In early 1918 Germany had one last chance. Russia was out of the war, and divisions freed from the east could give Germany a brief edge in numbers before American troops arrived in force. The German commander Erich Ludendorff decided to stake everything on a knockout blow in the west.

The last German offensives

The German Spring Offensive began on 21 March 1918 with a short, intense bombardment, including gas, followed by small groups of specially trained stormtroopers who bypassed strongpoints and pushed deep behind the lines. In a few days they advanced further than either side had in years on the Western Front, and a giant long range gun began shelling Paris. Alarmed, the British and French at last placed their armies under a single commander, the French general Ferdinand Foch.

Yet the offensives ran out of strength, as advancing troops outran their supplies and suffered losses Germany could not replace. Each push gained ground but no decisive objective. By July, after the Second Battle of the Marne, the initiative had passed to the Allies.

The Hundred Days

On 8 August 1918, British, Australian, Canadian and French forces attacked near Amiens with hundreds of tanks, aircraft and carefully planned artillery. German troops surrendered in large numbers, and Ludendorff called 8 August, the first day at Amiens, "the black day of the German army". The Allied counteroffensives that followed, known as the Hundred Days, pushed the Germans steadily back. Canadian and Australian troops played an outsized role, and American forces fought major battles at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne.

Germany's allies collapsed first. Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, at the end of September 1918. The Ottoman Empire followed at the end of October, and Austria-Hungary, already breaking apart as Czechs, Poles, South Slavs and others declared independence, signed on 3 November. At the end of September Ludendorff told the Kaiser that the war was lost and that Germany must seek an armistice. A new government in Berlin appealed to Wilson for peace on the basis of his Fourteen Points.

Revolution and armistice

In early November German sailors at Kiel mutinied rather than sail on a last, hopeless mission, and revolt spread to cities across Germany. On 9 November 1918 the Kaiser's abdication was announced and a German republic was proclaimed; Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands. German delegates signed an armistice in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, and the armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. Fighting went on until the final minute, and thousands of men were killed or wounded on the last morning. Among the last to die was an American private, Henry Gunther, shot about a minute before eleven.

Because the war ended before Allied armies reached Germany, a dangerous legend soon took hold. The "stab in the back" myth claimed that the German army had been undefeated and was betrayed at home, by socialists, strikers, liberals and Jews. The worked example below tests it.

The war's toll was staggering. Roughly 9 to 10 million soldiers died, and millions of civilians were killed by violence, hunger and disease. Germany, Russia, France and Austria-Hungary each lost more than a million soldiers; France lost about one in six of the men it mobilized. Some 21 million soldiers were wounded, many permanently disfigured or disabled, and countless families had no grave to visit.

A pandemic on top of the war

As the war ended, an influenza pandemic swept the world in waves from 1918 into 1920, killing far more people than the fighting had. Crowded camps, troopships and trains helped it spread, and wartime censorship kept many governments from warning their people. It is usually called the Spanish flu, not because it began in Spain but because neutral Spain's uncensored press reported it openly.

Worked example: testing the stab in the back

In November 1918 the German army still stood on French and Belgian soil. To many Germans at home, who had been told for four years that victory was near, defeat came as a shock. Within a year the stab in the back story had spread widely, and Hindenburg himself endorsed it before a parliamentary inquiry in 1919.

Test the myth against the evidence. The army's own commanders had asked for an armistice. German troops were retreating and surrendering in large numbers. Germany's allies had already collapsed, and fresh American divisions were arriving every month. The myth was false, but it was useful to those who wanted to blame the new democratic republic for defeat, and the Nazis later repeated it relentlessly. It shows how a comforting lie about the past can poison a nation's politics, and why careful history is a civic duty, not just an academic hobby. When a story about defeat blames an internal enemy, check who benefits from believing it.