Eric Ludendorff, although nominally a subordinate of Field Marshal Paul
von Hindenburg, was the most significant German leader of the war. He
directed the German military effort on the eastern front during the first two
years of the conflict, and controlled the entire land war from the close of
1916 until the eve of the Armistice. In the guise of assistant to Hindenburg,
Ludendorff not only exercised supreme military power, he came to overshadow
the political authority of Germany's prime ministers and the emperor,
Wilhelm II. Ludendorff, more than any military commander in the
war, became virtual dictator over the affairs of his country.
The future World War I leader was the son of a small landowner with an
estate near Posen. Ludendorff was born there on April 9, 1865. He became
an army officer in 1883, received training at the General Staff Academy,
then rotated between positions as a unit commander and staff officer. In
1904 he returned to Berlin as a member of the prestigious General Staff
itself. Marked as a particularly promising officer with uncompromising
views, he ignored the strength of the political opposition in the Reichstag
by insisting on a large expansion in the size of the army in 1913.
Exiled from the General Staff, Ludendorff greeted the war as commander
of an undistinguished infantry brigade at Strasbourg. Upon the start of
mobilition, he became deputy chief of staff to the Second Army, one of
the key units designated to invade Belgium. He emerged as the hero of the
hour in helping to capture an important stronghold defending the city of
Liege, the key to the German advance through Belgium.
The deteriorating situation in East Prussia gave Ludendorff the opportunity
to leap to higher command. Facing a Russian advance into this region
from the east and the south, a distraught General Max von Prittwitz called
for a withdrawal back to the Vistula. When Prittwitz was thereupon relieved.
Ludendorff received orders to restore the situation as chief of staff of the
Eighth Army. The new army commander, under whom Ludendorff was to
serve, was Paul von Hindenburg.
The ensuing campaign brought Germany's greatest wartime victory; it
established the pattern for the relationship between Ludendorff and Hindenburg;
and it began Hindenburg's rise to supreme command. The German
Eighth Army turned southward to annihilate the forces of General Alexander
Samsonov in the Battle of Tannenberg. Meanwhile, a weak German screening
force held Russian forces invading from the east. This daring plan originated
with figures on Prittwitz's staff and came to fruition under Ludendorff. During
the dangerous operations involved in ignoring one enemy force in order to
concentrate against another, Hindenburg played the secondary but valuable
role of steadying the nerves of his mercurial assistant.
Over the next two years, the team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, with
the latter playing the dominant part, came to control all German operations,
as well as much of the Austrian effort, on the eastern front. Ludendorff
clashed regularly with General Erich von Falkenhayn, the German commander-
in-chief. Falkenhayn saw the western front as the war's center of
gravity. He refused to provide the eastern front with the forces that Ludendorff
believed would bring total victory against Russia.
In August 1916, Hindenburg and Ludendorff returned to Berlin to take
Falkenhayn's place. Hindenburg became chief of the General Staff, that is,
supreme commander. Ludendorff, still the dominant member of the pair,
took the title of first quartermaster general.
Ludendorff pushed commanders in the west to develop more effective
offensive tactics and to shorten the front. He seized control of the debate
over the use of unrestricted submarine warfare. He accompanied this initial
plunge into the political arena with "the Hindenburg program." This was a
plan to put the entire adult male population from ages seventeen to sixty at
the disposal of the war effort. Although milder in application than in theory,
it represented an important milestone on the road to total war.
In January 1917, Ludendorff got Kaiser Wilhelm II to agree to the navy's
call for unlimited submarine warfare. In another political decision with
momentous consequences, Ludendorff arranged for V. I. Lenin to return to
Russia from his isolated place of exile in Switzerland. The Russian revolutionary
was expected to help pull Germany's eastern enemy from the war.
Another political move came in July: by threatening to resign, he compelled
the kaiser to oust Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. The obscure Prussian
bureaucrat Georg Michaelis took the now weakened post of prime minister.
The issue at stake was the possibility of a negotiated peace, and Luden
dorff's success kept Germany on the disastrous path leading either to total
victory or total defeat.
The year 1918 brought Ludendorff's final effort to win the war. The
submarine campaign of 1917 had failed; the United States had responded
to unlimited submarine warfare by entering the conflict; American troops
were now reaching Europe in large numbers. The general overrode the
objections of the foreign office and obtained the punitive Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk with Russia. Ludendorff dismissed the fact that Britain and France
were certain to use such a settlement to motivate their own populations into
a fight to the finish. Still, the end of combat on the eastern front released
large numbers of German troops for shipment to France.
Ludendorff's 1918 offensive on the western front was a desperate gamble
employing the last substantial resources of the German army. Successful
German attacks broke enemy defenses with a skillful combination of
artillery fire and highly trained infantrymen. But Germany lacked the men
to split the British from the French. In a momentous, much criticized
decision, Ludendorff shifted the direction of the main German advance
several times to exploit momentary successes. The Allies held on, their
morale bolstered by the arrival of a growing American army. The enemy
counteroffensive began in August. Convinced that the gamble had failed,
Ludendorff went to the brink of nervous collapse before resigning his post
at the close of October.
The man who had been virtual dictator of Germany fled to Scandinavia for
several months after the Armistice. In the political turmoil of the postwar
period, Ludendorff returned home and turned to the extreme right. He was
one of several leaders of the Kapp putsch in Berlin in 1920, which sought and
failed to overthrow the Weimar Republic. He then became an ally of Adolf
Hitler, marching at the Nazi leader's side when Hitler tried unsuccessfully to
seize power in Munich ir November 1923. Thereafter, he faded into the
political background. With his mental health in apparent decline, he busied
himself with the publication of anti-Catholic pamphlets. Ludendorff died in
the Bavarian town of Tutzing, near Munich, on December 20, 1937.
World History
