Erich Ludendorff
As the man credited with saying “the British Army are lions led by donkeys”, we can safely assume that Erich Ludendorff would have viewed his own style of generalship in drastically different terms. Strategically sound, Ludendorff assisted in redrafting the Schlieffen Plan in the lead-up to the war. He served as quartermaster general to Karl von Bulow’s Second Army in spring of 1914 and succeeded in overrunning the Belgian forts at Liege. After this, he was assigned to the Eastern Front where he worked closely with Paul von Hindenburg as his quartermaster general (so close, in fact, that Winston Churchill would henceforth refer to them collectively in writing as HL).
Erich Ludendorff is best viewed as the brains behind Hindenburg’s brawn. While credit went to the latter, Ludendorff engineered victories like those at Liège (August 1914) and Tannenberg with his scrupulous strategic planning and ingenious tactical intuition. Working as Hindenburg’s junior on the Western Front, he personally surveyed and upgraded German frontline defenses and constructed a new heavily fortified defensive line—known as the “Hindenburg Line“—to the rear. This new trench system exerted horrifically heavy losses on the British and the French during 1917. Fortunately for them, Ludendorff’s political acumen was little match for his military.
While he was a hammer to the Russians, his ill judgment made him a ticking time bomb when it came to Germany’s foreign policy. He was an ardent supporter of unrestricted submarine warfare which—although based on the sound strategic principle of starving Britain out of the war by sinking both her ships and her supplies—in reality meant that neutral American vessels were also routinely sunk. It was, to a large extent, this German policy that brought the US into the war and sounded the death knell for Germany’s chances of victory.
This didn’t dissuade Ludendorff from pushing one last time for victory. In March 1918 he launched his great offensive, “the Ludendorff Offensive” against the Allies on the Western Front. The Germans enjoyed considerable early success; the implementation of Ludendorff’s “punch a hole and let the rest follow” philosophy pushed the Allies further and further back. But right on the cusp of victory, their momentum ran out. Concerted allied counterattacks now put the German Army on the retreat. And this time they wouldn’t run out of momentum.
Ludendorff’s postwar success didn’t match that of Hindenburg. Perhaps it was because of his relative lack of political standing; perhaps it was because of the very public breakdown he’d suffered as his offensive collapsed before him; or perhaps it was his rather more dogmatic dedication to “victory at any costs”. Ludendorff briefly held political office as a member of the National Socialist party in the Reichstag, acted as a symbolic figurehead for Hitler’s Munich Putsch (1923), and unsuccessfully ran against Hindenburg for the presidency. And in 1935, two years before his death, he published a memoir whose title perfectly encapsulates the man who wrote it: Der Totale Krieg (“Total War”).