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Radio War Nerd EP #157 — The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, 1918 (Patreon)

Published:
2018-11-20 20:31:27
Imported:
2026-06
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Recorded November 15, 2018

To mark the 100th anniversary of the War To End All Wars, the War Nerd and Ames discuss the American military's biggest contribution to the Entente victory: the Meuse-Argonne offensive, launched in the last six weeks of the war. Turns it this was the largest and deadliest battle in US military history — 26,000 killed, nearly 100,000 wounded — featuring the most epic traffic jams in American history (see photo above), led by a gaggle of psychopathic dumb-as-nails US officers. Despite professing to love war so much, hardly any Americans even know about their military's biggest battle ever. And for good reason, as we learn. It did not go very well. And all that death and embarrassment didn't even matter much anyway—the Meuse-Argonne wasn't all that important compared to the Entente's other major battlefronts during the Hundred Days Offensive that ended the war.

Afterwards at 2:02:00 — the War Nerd briefly talks about World War One poetry, the dividing moment between pro-war verse and the sort of antiwar verse that's been the rule ever since . . . Also, Afghanistan going from awful to awfuler . . . 

Maps:

* German Spring Offensive, March 27 - June 17, 1918

* Meuse-Argonne Battle Plan Map

* Meuse-Argonne Actual Battle Movement, Sept 26-28, 1918

* Hundred Days Offensive, Aug 8 - Nov 11, 1918

* George Patton & tank, 1918

* Douglas MacArthur, the Liberace of the AEF

* Gen. Hunter Liggett, the only non-boyband senior commander in the field (and the only good one)

Total time: 2:35:49

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Totally Tanked

Look forward to listening. One thing that's often forgotten is that fighting the Germans is hard...

Ryan May

Can't wait. My dads great grandfather was in the lost battalion so this is very interesting to me

Gengeros

Thank you for this, the average America has no idea about World War I!

Gengeros

Germany should have just taken all of their forces in the east, and I mean fucking all of them, and just did a huge offensive west.

Zhukov

From what I recall the Germans had to keep those troops in the East to, at the bare minimum, ensure the collection of resources they desperately needed to keep fighting. The collapse and withdrawal of Russia necessitated substantial forces even after formal peace from Brest-Litovsk.

Karl

The line “an ecstasy of fumbling” appears in Australian metal band The Mark Of Cain’s track Lone Pine, and up until this episode I’ve never understood why.

Dave Dolle

What was the name of the Henry Allen (sp?) book Mark quotes?

eh

George Patton III sent out Christmas cards with pictures of mutilated Vietnamese corpses in 1968 according to Greiner's War Without Fronts so a great family all around.

Jimothy Realname

Thank you for getting 'Over There" stuck in my head again. AND WE WONT COME BACK 'TIL ITS OVER OVER THERE

Gabriel Uriarte

From the great Adam Tooze's WW1 book (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931-ebook/dp/B00INIXN6Y/)," rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931-ebook/dp/B00INIXN6Y/),</a> a remarkable throughline between the Franco-Prussian War episode and this one. ' [Clemenceau's] father had been arrested for resisting the Bonapartist usurpation of the 1848 revolution and narrowly escaped deportation to Algeria. In 1862 Clemenceau himself served time in the infamous Mazas jail for seditious activity. In 1865, broken hearted and with nothing to hope for in Napoleon III’s France, Clemenceau shipped out to that great battleground of nineteenth-century democratic politics, Civil War America. With his recently minted medical degree he meant to volunteer as a medic in the service of Lincoln’s Union Army, or to make a life for himself as a frontiersman in the American West. Instead, he settled in Connecticut and New York and over the following years produced for the liberal newspaper Le Temps a remarkable series of reports on the bitter struggle over the effort to complete the defeat of the South by means of comprehensive reconstruction. True to his convictions, Clemenceau saw Reconstruction as a heroic effort to complete a victorious just war with a ‘second revolution’. It was a battle that concluded, to Clemenceau’s delight, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1869, promising voting rights for African Americans. For Clemenceau, the radical Republican abolitionists were the ‘noblest and finest men of the nation’, inspired by ‘all the wrath of a Robespierre’. Coming from Clemenceau, this was the highest compliment. The partisans of Reconstruction were fighting to save the United States from ‘moral ruin’ and ‘misfortune’ in the face of abusive, self-interested heckling from Southern Democrats. Amongst that crowd was to be found Woodrow Wilson, who as a young man impressed all his acquaintances with his dogged adherence to the Southern cause. As the author of best-selling popular histories in the 1880s and 1890s, Professor Wilson concluded his triumphant narrative of the American nation state with a celebration of the reconciliation between North and South, which had condemned Reconstruction and consigned the black population to a disenfranchised underclass. For Wilson, the heroes of Clemenceau’s reports were the architects of a ‘perfect work of fear, demoralization, disgust and social revolution’. In their determination to ‘put the white South under the heel of the black South’, the advocates of Reconstruction had inflicted on the Southern states a policy ‘of rule or ruin’. One cannot help wondering what the future American President might have thought if during his adolescence as a young Southerner he had happened to stumble across the following lines dispatched to Paris in January 1867 by the future leader of wartime France: ‘If the Northern majority weakens and the nation’s representatives let themselves be persuaded in the interests of conciliation or of States’ Rights to let the Southerners reenter Congress easily, there will be no more internal peace for a quarter of a century. The slavery party of the South combined with the Democrats of the North will be strong enough to defeat all the efforts of the abolitionists, and the final and complete emancipation of the coloured people will be deferred indefinitely.’ As the first Southerner to be elected President since the Civil War, Wilson owed his career to that postponement of justice. '

