Welcome. I am so thrilled you're joining us today.
We are taking you right to the front lines of,
well, one of the most staggering historical events
of the 20th century. For this deep dive, we're
unpacking a phenomenally detailed set of notes
and historical records from a massive Wikipedia
article all about Operation Michael. It really
is a defining moment. We're looking at a masterclass
in the stark difference between, you know, a
tactical success on the battlefield and a strategic
victory that actually wins a war. Right. So to
put you right in the middle of it, it is the
spring of 1918. The Eastern Front has collapsed.
Russia is officially out of the war via the Treaty
of Brest -Litovsk. And for the first time in
years, Germany has a massive numbers advantage
in the West. Yeah, but they also have a ticking
clock. Exactly. The Americans are coming. Our
mission today is to explore the revolutionary
tactics the Germans unleashed, the utterly terrifying
human experience on the ground, and how a military
operation that successfully captured a massive
amount of territory ended up being, well, a catastrophic
failure. The stakes here are almost impossible
to overstate. We have to look at Operation Michael
not just as a sequence of battles, but as a desperate
all -or -nothing gamble. The German high command
knew they were rolling the dice on the survival
of their entire empire. Let's untack this. Let's
look at the geopolitical reality of early 1918.
The German people on the home front are essentially
starving due to the protracted war and the Allied
naval blockade. The pressure is immense. Immense.
But because Russia has surrendered. The German
quartermaster general, Erich Ludendorff, suddenly
has a massive influx of manpower. How significant
was this shift in numbers? Oh, it was a game
changer on paper. Ludendorff was able to transfer
nearly 50 divisions from the Eastern Front over
to the West. Wow. Yeah. Suddenly, Germany boats
192 divisions on the Western Front. And out of
those, 110 are positioned right on the front
line. For the first time in a long time, they
significantly outnumbered the Allies in that
theater. But having the numbers on paper is very
different from deploying them effectively, right?
Especially with that ticking clock we mentioned.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, you
have to realize just how loud that clock was
ticking in Ludendorff's ear. He knew that 318
,000 fresh American soldiers were expected to
land in France by May of 1918. And another million
by August, right? Exactly. A million by August.
The German high command... knew their window
to win the war was rapidly closing. Once the
American Expeditionary Force was fully built
up and integrated into the lines, Germany simply
couldn't compete with that level of fresh manpower
and industrial output. So Ludengroff comes up
with this wildly ambitious do or die strategy.
I know the goal was to target the British Expeditionary
Force, the BEF. But what was the actual mechanical
plan here? The grand strategy was to hit the
British incredibly hard at a specific junction
point, separate them from the French army to
the south, and then aggressively. Right. The
ultimate goal was to push the British all the
way into the sea by cutting off the channel ports.
Those ports were absolutely vital for British
supplies and reinforcements. Draft them in Flanders,
force a surrender, and then turn the entire German
military apparatus on the French before the Americans
arrive in force. And the British lines were sitting
ducks for this, particularly General Hubert Goff's
Fifth Army. Sitting ducks is putting it mildly.
They were incredibly vulnerable, precisely where
the Germans planned to strike. Gau's Fifth Army
had recently taken over a massive 42 -mile stretch
of the front line from the French. 42 miles is
huge. It is, and calling it a line is being generous.
