- 4 months ago
The Great War covers the era of the First World War from its causes and origins to its violent aftermath. Jesse Alexander covers the important events
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00:00Now, countries with no reason to join the war but promises of plunder came in.
00:08For some, the gains would come, and cheaply.
00:12For most, it would be a valueless meat grinder.
00:18The nations that came in later came in chiefly for what they could get out of it.
00:23Japan, Italy, Bulgaria, whatever.
00:28The German Overseas Empire was the first casualty of the war.
00:32The Japanese came in and picked up their Asian possessions.
00:36The British picked up their African possessions.
00:39So the German Empire abroad ceased to exist in 1950.
00:44Italy had come in for a grab bag of promises of a handful of small territories in the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas.
00:52The cost would be calamitous as Italy's armies hurled themselves throughout the war into broken offensives against well-defended mountain crags.
01:10The Balkans chose sides frenetically.
01:14The Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Montenegrins, and later the Romanians joined the Allies.
01:20Bulgaria went with the Turks and Central Powers.
01:23Portugal and Brazil contributed corpses.
01:26Britain and France's attempt to aid Serbia from the south by landing at the Greek port of Salonica,
01:34stalemated 600,000 men so utterly that laughing Germans called it the Allies' largest concentration camp.
01:42With the armies at a standstill, the navies had come forward to widen the misery.
01:48The Royal Navy expanded the sea blockade of any militarily useful shipments to Germany to include grain, flour, and other foodstuffs.
01:57This blockade was so effective in cutting off maritime supplies to Germany and to the other Central European nations,
02:04that Germany was soon reduced to a near starvation level.
02:08The furious Germans, casting about for a weapon of retaliation, seized upon their growing submarine fleet.
02:24Germany threatened to sink any ship in a British Isles combat zone without warning.
02:29Shortly, all neutral shipping was being blockaded out of both countries.
02:36ships went down briskly.
02:41Britain was actually more vulnerable at sea than the Germans were.
02:46Britain imported 64% of her foodstuffs when the war started.
02:50Germany only 25%.
02:53The British blockade forced the use of the submarine as a commerce raider.
02:59But it was a new kind of weapon.
03:02It's character, its weakness, its relative vulnerability on the surface required that it attack without warning if resistance was offered.
03:15A peaceful, prosperous United States with a heavy German immigrant population had grumped about unsportsmanlike conduct, neutrality, and the loss of markets, but followed the aloof lead of President Wilson, a plague on all of troublesome Europe.
03:32When the canard liner Lusitania sailed from New York in the face of printed warnings from Germany, with a passenger register that included a heavy list of American celebrities, the outcome of the Great War swung fatally.
03:53On a clear May 1st, in sight of the coast of Ireland, Walter Schweiger, commanding the German submarine U-20, prepared to sink his country along with a speeding liner.
04:06Schweiger's torpedoes slammed into the Lusitania, and she went down in 18 minutes.
04:121,198 people, including 128 Americans, drowned.
04:28After that, there was never a doubt that the United States would fight this war.
04:34The righteous rage of the United States would never be assuaged.
04:38Germany sprayed gasoline on rising flames by refusing to apologize or pay compensation and lionized Schweiger in its national press.
04:49President Wilson's attempt at a calming statement that there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight backfired.
04:57He was scorned as craven for wanting to protect his people from the ever newer horrors that had been appearing on the Western Front.
05:07In front of Ypres, with a soft breeze blowing toward the French lines on a day of golden sunshine, colonial troops described two greenish-yellow clouds drifting toward them over five miles of front as mist seen over water meadows on a frosty night.
05:24In 15 minutes, 5,000 men met slow death.
05:2910,000 were maimed and utter panic took hold as the heavier-than-air chlorine gas dropped into the trenches.
05:41Even the Germans were astonished at the devastation and not prepared to exploit the four-and-a-half-mile gap opened in the line.
05:49With the surprise of the terror weapon lost, poison gas became just one more deadly artifact, with gas barrages, fired by artillery and released by gas cylinders, a new constant.
06:02Phosgene and mustard gases joined chlorine in the death brigade, and whole companies of soldiers blinded and asphyxiating pitifully with ruined lungs were soon commonplace.
