On the 11th of November, 106 years ago, the Great War, the so-called War to End All Wars, came to an end. Today, on Armistice Day, we remember the end of World War I.
00:01:29.960So every day, every year, we try and do something, or I mark it, being the resident history nerd.
00:01:34.580So I thought today we could talk about the actual armistice.
00:01:38.580I'm fascinated by World War I, even though my background, actual academic background,
00:01:42.100undergrad is ancient history, classical history.
00:01:44.440I'm a fan of all history, but particularly fascinated by World War I, always have been.
00:01:49.040Well, it's a key moment in our history. It shapes the modern day in a massive way.
00:01:54.460Oh, absolutely. I think Dan Carlin and I agree that we still live in the shadow of World War I in all sorts of ways.
00:02:00.520World War II was just an extension of World War I. Most historians kind of agree.
00:02:05.580It was sort of a 20-year armistice between those two wars.
00:02:08.680One and the same event in certain ways, you can argue. Lots of people do argue that.
00:02:14.040Now, I'm fascinated by World War I. It sort of always has been.
00:02:17.220For some reason, it captured my imagination when I was a child, just about old enough to sort of start reading and learning about it.
00:02:22.760But particular bits of it I'm also fascinated by.
00:02:27.300The Miracle on the Marne, the Battle of Verdun, which the Brits had nothing to do with.
00:02:31.100I'm absolutely fascinated by what happened around Fort Dumont and the whole Battle of Verdun and all sorts of things.
00:02:36.320And the end of the war, the whole of 1918, the spring and summer offensives of 1918 on the Western Front particularly fascinate me.
00:02:44.500So I thought today, maybe, since it is Armistice Day, we can have a little talk about the armistice and the end of the war and how it played out and all that sort of thing.
00:02:54.940OK, so, first of all, just to say, Remembrance Sunday was yesterday.
00:03:03.360And I don't really need the audio on this.
00:03:08.200These are some of the events that we have every year at the Cenotaph.
00:03:11.660If anyone doesn't know, this building on the left, this structure on the left there is the Cenotaph.
00:03:15.580There's a memorial to all war dead, not just from the World War I.
00:03:28.000Sorry to bring this back to low politics for a moment, but I heard a rumour going around that the veterans were going to turn their back on Keir Starmer.
00:09:51.180Before the Americans, before hundreds of thousands of Americans came over, to try and win, try and push through to Paris and win on the west.
00:10:07.980Erich Ludendorff was in supreme command of the German, well, actually it was Hindenburg, but Hindenburg was only nominally, he was a figurehead, really.
00:10:16.420The Kaiser, the Emperor at the very top, then Hindenburg, then Ludendorff, but to all intents and purposes, in reality, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, Ludendorff was in charge of everything.
00:10:28.740Had breakdowns in the end, lost a stepson and all sorts of stuff.
00:10:31.640So, his plan for 1918, the spring and summer offensives of 1918, was what historians later called the Kaiser Schrapp, the Kaiser's battle, the Emperor's battle, battles.
00:10:42.020And the idea was a number of punches, not just one offensive, but a combination of punches up and down the line.
00:10:49.120And the line stretches all the way from the Atlantic to Switzerland, really.
00:10:55.900He trained up a load of, what they call, shock troops.
00:10:59.600Sort of, not quite modern-day special forces, but certainly much more specialised, highly trained troops than your normal, average soldier from World War I.
00:11:08.420Well, today, they would just be sort of a normal soldier, but back then, still, they were sort of specialised, what they thought of as specialised troops.
00:11:17.880Ludendorff just simply said, war consumes men, that's its nature.
00:11:22.320So, these guys, all sort of like von Falkenheim, Bosch, the French general, famously, one of our commanders, were, when we look back on it, seemed very sang-fired, very cold-blooded about using tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives.
00:11:44.120Oh yeah, blood was a currency they spent freely.
00:11:46.460How you guys talking about there, for our guys, but lots of them, they were just, the calculation was simply that, well, we just will lose tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of guys if we do this, this thing, whatever it is.
00:12:00.000So, today, doctrines of war are just not like that, just not prepared to do that.
00:12:08.160It's a much more 19th century way of looking at war, is that, well, if we do this and lose 800,000 men, like at Verdun, for example, they lost more at Verdun, but say, this offensive that's going to last for three months, we might lose half a million guys.
00:12:22.500Well, the other side will lose half a million, so, it's worth it then.
00:12:26.940You know, seems insane, right, to us now, but there you go, that was sort of, a lot of the thinking.
00:12:32.580So, Ludendorff decides he's going to have this multiple punch combo thing, the Kaiserschlack, started with Operation Michael, that's the wiki page there.
00:12:43.120You can see, about a quarter of a million men aside, were chewed up in that, 72 divisions, I mean, giant, giant stuff, dwarf in the Napoleonic Wars, or the American Civil War even, both of which are giant conflagrations, giant.
00:13:02.980But World War I, there's sort of nothing like it, it's a madness, true, true madness.
00:13:08.680Well, Michael was, it was a success to a limited degree, what does wiki say, was it a result, okay, so it's just part of a larger thing.
00:13:20.160So, the next punch was going to be Operation George, but they had to, had to dial it down a bit, so they ended up calling it Georgette.