radiowarnerd

That's astonishing, I had no idea! It sounds a lot like Adam Gurowski's take on the war. As with Science Fiction, the European intellectuals understood American culture much better than the Americans did.

radiowarnerd

AFIK, Allen wrote two books about post-war Germany. 'My Rheineland Journal' and 'The Rheineland Occupation'.

radiowarnerd

Yeah, it's strange, isn't it? I got nothing but WWII growing up. Never seemed to stop, but the other big war didn't get much mention.

Gabriel Uriarte

Will, Not to be tedious as an Adam Tooze promoter, but the book I mentioned below (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931-ebook/dp/B00INIXN6Y)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931-ebook/dp/B00INIXN6Y)</a> has a good succinct description of the bind even the most Ludendorff-militarist Germans found themselves in in this regard: " The most pressing priority was grain. In 1918 Austria and Germany confidently expected at least 1 million tons from their new ally. But by the end of April it had become clear that ‘exploiting’ the bread basket of the Ukraine would present more problems than these fantasies allowed. If they were to avoid the enormous costs of a full-scale occupation, Austria and Germany needed a cooperative local authority to collaborate with them. Having been driven out of Kiev, only to be restored courtesy of the German Army, the Rada needed a breathing space to re-establish itself. But the scale and urgency of Germany and Austria’s economic demands made this impossible. In Ukraine, as in the rest of revolutionary Russia, the only way to secure popular legitimacy was to cede possession of the land to the peasants.34 Over the summer of 1917 a nationwide land grab had redistributed the gentry’s estates. In the Constituent Assembly election, the peasants had voted in their millions for the party that promised a village-based agrarian future, the Social Revolutionaries. The SRs were reliable allies against the Bolsheviks, but their land policy ran directly counter to the interests of the Central Powers. To maximize the surplus available for export, they needed cultivation to be concentrated in large, market-orientated farms. For the Rada to have presided over the restoration of the great estates for the sake of its German protectors would have discredited it completely. For the Germans themselves to reverse the agrarian revolution by force would have required hundreds of thousands of troops from the Western Front that Ludendorff could ill afford. If the Germans had been able to barter desirable manufactured goods in exchange for grain deliveries, this conflict might have been alleviated. Under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany had committed itself to trading grain for industrial goods. But under the strain of the war effort, goods for export were in desperately short supply.35 To purchase the grain they needed, the Central Powers resorted to the short-term expedient of simply ordering the Ukrainian National Bank to print whatever currency they required. This gave them purchasing power and avoided requisitioning, but within a matter of months it rendered the currency worthless. As General Hoffmann noted from Kiev: ‘Everyone is rolling in money. Roubles are printed and almost given away . . . the peasants have enough stocks of corn to live on for two or three years, but they will not sell it.’36 Having reached this point, there was no alternative but to resort to coercion. "

Chris Kohler

*sigh* I had read about the whole "stormtrooper tactics" and those gains in the Ludendorf Offensive, but every time I brought any of that stuff up in conversations, I was always told I'm a full of shit revisionist "Proto-Wehraboo" and none of that was true, till I too started to doubt any accounts of late war German successes. So it isn't all just myths?

Chris Kohler

If those things are true, it makes the "Stabbed in the Back" legend at least somewhat understandable. After all, they have been making progress and from what you read in German soldier accounts, there has been a lot of optimism and invigoration and all of a sudden the war is lost and the politicians surrender. An American soldier in Vietnam, who bought into the "kill count" propaganda, would probably have been baffled by the defeat and retreat too.