06:14A smothering gas mask became as dreaded as the maimed.
06:19The battles along with the villages and terrain features that named them went on.
06:24But Artois, Aubert Ridge, Second Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Champagne, Luce gained nothing but the growing list of torn men now nourishing the bright poppies.
06:37Joffre sniffed Gilets grignot, I am nibbling them.
06:44As Kitchener and French faded, with the prospect of quick victory, General Sir Douglas Haig scioned to a whiskey fortune,
06:52and a man who had failed his Camberley staff college exams became head of the British Expeditionary Force.
06:58On the home front, England confronted a war that did not end.
07:05Posters exhorted volunteers to replace the massacred professionals.
07:10The Munitions Act put the whole industrial structure on a war footing.
07:16Strikes were forbidden.
07:18Munitions workers were frozen into their jobs.
07:21And women were invited to leave the kitchen for the plant.
07:28It was deemed morally responsible for a woman to rent her own flat, to wear new fashions, to smoke in public, etc.
07:40The war had won the European woman a new-fashioned kind of independence.
07:46They deserved, they felt, a reward.
07:52Come the end of the war, the reward was suffrage.
07:56Death arrived at home, too.
08:00From 1915 through 1917, immense German airships called Zeppelins, after their designer, were raiding England.
08:09The Germans were bombing cities at far distance from the front.
08:14In those days, we tend to forget this.
08:16The Germans were very enthusiastic about bombing cities.
08:20The rapid development of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes softened the threat.
08:25And for the first time in history, called attention to a new breed of hero.
08:29One who lived in the clouds.
08:31Barely ten years after the Wright brothers first flew, knights of the air were duelling miles above the earth.
08:41Pistols and bricks had been replaced as weapons by synchronized machine guns and thinned bombs.
08:48A whole vocabulary was invented.
08:50Dogfight, air raid, strafing, spad, Newport, Fokker, spin, loop, aerodrome, and most importantly, ace.
09:02While the artilleryman who killed a thousand men a day on the western front was ignored, air kills by the dashing pilots were counted in daily headlines.
09:12Von Richthofen, Bishop, Fank, Boelker were national gods.
09:19Max Immelman and Raul Lufberry gave their names to classic air maneuvers and became immortal.
09:27Unfortunately, becoming immortal often involved a wingless three-mile fall to earth while being caressed by flames.
09:34Infantrymen who swept up the remains sometimes felt lucky, though not for long.
09:41The murderous standoff that the Great War had now become went to sea.
09:55A mutually sought showdown between Britain's vast grand fleet and Germany's huge high seas fleet took place on May 30th.
10:04Admiral Sir John Jellicoe's split force blundered into the German fleet under Admiral Reinhard Scheer off the Jutland Peninsula,
10:13and something like a knife fight with 14-inch guns began.
10:18German gunnery and armor gave better than it got.
10:22A massive 117,000 tons of English warships went down, compared to the 61,000 tons of German losses.
10:31It decided nothing and everything.
10:34Jutland was a tie.
10:37If anything, the Germans came out a little bit on top, they sunk more ships.
10:43On the other hand, the German grand fleet was chased back to their bases and they never emerged again.
10:52From that point on, the blockade of Germany was not challenged.
10:59Back on the trembling earth, Austria finally crushed Serbia with German help, and the Russian armies were driven off in front of Prussia.
11:10But decision did not appear.
11:12The public regard for the heroic Lord Kitchener had fallen so low at the time of his death in a submarine attack,
11:20that the House of Commons was considering a motion to reduce his salary.
11:26Into his place as war minister stepped explosive, powerful David Lloyd George.
11:32English leadership was back, but English war strategy remained insanely the same.
11:39Douglas Haig was about to commit a military blunder so great that its cost and horror would haunt the soul of England for the rest of the 20th century.
11:52Heig launched an enormous offensive along an 18-mile front against the impregnably fortified chalk hills overlooking the Allied trenches along the Somme.
12:02He looked on with stubborn confidence as German machine guns and artillery methodically hollowed out the best of a whole generation of English manhood.
12:12They lost 60,000 troops in one single day.