The defenses were dangerously incomplete. They
lacked the troops to hold it properly, so they
were relying on isolated outposts, massive gaps,
and completely unfinished rear zones. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Because the
Germans didn't just plan to overwhelm these weak
points with sheer numbers. They completely changed
the fundamental way warfare was fought, creating
these elite infantry units called Stus Truppen,
or stormtroopers. How did these units operate
differently from what we typically picture when
we think of World War I? That is the crucial
tactical shift right there. For years, the standard
doctrine involved throwing massive, slow -moving
waves of men at heavily defended trenches. It
was just a meat grinder. Right, walking slowly
across no man's land. Exactly. But these new
stormtrooper units were trained in infiltration
tactics. Instead of attacking the strongest points
head -on, they moved in small, highly trained,
autonomous groups. Their orders were to completely
bypass the heavy defenses, slip through the gaps
in the line, and race forward as fast as possible
to disrupt communications, attack headquarters,
and destroy artillery in the rear. It sounds
like modern special forces tactics being born
right there in the mud. And to support them,
they completely overhauled their artillery strategy,
too. Instead of the classic bombardment that
would last for a week and basically just warn
the enemy an attack was coming, they used something
called a hurricane bombardment. Think of it as
maximum shock and awe. It was a brief, incredibly
complex, highly destructive barrage that lasted
only a few hours. It was meticulously coordinated
to sever telephone wires, knock out heavy guns,
and maintain the absolute element of surprise
right up until the very second the infantry charged
out of the trenches. Which perfectly exposed
the fatal flaw in the British defense strategy
for this specific sector. The British were using
a defense in -depth strategy in their forward
zone. They were, and it was specifically designed
to rely on small, isolated readouts. Essentially
fortified mini -bunkers that provided overlapping
machine gun crossfire. If an enemy attacked,
they would be caught in a deadly web of intersecting
bullets. Right. But as you'll see, that entire
strategy relied on one critical factor, the ability
to actually see the enemy coming. So let's put
you on the ground on the morning of March 21st,
1918. It's 440 a .m. The largest artillery barrage
of the entire war begins. What did that actually
look and sound like for a soldier waking up to
this? The sheer scale of it is almost unimaginable
to modern minds. In just five hours, the Germans
fired over 3 .5 million shells. Three and a half
million. In five hours. It's staggering. And
it wasn't just high explosives. It was a terrifying,
suffocating mix of mustard gas, chlorine gas,
tear gas, and smoke canisters, blanketing an
area of 400 square kilometers. It's horrific.
Winston Churchill was actually inspecting a division
near the front that morning, and his description
is chilling. He said it was exactly as a pianist
runs his hands across the keyboard from treble
to bass. He said there rose in less than one
minute the most tremendous cannonade he would
ever hear. He noted that the enormous explosions
upon the trenches seemed almost to touch each
other, with hardly an interval in space or time.
Just an apocalyptic wall of fire and poison.
And then around 9 .40 a .m. the bombardment lifts
and the German infantry assault begins. But nature
decides to intervene with a freakishly thick
morning mist. A literal fog of war. Yeah. It
was so dense that visibility dropped to barely
10 yards. So those British readouts we talked
about in the forward zone, the mini bunkers relying
on overlapping crossfire to defend the line,
they were completely blind. Entirely. The German
stormtroopers, utilizing their new infiltration
tactics, just slipped right past them in the
thick fog. completely unseen. The chaos must
have been absolute. Telephone wires are shredded
by the hurricane bombardment. Human runners carrying
messages are getting completely lost in the dense
fog and the gas clouds. British headquarters
are totally cut off, meaning generals have zero
ability to influence the battle. And the troops
garrisoned in those forward zone redoubts suddenly
found themselves completely surrounded by Germans
who had materialized out of the mist behind them.
Some units, once they ran out of ammunition,
had no choice but to surrender. Others fought
to the very last man. Which leads to an agonizing
period from March 22 to March 25. The British
are forced into a desperate fighting retreat.
This raises an important question about how fractured
leadership operates under extreme duress. In
the midst of this overwhelming chaos, communication
broke down from the very top. There was a disastrous
misunderstanding between the 5th Army Commander,
General Goh, and his Corps Commander, General
Ivor Maxis. What? Gulf had ordered a fighting
retreat, but only if necessary to maintain the
line. Maxis, dealing with fragmented reports
and immense pressure, misinterpreted this to
mean his entire Corps should fall back to the
Somme River immediately. A single misunderstood
order cascading into a catastrophe. Because of
that, the British Eighth Corps retreated way
further than intended. They abandoned highly
defensible terrain and moved over 14 kilometers
back, essentially blowing a massive hole in their
own lines. But even amid that strategic collapse,
the micro -level heroism is staggering. You have
individuals like Lieutenant Colonel Wilfrith
L. Stove at a readout called Manchester Hill.
He commanded his garrison to fight off repeated
assaults from all sides. He personally carried
ammunition through heavy fire and held out until
he was killed late in the afternoon of March
22. They fought and died simply to buy a few
precious hours for the rest of the army to fall
back. While the British are frantically retreating,
the advancing German troops are running into
something that profoundly alters the momentum
of the battle. And it wasn't a fortified trench.
