![]() As winter approached and the Allies sagged, everything hinged on the pending American thrust northward from Saint-Mihiel and Verdun toward Sedan– aimed at the vital pivot of the whole German position west of the Rhine. Lloyd George’s war cabinet warned Haig that the shrinking army he was conducting slowly eastward was “Britain’s last army,” and it was going fast. They spent their dwindling strength breaching the Hindenburg Line and had little left for the Meuse, Moselle, or Rhine lines, where the Germans would stand fast. Haig suffered nearly half a million additional casualties in 1918, and so did the French. After rousing success in August and September, the British and French offensives had stalled. Most historians argue that the war was won by Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s famous Hundred Days Offensive – a coordinated Anglo-French-American envelopment of the German army on the Western Front – and most emphasize the performance of the British and French and speak of the American battles at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne as sideshows. The Americans saved Britain and France in the spring and summer and destroyed the German army in the fall. ![]() Lloyd George feared social revolution in Britain if casualties continued to mount, and lamented that Haig “had smothered the army in mud and blood.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George refused to send replacements to Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s army on the Western Front, so controversial were Haig’s casualties. ![]() The French army limped into the year, effectively out of men and in revolt against its officers British divisions, 25 percent below their normal strength because of the awful casualties of Passchendaele, had not been reinforced. The British, barely maintaining 62 divisions on the Western Front, planned, in the course of 1918 – had the Americans not appeared – to reduce their divisions to thirty or fewer and essentially to abandon the ground war in Europe.ġ918, eventually celebrated as the Allied “Year of Victory,” seemed initially far more promising for the Germans. France maintained its 110 divisions in 1918 not by infusing them with new manpower – there was none – but by reducing the number of regiments in a French division from four to three. By 1918, French reserves of military-aged recruits were literally a state secret there were so few of them still alive. ![]()
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