12:17That attack had implications that went far beyond the battlefield.
12:22The British, Australians and Canadians would never forgive the British tactics and techniques that were used on the Western Front in 1916.
12:32That undercut the British Empire.
12:35The graduates of what they call public and we would call private schools, who are the lieutenants and the captains, are killed first.
12:54And what happens, therefore, is that you have, if you will, an inversion of the social pyramid.
13:05That the next generation of doctors, lawyers, civil servants, engineers, political leaders, are the people who get killed first.
13:18The warrior poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote,
13:22I gaze down into the dark green glooms of the weedy little river, but my thoughts are powerless against unhappiness so huge.
13:33Gains were pallid.
13:35The murder went on.
13:37Hague drove his slaughterhouse until November, when there was simply nobody left to feed him.
13:46By the end of the dismal year of 1916, 607,000 English soldiers had fallen.
13:52With the professional army long gone and the corps of the volunteer army thrown away on the Somme, the conscription that had begun in 1915 had to feed the death machine.
14:05Married men fell with the bachelors.
14:09Whole communities were enlisting in PALS regiments, perhaps most notably the Liverpool PALS.
14:16These men would all go into training together, be organized into regiments and brigades together, so that whole communities and local districts were going into battle as one.
14:29This was disastrous in the 1916 and 1917 offensives, when whole communities were wiped out.
14:38It was the vilified Winston Churchill who was a leading impetus for a new weapon to break the stalemate.
14:47He supported Colonel Ernest Swinton's plea to develop a motorized armored vehicle.
14:53The top secret weapons were shipped under cover and marked as water carriers, which quickly became tanks.
15:00One doubting general insisted on the higher value of the horse.
15:05No damn design changes.
15:07But tanks would be heard from with increasing vehemence, especially in light of what was about to happen at Verdun.
15:15Falkenheim, in one of those great, cynical, Western Front moments, decided to attack Verdun, not to gain territory, but to kill people.
15:30You don't tell people this because you cannot tell your own troops that they're being sent into battle not to win this or crush that or break something else.
15:44They're being sent into battle simply with the intention of killing more of the other guys than you're losing yourself.
15:51Verdun was the chosen place.
15:56The nominal target was the system of forts that had Fort Douamont as a hub.
16:01The attack against it was called Operation Gericht, meaning place of execution.
16:21The
16:26A
16:29Shells fell at the rate of 100,000 rounds per hour.
16:33Scarecrow Frenchmen blackened, uniforms in tatters, rose up from the charnel house to defend.
16:41French trenches collapsed. Pillboxes shattered.
16:46Douamont fell.
16:48calm, decisive General Henri-Philippe Pétain
16:51began a climb into history
16:53when he was ordered in as the savior of Verdun.
16:57He ended an order of the day with the enduring words,
17:01they shall not pass.
17:03Nobody did on either side.
17:14It was after almost six months of slaughter
17:17that exhaustion and empty ammunition dumps
17:20brought the Battle of Verdun to a halt.
17:23France had lost 500,000 men.
17:26Germany had lost 400,000.
17:29Falkenhayn had been somewhat right in his estimate of outcome,
17:34except that he was not one step closer to victory.
17:38As his men died in mud, others died in sand.
17:43World War I was the first war
17:45where oil made a great deal of difference,
17:47and that was located in the Middle East.
17:49The British wanted to expand their colonial empire
17:52to take control of some of that oil.
17:55So huge numbers of troops were put into Egypt
17:58and then into Mesopotamia.
18:03The British Middle Eastern campaign would go from defeat
18:06in Mesopotamia to signal success in front of Palestine
18:10under General Sir Edmund Allenby.
18:14Colonel T. E. Lawrence would fan the flames of Arab revolt
18:18against the Turks and enter mythology as Lawrence of Arabia.
18:23Between Lawrence's slashing ambushes
18:26and Allenby's deft handling of a 400,000-man army,
18:30the Turks would be smashed throughout the war,
18:33from Aqaba to Tafila,
18:35from Gaza to Beersheba and Jerusalem.
18:39In Europe, the caste changed.