It was the British supply dumps. This is one
of those deeply human details you only find when
you dig into the sources. You have to remember
the context we started with. The German home
front was starving. The German soldiers were
constantly fed propaganda stating that their
U -boat blockades were starving the Allies into
submission, just like the British naval blockade
was starving Germany. Right. So these hungry,
exhausted German stormtroopers overrun the British
camps, expecting to find an enemy as deprived
as they are. Instead, they find an absolute abundance
of high -quality food. The sources mention them
finding luxuries like chocolate, tinned meats,
and even champagne. Imagine the psychological
blow. You are pushed to the absolute brink of
human endurance, watching your friends die from
miles of mud, believing the enemy is on the verge
of collapse. Then you capture their trenches
and realize you've been lied to. The Allies aren't
starving. They are incredibly well supplied.
It must have been devastating. It was. Instead
of being thrilled by the plunder, many German
units were profoundly demoralized. Some units
even stopped their advance entirely just to gorge
themselves on the captured rations, completely
losing their tactical momentum. that is fascinating
to really understand what that exhaustion looked
like the war diaries from the individual british
units are incredibly revealing i was looking
at the accounts of the 11th hertfordshire regiment
and the 54th brigade those diaries ground you
entirely in the perspective of the individual
soldier It strips away the grand strategy and
leaves you with the brutal reality of survival.
Exactly. Reading those accounts, it's just a
relentless nightmare sequence. Falling back,
digging hasty trenches in the dark, realizing
you're being outflanked, losing commanding officers
to sniper fire, and retreating again. They were
marching continuously through the night, getting
maybe two or three hours of sleep over a span
of five days. And yet, amidst that total physical
and mental depletion, you have this incredible
anomaly on March 25. The 54th Brigade is essentially
a shadow of its former self. They've been fighting
and marching for four punishing days. Suddenly
A writer arrives with surprise orders countermanding
their retreat. Oh, wow. Yeah, they are told to
turn around, form up, and launch a counterattack
against a village called Babuwef. And against
all physical logic, these exhausted men do it.
They literally turn around, surprise the advancing
Germans, who fully believe they were only chasing
ragged fleeing units, and engage in brutal hand
-to -hand combat for 20 minutes among the cornfields.
The British completely retake the village. They
capture 230 German prisoners and see— these 10
heavy machine guns in that single action. The
sources even note they were finally able to bring
up their cooking limbers after securing the village
to have their first hot meal in days. Which were
essentially mobile, horse -drawn field kitchens.
It's a surreal image. enjoying a hot meal in
a freshly recaptured village surrounded by the
chaos of a collapsing front. It stands as an
unbelievable testament to the resilience of those
specific soldiers. It really does. And it seems
like these fierce local stands, like the 54th
Brigade at Bab Wuf, finally started to physically
stall the German momentum. Did this buy the Allies
the breathing room they needed to fix their fractured
command structure? It bought them just enough
time to avert total disaster, yes. The sheer
scale of the German advance was threatening to
permanently split the British and French armies,
which would have ended the war. This existential
crisis forced the Allied leadership to do something
they had been fiercely resisting for years due
to national pride and differing strategic goals.
They had to unify their command structure. Because
up until this point... The British reported to
British command, and the French reported to French
command, and they were often working at cross
purposes. Precisely. General Haig was worried
about protecting the Channel ports, while General
Pétain was worried about protecting Paris. But
at the Doulins Conference on March 26, the Allied
leaders finally met and appointed French General
Ferdinand Focke as the Supreme Allied Commander
of the Generalissimo. Finally, The British and
French forces were coordinating under one central,
cohesive strategy. Meanwhile, the massive German
offensive is starting to crack under its own
weight. The logistics are completely failing.
But it wasn't just a matter of supply lines being
too long, right? It was what they were trying
to cross. You have to picture the physical reality
of the terrain. The Germans were advancing over
the old 1916 -some battlefield. This wasn't open
countryside. It was a lunar landscape. Oh, right.