00:13:27.680Or some, or some others call it the battle, like Lee's, Lies.
00:13:33.620Again, just 100,000, 120,000 guys apiece, chewed up in that one.
00:13:41.820Well, to go back to your sort of, your specialisation, to field 100,000 people as just the totality of your army in ancient times would have been a formidable army that you could conquer, you know, entire continents with, potentially.
00:14:00.040And so, the fact that in just one battle, these are the losses, it sort of puts it into perspective.
00:14:08.300Because, of course, those numbers are very difficult to actually get your head around.
00:14:13.340And I think that it's very, very difficult to look at that number and think that every one of those people had friends and family and the human tragedy of the thing.
00:14:24.600Each one of them a family destroyed on some level, yeah.
00:14:27.180I know it's the same in France, but in England, you go to any, almost any small market town, and there'll be a World War I memorial.
00:14:35.820Any small little village, church, and there'll be a list of names.
00:14:40.580And often it was the best and brightest who died.
00:14:42.360They're the ones who signed up before they were conscripted.
00:14:45.120They're the ones who did a lot of the dying.
00:14:46.660I sometimes think about the Britain that we could have if we hadn't have engaged in this madness.
00:14:52.680A whole generation wasted and maimed and traumatised.
00:14:57.180I went to Prince Town in Devon over the summer.
00:15:02.180There's only a very small town, you know, it's basically known for having a brewery and Dartmoor Prison, and that's about it.
00:15:08.480And their war memorial had 40 or so names, so that would have been a sizable portion of the town dead.
00:15:16.680And sometimes, particularly earlier on in the war, sometimes you'd have whole villages join up and they'd put them in the same regiment.
00:15:23.820And so if that particular regiment was at the forefront of a big offensive and got mown down 90-plus casualties,
00:15:33.440or 100% casualties sometimes, all the menfolk of that village wiped out.
00:15:37.740Yeah, unbelievable human misery and suffering was caused.
00:16:19.300Well, even if you were untouched, the effect of having to lie in a ditch for several years,
00:16:24.180while explosion after explosion, shower of mud, scraps of metal and all the rest of it came raining down on you regularly.
00:16:32.960I mean, even if you were untouched, it must have been utterly traumatic.
00:16:35.600I'd imagine that trench warfare, if you're stuck in the trenches, particularly when it's rainy and muddy and horrible and you're getting trench foot,
00:16:43.700that is about as close to hell on earth as we've probably ever got as a species.
00:16:50.900A lot of the accounts say that until you've suffered under a bombardment,
00:16:54.940in other words, you've just got to sit there while the enemy shells you,
00:16:57.660just hope one doesn't fall right on top of you,
00:17:00.000that until you've experienced that, you can't understand.
00:17:03.460You know, lots of guys say that about all sorts of war until you've been under fire, just small arms fire.
00:17:07.020Well, being under a sustained bombardment, lots of people went mad.
00:21:05.440The blows that rained down on the German forces.
00:21:07.320This is for the Allied counter-offensive.
00:21:11.140The blows that rained down on the German forces followed one after another so swiftly that the opportunity to reinforce one sector at the expense of another was denied to Ludendorff.
00:21:19.900As a result, the pressure exerted on him in Flanders, Artois and Picardy, principally by British and Empire forces, was to break the German army as a fighting force, obliging the German government to salvage what they could by means of an armistice.
00:21:32.900So it had always been the case that the British forces, not just English, all sorts, everything, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, Scots, Welsh.
00:21:42.560Lots of people from the Empire, basically.
00:21:45.920We would hold, we held the front closest to the Atlantic and the French held the rest of it.
00:21:51.940So the idea largely, it's more complicated than this, but the French would hold steady where they were, all the way from Switzerland and Verdun, all the way up.
00:22:00.700But in really, really northern France, northern France, near the Atlantic coast and into Belgium, we would do the majority of pushing forward and breaking the German line.
00:22:12.540So the Canadians, as I say, had a massive part of that, near Arra, as Vimy Ridge, I mentioned, been stalemate for years and years and years.
00:24:09.740So, in the end, in the end, where the Kaiserschlacht had petered out like an elastic band, sort of snapped.
00:24:19.140And then we were able to break through and eventually get into the Hindenburg line and then the Siegfried line behind that and advance on into Belgium.
00:24:28.980I mean, even in October 1918, Ludendorff was sending communications to Woodrow Wilson, trying to get some sort of negotiated peace, rather than just an outright, abject surrender.
00:24:42.700Well, that's what it did end up, the Germans just surrendered.
00:24:48.160The thing that's also worth mentioning is that after the war, in the interwar period, and Hitler and the Nazis,
00:24:54.360there's this idea of a stab in the back, that Germany wasn't defeated in the field, and they were just stabbed in the back by politicians and stuff.
00:25:04.580And historians always argue how true, if at all, that is.
00:25:07.800But it does seem that they were defeated in the field, though, because Ludendorff and the Kaiser would never have given in otherwise.
00:25:13.880They just would not have given in if that wasn't the case.
00:25:17.840But anyway, historians still argue about that.
00:25:20.940I've got another quick thing to read out here.
00:25:24.420It's an account from a private, an American private, Private Donald D. Kyler of the 16th Infantry, 1st Division.