18:41Von Falkenhayn was replaced as commander of the German army
18:45with the hero tandem of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
18:50Prime Minister Asquith, devastated by loss of his son in battle,
18:54was replaced by the fiery David Lloyd George.
18:58As the French kicked Joffre upstairs,
19:01General Robert Nivelle, a hero of Verdun,
19:04stepped in as commander-in-chief of the Western Front.
19:07For all his role in the Somme tragedy,
19:10Haig was made a field marshal.
19:13In the East, Russia's General Alexei Brusilov
19:17gathered all he could for a grim mauling
19:20of the Austrian defenses over a 200-mile front.
19:23The Brusilov Offensive was one of the great battles of 1916,
19:30and though the Russian losses were dreadful,
19:36they gained back a huge amount of territory
19:40that they had lost the year before.
19:43But it was the last great gasp of the Russian army
19:46as it reeled and died of exhaustion of men and supplies.
19:50But suffering without progress had begun to rot Russia from within,
19:56and that would have consequences much beyond arms.
20:05As 1917 opened, Tsar Nicholas was afield with his dissolving armies
20:10as his empire went unruled.
20:12Heavy rioting began in Petrograd,
20:17and police machine guns killed hundreds.
20:19Soon the storm spread to other cities.
20:24What shall I do, the desperate Tsar asked advisers.
20:27You must abdicate, was the answer.
20:30He did, and the Romanov dynasty died on March 16, 1917.
20:36To destabilize its enemy, Germany smuggled into Russia
20:44the arch-revolutionary Nikolai Lenin from his exile in Zurich.
20:48From that moment, Lenin worked his way furiously
20:52toward ousting all other attempts at leadership,
20:55and Russia began a long slide out of the war.
20:58But whatever the Germans were gaining in Russia,
21:02they had been throwing away in the United States
21:05with their sabotage, submarine warfare,
21:08and general ham-handedness.
21:13Germany's talent was in uniform.
21:15It certainly wasn't in their foreign office.
21:17Their foreign minister, Alfred Zimmermann,
21:20sent a telegram to Mexico offering an alliance
21:24and the possibility of retrieving Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
21:29He sent that telegram over an American-owned undersea cable.
21:33It was obviously intercepted,
21:36and the Americans learned what he was going to do.
21:39And then when it was published in the papers,
21:42he doubled his ignorance
21:45by admitting that that was his own telegram.
21:48After the Zimmermann telegram episode,
21:51War between the United States and Germany is inevitable.
21:59Woodrow Wilson, who was elected to his second term in 1916,
22:02on the slogan that he kept us out of war,
22:05was not a pacifist, as many are inclined to believe.
22:09He was, in fact, an interventionist.
22:12He must lead the American people into this war
22:15that he did not want but was now inevitable.
22:18He brings his message to Congress on the 2nd of April,
22:21pointing out to the members of Congress
22:23that the Americans have no quarrel with the German people,
22:26but America must make the world safe for democracy.
22:31The anti-war forces in America crumbled,
22:34and cries of kill the Kaiser and on to Berlin rang out.
22:38Wilson signed the declaration of war.
22:42The United States Army that began to prepare itself for war in Europe
22:49was as hollow, depleted, and unprepared
22:51as any great nation's army had ever been.
22:54It stood at 200,000 men
22:57and without a semblance of modern equipment.
23:00It would take a dominating leader to shape it up.
23:03They had him in a new commander.
23:06John Pershing was a cavalry officer, West Point graduate.
23:12He had fought in the last of the Indian Wars.
23:15He had done well in the Spanish-American War.
23:18He had commanded the 10th Cavalry, the Black Buffalo Soldiers.
23:22That's where he got the nickname Black Jack.
23:24He had done well in the Philippines in the insurrection.
23:27President Roosevelt jumped him from the rank of Captain
23:31to Brigadier General.
23:33Pershing is more important as a symbol,
23:37as the man who seemed to be holding it all together.
23:44Not one American soldier would be lost
23:47in the immense transfer of American troops to Europe in 1917.
23:54Rear Admiral William Sims had met with the British
23:56and within weeks had his destroyers online
23:59to help protect the huge convoys.
24:01The bled dry French and British were delighted.
