrayed from within. A fine account of the Allies' dramatic but ultimately unsatisfying victory in World War I.

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November 1, 2013

With a surge of bloody fighting, the Americans having joined, and starvation and unrest on the German home front, the collapse of the German army began.

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