The craters. It was a wasteland of overlapping
artillery craters, poisoned wells, rotting corpses
from two years prior, and shattered roads. Trying
to drag heavy artillery pieces and horse -drawn
supply wagons through that nightmare while under
aerial harassment was nearly impossible. The
infantry simply outran their own ability to be
fed or rearmed. And Ludendorff himself. makes
a massive unforced error here. Instead of keeping
his eyes on the prize, the channel ports He gets
distracted. It's a classic case of military hubris.
Lugendorf became intoxicated by his early tactical
successes. Instead of concentrating all his elite
forces on one decisive breakthrough toward the
sea, he started chasing local victories. He spread
his forces out. He launched a secondary offensive
called Operation Myers against the heavily defended
British Third Army up at Arras, abandoning his
strategic discipline. And how did that go? It
was a complete failure. The Germans hit a brick
wall. And to make matters worse for the Germans,
the Allies started deploying new technology.
technologies to hit back. Near a place called
Collin Camps, the British debuted their brand
new whippet tanks. These were a significant departure
from the older lumbering Mark IV tanks that moved
at a walking pace. The whippets were much lighter,
faster, and designed specifically to exploit
gaps in the enemy line. The accounts say just
12 of these whippets suddenly appeared on the
battlefield and charged into the German lines,
completely scattering 300 highly trained stormtroopers
who fled in absolute panic. It must have felt
like the technological tide was turning against
them in real time. And it was. The whole offensive
finally fizzled out in early April. The critical,
culminating moment was the fighting around Villa
Bertone on April 4th and 5th. Ludendorff made
one final, desperate push to capture the high
ground overlooking the vital railway city of
Amiens. If Amiens fell, the Allied rail network
would be paralyzed. They didn't get it. No. A
hastily organized night counterattack by Australian
forces and British units, including the very
same exhausted men of the 54th Brigade we talked
about earlier, halted the German advance dead
in its tracks. The Germans simply could go no
further. So what does this all mean? When you
look at the raw data, the sheer scale of Operation
Michael is just unbelievable. The Germans advanced
up to 40 miles into Allied territory. They captured
3 ,100 square kilometers of France. They took
over 75 ,000 British soldiers. prisoner and captured
1 ,300 artillery pieces and 200 tanks. If you
just look at a map, it looks like a massive,
undeniable victory. But the crucial analysis
here is that despite those terrifying metrics,
it was a catastrophic strategic failure for the
German Empire. Consider what they actually captured.
Useless, shell -torn wilderness from the 1916
battles. They completely failed to capture the
vital rail hubs of Emian or Eris, and they never
reached the channel ports. And the human cost
was staggering. The Germans suffered roughly
250 ,000 casualties. The Allies suffered roughly
255 ,000 casualties. And here is the vital difference
in those casualty numbers. The Allies could replace
their losses. The Americans were pouring into
France by the hundreds of thousands, and British
factories were turning out 10 ,000 machine guns
and 100 tanks every single month. But the 250
,000 men the Germans lost, those were their absolute
best, highly trained, irreplaceable elite troops.
Precisely. Ludendorff bled his army dry for ground
he couldn't even defend. tactical brilliance
without strategic discipline loses wars. Well,
thank you so much for joining us on this intense
historical journey today. Operation Michael truly
changed the tactical face of war forever with
the introduction of infiltration tactics and
hurricane bombardments. But as we've seen, it
ultimately marked the beginning of the end for
the German Empire in World War I. I want to leave
you with a final thought to mull over, specifically
regarding the core of the German tactical shift,
the creation of the Stoßtruppen. The German military
explicitly skimmed the absolute best, fittest,
and most experienced soldiers from every regular
unit across their entire army to create these
elite shock troops. This pooling of talent ensured
that their initial attacks on March 21st would
be devastatingly effective, but it also mathematically
guaranteed that their highest casualties in the
vanguard of the assault would be their most irreplaceable
men. When those elite troops fell, Germany was
left with severely degraded, lower quality, exhausted
troops in reserve. Did the very military innovation
that made their attack so brilliantly effective
initially actually seal their ultimate doom?
That is a fascinating question to chew on, the
paradox of the elite vanguard. Keep questioning
history and always look for those hidden connections
in the stories we think we know. Until next time,
take care and keep diving deep.