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225 The German Army at Vimy Ridge ANDREW GODEFROY “At last! Now the fight will be man to man, with the same weapons.” —Oberschlacht bei Arras1 Assessing military effectiveness and conceptual change in an army often begins at its defeat. However, Canadian military historians have suggested that the victory at Vimy Ridge was the catalyst for adaptive tactical and operational maneuvre that one historian has called “not glamorous but effective.”2 Still, any study of how the Canadian Corps won the battle should also include the German Army’s perspective on how it lost the battle. What was the German view of the Battle of Vimy Ridge? This is hard to know with certainty for tremendous amounts of German First World War primary records were lost during the Second World War. The allied bombing of Berlin in February 1945 destroyed the personnel rosters and card indices of the Prussian Army, the transition army (Uebergangsheeres), and the Imperial Army (Reichswehr).3 Another allied raid at Potsdam on 14/15 April 1945 burned the German First World War official archives (Reichsarchiv), leaving only remnants of related records in other places.4 Second, eyewitnesses to the event are effectively lost. Third, modern historians face some language barriers, as surviving German official histories of the First World War are written in Old German whose Latin-style romanticism makes interpretation difficult. German First World War unit histories and biographies, some of which appeared as early as 1919, were detailed but often selective about those battles that were covered. In the era of post-war accusation and apologia, turgid German official military histories often portrayed defeats as near victories or they simply absolved their commanders 13 226 ANDREW GODEFROY of any responsibility for the outcome.5 These views certainly contrast sharply with Allied accounts of the same battles, making the matter of discerning actual events much more problematic. In the wake of the failed offensives of 1914, the German High Command adopted a largely defensive strategy in the west, designed to hold on to ground already won, while the war on the Eastern Front was decided. Yet by 1917 the situation remained fluid. Though the German High Command felt confident in its eastern campaigns, the situation there was not stable enough to release large forces to the western theatre. Germany’s allies were becoming less dependable, especially the Austro-Hungarians. Feeling the strain of his alliance with Germany, Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles IV6 even instructed his senior leaders in 1917 to distance the army from German influence wherever possible. The German Army itself was also worn out after the bloody battles of the previous year and both reserves and munitions were in short supply. A typical army group of 140,000 men, for example, expended six or seven trainloads of heavy artillery munitions daily, requiring 26,000 horses to transport shells from railheads to the guns at the front. Seldom were there adequate resources to bring sufficient munitions or other critical supplies to the soldiers doing the fighting.7 Food was also beginning to run low. In 1916 heavy rains had badly damaged the potato harvest in Germany, adding potatoes to the growing list of rationed items. One estimate suggests that the average German adult citizen was subsisting on as little as 1200 calories a day, the normal intake for a three-year-old. Soldiers at the front could expect little better for their sacrifice.8 The end of 1916 marked the beginning of the “turnip winter” for most Germans and despite steps to ease the army’s logistical nightmare, many of its 154 front-line divisions were simply exhausted and not well supported. Given this situation and the unresolved hostilities in the east, Germany looked to a year of only defensive operations on the Western Front. As the blockaded Germans grew more isolated and weaker, the initiative passed to the ever-strengthening Allies.9 With their front lines seriously strained, the Germans began in late 1916 to withdraw to a fresh belt of defences on much better ground. Named the Siegfried Stellung (the Allies called it the Hindenburg Line), German commanders General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff created a new wall of defence from Vimy Ridge down to the River Aisne west of the Chemin des Dames, reducing the overall German Western Front by forty kilometres and freeing thirteen infantry divisions desperately needed to reconstitute their reserve. The Siegfried Stellung was ready by the end...

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