24:06They wanted every man.
24:08Lafayette, we are here, barked Colonel Charles E. Stanton
24:13on July 4th, 1917,
24:15after the Americans had arrived in France
24:17to a rapturous French reception.
24:20The citizens could not know that Pershing's big, rough army
24:24had been taught to march, but was still learning to fight.
24:27They were months away from use on the front.
24:30Pershing was determined to maintain the integrity
24:33of the American army, but he was enough of a realist
24:36to know that he had to detach American units
24:39to British command and French command in times of emergency.
24:43In the meantime, maddeningly true to the mistakes
24:47of his predecessors, General Robert Nivelle mounted another offensive
24:52to win the war, founded on all the old impossibilities.
24:58Although his attack around Arras could not advance,
25:01losing 187,000 men in 10 days,
25:05it would have one grand result, mutiny.
25:10The army said, we've had it, and they just refused to fight.
25:14Men streamed back to towns in the rear,
25:18tried to commandeer trains to go to Paris.
25:22They were barely stopped, and eventually,
25:26ringleaders were rounded up.
25:29A handful of drumhead executions went some distance
25:33into repairing the army, but nothing went so far
25:36as getting rid of Nivelle and bringing in General Pétain
25:40to balance leadership with compassion.
25:43He nursed the demoralized army back to health,
25:46but it was tired and nowhere near replacing its losses.
25:50It needed bodies, strong, fresh American bodies.
25:56Georges Clemenceau, the new French prime minister,
25:59wanted things to hurry up and said so loudly.
26:03Concurrently, Field Marshal Haig, attempting to seize the submarine ports
26:07and divert the Germans from the French sector,
26:10was writing tens of thousands of new names
26:13on the cenotaphs of British villages.
26:16He chose Flanders for his latest dream of penetration.
26:20Notably, in front of Ypres,
26:22for a third battle in a sorry bogland before ravaged villages.
26:27One, a magnet for mud and death called Passchendaele,
26:31would be remembered with shudders for generations.
26:34There was nothing like the mud of the Great War.
26:38It was a liquid sea.
26:40The horses drowned in mud.
26:43The wounded slipped beneath wood and died not of their wounds,
26:50but actually being drowned as well.
26:52You couldn't supply troops. You couldn't move.
26:55It put a mental state into a soldier that was automatic depression.
27:03However, there was a glimmer of hope at Cambrai,
27:06where an attack led by 324 tanks,
27:09speeding at one and a half miles per hour,
27:12gained more ground in six hours
27:14than had been taken around Passchendaele in four months.
27:18In Italy, the Germans went to the aid of their hapless Austrian ally
27:24and smashed their foes for them.
27:26In the fall of 1917,
27:28they drove into the Italian army in the Battle of Caporetto
27:31and broke it in 20 days.
27:33Of the 305,000 men Italy lost,
27:50275,000 surrendered.
27:56The Italians would need all their fortitude
27:58to recover as a fighting unit.
28:03Much more important,
28:04Russia was about to leave the alliance,
28:06taking along its millions of rebelling soldiers.
28:18As 1917 waned,
28:20Lenin's Bolshevik revolutionaries struggled to throw over
28:23the provisional governments of Alexander Kerensky
28:26and replace it with a Bolshevik dictatorship
28:29to take Russia to a separate peace.
28:34And when Petrograd Regiment stopped recognizing his rule,
28:37Kerensky left the city on November 7th
28:40and Lenin was in command.
28:42Cries to end the war went up.
28:46The Bolsheviks made a separate peace
28:48at Beths-Liftkots with the Germans.
28:51This enabled the Germans to move a great number of men
28:55from the Eastern Front to the Western Front.
28:58Ludendorff saw that 1918 was going to be
29:01make or break for Germany.
29:03Huge numbers of Americans were coming in.
29:06So he had to destroy the Allied armies
29:08that were on the lines in early 1918
29:11before the Americans came.
29:17Ludendorff designed an entire new tactical division
29:20doctrine for the German army in the winter of 1917, 1918.
29:25Infantry was composed into small packets,
29:2912, 15 people apiece,
29:32armed with or built around machine guns or flame throwers.
