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America officially entered WWI in April 1917, and even in early 1918, it was not clear who was going to win the war

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situation in 1917

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Britain and France

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in terms of lack of military advancement and sheer casualties, both countries had another terrible year

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yes the Americans had joined the war in April 1917 but the American soldiers were just being trained to fight and hardly any are engaging in combat in France

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in France, the Germans were moving into defensive fortifications and letting the allies come at them and beat themselves bloody

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French armies are failing so badly that portions of the army mutinied against their officers

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in northern France, British and their imperial allies the Canadians and Australians are launching offensives which are causing 4,000 casualties a day for weeks

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the front hadn't budged much in over three years of fighting

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Russia

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1917 Russian Revolution

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communists take over in late 1917 cutting any deal they can to get the war over

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Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

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March 1918

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between new Bolshevik government and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey) which ended Russia's participation in the war

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renounced Russia's claims on Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania

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Central Powers

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early 1918, expanded far into what had been the Russian Empire

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down into the Balkans

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British and French fighting at Salonika in Greece

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British driving up against the Turks

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Italians attacking the Austrians in the Alps but suffered a considerable defeat

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early 1918: war is not going well for the Allies

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Allies:

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playing for the long run

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we're blocking Germans with naval forces

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Allies looking toward 1919-1920

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Germans

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strategy dominated by Ludendorff

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Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937)

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August 1916 became joint head with Hindenburg to manage the war

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1935: published "Der Totale Krieg"

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"peace is merely an interval between wars"

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had rivalry with Hindenburg, told him that him handing over power to Hitler would bring ruin to Germany

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Ludendorff wants to have a decisive battle: move all eastern soldiers to the west.

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war in first half of 1918

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five German offensives in west

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break open big holes in Allied lines

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British hold well

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Germans are using their best forces and running out of steam

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war in second half of 1918

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Germans feel spent, not just in formal military terms but psychologically spent the way someone feels who has made what they think is their maximum effort yet has not achieved anything near their goal

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Instead of letting the Allies continue to beat themselves up against the German lines, the German High Command weakened their military considerably by exhibiting a particular mix of tactical arrogance and strategic political insecurity wanting somehow to redeem everything by winning that one decisive battle, yearning for that great gamble one more time, just as they had done with their strategy on unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, another gamble that did not pay off. And so in the summer of 1918 just as German power and moral was reaching its nadir, the fresh and newly trained American forces were beginning to move into significant combat action in France.

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so why did the war turn the way it did in 1918

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1. Germany made military choices that didn't turn out the way they had hoped

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2. The Allies now with America in the war controlled the seas and dominated much of the access to raw materials

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Allies largely took care of the German submarine threat by developing the concept of ship convoys in which merchant ships had naval escorts to protect them

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3. Had access to help from imperial partners from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even from India, not only as military powers but as sources of labor and materials.

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4. Increasing advantage in leveraging scientific advantages: caught up to and exceeded the Germans in the quality of their poison gas, also developed highly sophisticated intelligence technologies and aircraft in particular.

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5. Leadership and Resilience: David Lloyd George, George Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, like them or dislike them, these were gifted politicians: extremely able to articulate national objectives and rally people to a cause. Contrast this with Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany who didn't even make speeches in public since his advisers were afraid to let him speak in public for fear of what he would say. In Austria, the aging emperor Franz Joseph had passed away and in 1918 the Habsburg emperor was Charles I, not a charismatic speech maker at all, since, that's just not the kind of thing emperors do. And in Turkey, the Ottoman Empire was headed by a figurehead Sultan, but the real source of power was Enver Pasha, a decent politician but not someone who is used to rallying the Turkish people on the stump. So in a conflict among countries ramping themselves up into total states, strained to the limits of what they can do, the resilience of the Allied countries and their leaders, their ability to adapt under enormous pressure, turned out to be a key measure of who would last out the war. At the end of the summer in 1918, what surprised most people was how suddenly the Central Powers, having lost their bid to win the war, just seemed to fall apart and crack, and in November 1918, it was all over."