PLANNING FOR THE ENDGAME: THE CENTRAL POWERS, SEPTEMBER 1916–APRIL 1917

Lawrence Sondhaus

Between September 1916, when Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff were granted sweeping authority over the war effort of the Central Powers, and April 1917, when the Germans ( just days after the United States entered the war) sent Vladimir Lenin home to Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary crafted their ultimate plan for victory in the Great War. Their decisions during these months did much to shape the course of the remainder of the confl ict and, in particular, the course of the war during 1917, in the fi ghting beyond the West- ern Front. To varying degrees the outcomes of the major actions of 1916 (the Somme, Verdun, Jutland, Austria-Hungary’s Tyrol offensive, and the Russian ‘Brusilov offensive’) infl uenced their planning for the endgame, but in the end their own deteriorating relationship with each other would matter more than anything else. While on the surface the measures agreed upon by Germany and Austria-Hungary during these months strengthened their common war effort and solidifi ed their alli- ance, the consolidation of decision-making authority in German hands marked the end of the Habsburg empire’s centuries-old status as an independent great power, accelerating its collapse by causing those who still believed in the Dual Monarchy to lose hope in its future. At the start of the war Germany and Austria-Hungary had the longest-standing formal partnership of any of the great powers, having been allies, offi cially, since 1879, but unlike France and Russia their pre- war relationship did not include a military convention. Their respective chiefs of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, got along very well, but Conrad, for example, remained ignorant of basic elements of the German war plan against France, such as the violation of Belgian neutrality.1 Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary pursued a plan for a

1 Holger H. Herwig, ‘Disjointed Allies: Coalition Warfare in Berlin and Vienna, 1914’, Journal of Military History 54 (1990), pp. 274–76; Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 101. 2 lawrence sondhaus

The Russian Front

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Map 1.