29:37The key was to infiltrate and then bypass,
29:40to go for the rear and keep going.
29:42The attack began in the fog on March 21st.
29:47There was an enormous artillery preparation,
29:52short, very violent.
29:54Gas and high-explosive rounds mixed.
29:57When the German infiltration units hit the British front lines,
30:02the British simply crumbled.
30:07There were eight British battalions of 6,000 troops there.
30:10Only 50 survived.
30:13Their front disintegrated into isolated islands
30:16with the German tide flowing around them.
30:19Dugouts collapsed and ammunition dumps exploded.
30:22The Germans, in what they called Operation Michael,
30:27had their breakthrough.
30:29The communications hub of Amiens
30:32was the immediate target to split the French from the British.
30:35Then it would be on to Paris and the English Channel.
30:39Ludendorff smelled victory.
30:41Operation Michael was a huge success on the first day.
30:46In 24 hours, the Germans gained more ground
30:50than the French and British had gained
30:54in 140 days two years before.
30:58Then their offensive ran out of gas.
31:01They reached the old battlefields of the Somme,
31:04which were literally a desert.
31:06And there was no water.
31:08There were a few real tracks through it.
31:11When they got to the other side,
31:14their troops started to loot.
31:16They found the kind of food supplies
31:18that they hadn't seen in four years.
31:21And the attack groundwalled.
31:26The Allies needed an overall commander.
31:29General Ferdinand Foch gave his qualifications.
31:33I would fight without a break.
31:35I would fight in front of Amiens.
31:37I would fight in Amiens.
31:39I would fight behind Amiens.
31:40I would fight all the time.
31:42I would never surrender.
31:44He was chosen.
31:52Operation Michael had overrun
31:541,250 square miles of countryside
31:56and captured 90,000 prisoners.
31:59Ludendorff regrouped his exhausted forces to go farther.
32:15In these battles, 838,000 soldiers would be killed, wounded, missing, or captured.
32:21Nobody could afford such losses.
32:26But the Germans could not replace theirs.
32:29And the Yanks, at last, were coming.
32:33Indeed, they were there.
32:36The first American offensive action at a small village named Contigny showed the American people
32:43that the American fighting man was now in the fight and could discharge himself very well.
32:49And it also showed the German high command that the American fighting man was someone to be contended with.
32:55The emergency that brought the Americans into their first big-scale action came when a whirlwind German attack drove a strong salient into the French and British lines behind Chemin des Dames Ridge.
33:14Pershing released the United States 2nd Division with its Marine Brigade under General James G. Harbord to the beleaguered area on Foch's frantic request.
33:34It was May 30th, Memorial Day.
33:37Coming up to Chateau-Thierry, past retreating Frenchmen yelling,
33:42La Guerre est Fini!
33:44The Americans found themselves caught against a river bank and beating back a determined enemy with point-blank use of machine guns and artillery.
33:55Again Paris was threatened, and again the French government packed to leave, refugees streaming out before them.
34:01Pershing cabled, the possibility of losing Paris has become apparent.
34:06On June 1st, the American 3rd Brigade and the Marine Brigade started up the Paris Mets Road to relieve the embattled French.
34:15The Germans, wheeling from Chateau-Thierry, moved astride that road and drove into Belleau Wood, a dense hunting preserve.
34:25General Harbord told his Marines,
34:28The Marines, we dig no trenches to fall back on. The Marines will hold where they stand.
34:37There would be three weeks of very vicious fighting, a hard fought battle.
34:41At the end of the three weeks, the Marines could say Belleau Wood, entirely Marine.
34:46It was a small victory, but it was one that caught the American public's imagination.
34:56It was splashed over the front pages of all of America's newspapers.
35:01Marines save Paris at Belleau Wood.
35:04This bothered the Army then, and in some quarters, it still bothers them.
35:09Enthusiasm was wild in America. The people on the home front endured meatless, gasless, and lightless days.
35:17They were told, lick war stamps and lick the Kaiser.
35:20Movie stars staged monster liberty loan rallies, and a quarter of the adult population signed on.
35:27Ludendorff still held powerful cards, but cabled ominously of the American fighters.
35:35Personnel must be called excellent. Spirit of troops is high.
35:40Moral effect of our fire does not materially check advance of infantry.
35:57Americans were widespread in the forces that now opposed a series of desperate hammer blows from Ludendorff.
36:04He termed these his Friedensturm, or peace offensive.
36:08A very large penetration had occurred between the Aen and the Marin rivers, thrust like a dagger pointed at Paris,
36:16and the communications of Paris, it needed to be dealt with and pinched off.
36:21The Americans devised a plan to do this and restore the line in July of 1918,
36:28and had engaged more than 300,000 Americans and sustained casualties of 67,000 during the campaign.
36:38The restoration of the line sent the Germans back on their heels one more time.
36:43The stage was set for the formation of the first American army.
36:51John Pershing's dream of an American army fighting in France under its own commanders was about to come true.
36:57August the 8th, 1918 was the turning point for Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
37:04On that day, Australians and Canadians attacked under Hague's command using 450 tanks and achieved immense success against the Germans.
37:16The Germans started surrendering, surrendering in droves.
37:22When Ludendorff rushed in reinforcements, they arrived in the rear areas and they were met with jeers and not cheers.
37:31The German troops there saying that the reinforcements were simply prolonging the war.
37:38The Persian got his first chance to show what an American army could do in September of Sammy Hill, a bulge in the line.
37:53He pitched off that Sammy Hill salient in classic fashion, hitting the shoulders from both sides.
37:59Some folks say that the Germans were already withdrawing from Sammy Hill, perhaps they were, but they were withdrawing because they knew the Americans were coming.
38:13Foch had demanded American troops be blended into his forces for a huge critical Murs-Argonne offensive coming hard after the Sammy Hill operation, and Pershing had refused him.
38:27Do you wish to give battle? Foch had taunted.
38:30Pershing had snapped back certainly, but as an American army.
38:35When Foch said, I insist, Pershing replied, you may insist all you please, but I decline absolutely to agree.
38:41On September 26th, the Americans were fighting in the Murs-Argonne as a unit under their own command.
38:54Murs-Argonne was the first seriously contested American offensive, and it floundered.
39:00Pershing had ordered an attack on line, and that meant that any serious resistance received in one sector would stop the entire line.
39:13The Americans were fast learners, however.
39:15Pershing changed his instructions to his commanders.
39:18They would no longer have to attack on line.
39:21He gave initiative to battlefield commanders.
39:23He was running out of troops, so he stripped down the rifle companies from a strength of 250 to 175.
39:32Also, he started stripping out troops from divisions in the rear, and then he fired commanders.
39:39He fired several division commanders and one of his two corps commanders.
39:43So when the attack resumed in mid-October, the Americans had it right, and they started moving.
39:50On the American front, the Germans had established four successive defense belts up to 20 miles deep.
39:57On one flank, the Germans held dominating heights looking down the Americans' throats.
40:03It was the greatest concentration of defenses that American troops would meet in two world wars.
40:09Foch's attitude was, you asked for it, you got it.
40:13But the Americans drilled forward with growing, unstoppable confidence and power.
40:22In the words of the once skeptical General Ludendorff, when asked who won the war, was heard to say, the American infantry.
40:31The Germans and their allies were suddenly cracking everywhere, from the Western Front to Greece to the Middle East.
40:38The new replacements that are coming in from German urban areas, and the siphoning off of the very best German soldiers as storm troop soldiers, has resulted in a qualitative lessening of the fighting quality of the German army.
40:56The Germans were a few years later.
40:58Ludendorff, the Iron Man, now suffered complete nervous collapse, alternately weeping and raging at his staff, his Kaiser and his people for the war's failure.
41:08Socialists wearing red armbands surged through Germany's streets, mugging German officers and tearing off their epaulets and decorations.
41:20The fleet mutinied against Admiral Sher's order, putting it to sea for a last battle, murdered officers, and sailed back to port with red flags flying.
41:32On October 4th, armistice negotiation offers were sent secretly to America's president, with the feeling that the liberal idealistic Wilson, who had written a rather gentle 14 points of basis for world peace, would be the spokesman they wanted against the ferocious French, British, and Italian belligerents.
41:51Wilson was seeking to put himself in the position of Arbiter Mundi, Empire of the World, able to, if necessary, dictate the peace settlement.
42:04He had in mind dictating, if necessary, to the Allies as well.
42:09The Hindenburg Line was broken.
42:13Turkey would quit the war on October 30th.
42:17Austria on November 3rd.
42:21The Kaiser now dismissed Ludendorff.
42:24The old German god of war donned a false beard and dark glasses and fled to Sweden.
42:30It was the finish.
42:32A German armistice commission met at 7 a.m. in a railway car on a siding in Compiègne forest.
42:40And when a German asked for his proposals for an armistice, an icy Marshal Foch growled,
42:47I have no proposals to make.
42:50The Allies were willing to keep fighting.
42:53The Germans gasped at the terms that ended their hopes of keeping anything for themselves.
42:59The Great War was to end at 11 a.m. on November 11th.
43:03Retreating German armies wantonly destroyed towns, orchards, coal mines, and art treasures.
43:10The bitterness would soon be richly returned by demands that economy-shattering German indemnities repay ravaged civilians $32 billion for damages of the war.
43:22The cream and gold imperial train rolled out in darkness and deposited the Kaiser across the Dutch frontier.
43:31He spent his years of asylum in numbing disregard.
43:37On November 11th, remembered forever as Armistice Day, Hindenburg wept and the guns of the Great War fell into eerie silence.
43:47Birds were heard again.
43:49Troops wandered out of their animal lairs and blinked in the quiet sunlight.
43:54There was little drinking, survival being intoxication enough.
43:59The Allied home fronts exploded in hysterical joy as mixed consternation and relief swept a bewildered German public.
44:20A German corporal named Adolf Hitler, then huddled in a sentry box guarding Russian prisoners at Traunstein,
44:27would have the day's events burned into his seething brain.
44:34The peace settlement, group of settlements that is then made with Germany, with Austria, with Hungary, with Bulgaria, with Turkey,
44:45is a whole series of treaties negotiated in and signed in Paris and its suburbs.
44:52And these treaties are often very heavily criticized.
44:57The terrible dissatisfaction of the Germans with it was essentially dissatisfaction over the fact that they hadn't won the war.
45:05That having lost the war, they were not going to get everything they had hoped, I must say, does not seem to me particularly surprising.
45:17When asked by a shocked German what history would say of this, the French tiger Georges Clemenceau would say,
45:25it will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.
45:28In trying to sum up the war, there was no language that could really express what had happened.
45:36All of the widows, the orphans, the lost limbs, the millions of dead, it was mind-boggling and it was mind-numbing.
45:58There was no way to express what had happened.
46:05Dead or wounded, over 9 million Russian soldiers had fallen, along with better than 7 million Germans,
46:127 million from Austria-Hungary, 6 million from France, and 900,000 from the British Empire.
46:21More than 200,000 Americans fell in just seven months of battle.
46:28The Great War had killed 22 million.
46:34Soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force's four black regiments, who had piled up battle casualties in the Argonne,
46:41were told that they could either be discharged to stay with French girls they had married or return home alone.
46:48Wilson returned home to begin a long fight with Congress in his desire to have the United States enter a League of Nations.
46:59He was bringing his case to the people on grueling tours when a stroke took him out of the last fight of the Great War, and a losing one.
47:08His League would die without America.
47:11The American Expeditionary Force and the other Allied armies came home to the greatest parades there had ever been.
47:20But the cost of the Great War was greater than could ever be shown.
47:24Gone with so many soldiers was a centuries-long age of hope in the possibilities of human intelligence, of kindness and greatness.
47:34The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires had ended their time at the center of Europe,
47:43and the British Empire had been fatally wounded.
47:46American innocence was in the past.
47:49What had been lost in art, treasure, health, genius, and joy could never be reckoned.
48:01Nor could the tears of those who waited forever for the return of the 22 million who slept under a shattered world.
48:14These wounds couldn't heal.
48:17And so, in 21 years, the bleeding would begin again.
48:22You're back.
48:23You're back.
48:32You're back, you're back.
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