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Ludendorff was also able to withdraw his six divisions and many Austrian batteries from the Italian front, assured that no Italian offensive need be feared; and his tactics came as a surprise in spite of the practical warnings given at Caporetto and Cambrai.
Speaking again of the answer to one of the Wilson notes, Ludendorff says: The answer to Wilson was dispatched on the 20th of October. The submarine campaign was abandoned. This concession to Wilson was the deepest blow to the army, and especially to the navy. The injury to the morale of the fleet must have been immeasurable. The Cabinet had thrown up the sponge.
Besides, it would not have been surprising if you had thought that we had come to the end of our resources. The communications you received, which I read from time to time, certainly led to that conclusion." Later on in the conversation, General Ludendorff asked me when, in my opinion, the Americans would participate in the war with great force.
Before 21 March Haig had kept his line better manned north than south of Arras, and the reasons which made him anxious for the defence of his northern sector counselled Ludendorff to attack it when the defeat of the Fifth Army had compelled the British commander to divert ten divisions from the north and supply their place with the weary survivors of the battle of St. Quentin.
I cannot, however, help referring here to the utterly unwarranted attacks made upon me by General Ludendorff, in his evidence before the Examination Committee of the National Assembly, with the view of refuting my own account of the interview which we had at G. H. Q. At all events, the General so completely lost control of himself before the Examination Committee, that this possibly explains his false interpretation of my evidence.
The latter fact, has, at all events, been substantiated by General Ludendorff himself, in his evidence before the Committee. The gentlemen who urged me to obtain this interview, themselves made efforts to bring it about. But these efforts were of no avail, and I therefore regarded them as too insignificant to be mentioned in my own evidence.
Both were dissatisfied with the obstacles which intense bombardment, used for initial success, placed in the way of its prosecution; but by one of the ironies of the war, while Ludendorff now relied on the superiority of his human material, Haig looked for success to the greater ingenuity of mechanical contrivance expressed in Tanks.
Light was thrown on the German submarine policy by a Berlin dispatch, dated October 26, 1916, which indicated that the submarines were at least placating the extremists: "While the silence of the German press and public on the subject of sharpened submarine warfare may be attributed in some measure to the stand of Hindenburg and Ludendorff against it, much more significant is the growing popular realization that sharpened submarine warfare is actually in force.
Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had been chosen for such a minor blow.
This brought the Kaiser, Von Hindenburg, and Von Ludendorff in hot haste to Berlin, to exert the utmost possible pressure of the military party on the recalcitrants. For the time being their power prevailed, but the German Chancellor, Von Bethmann Hollweg, was sacrificed, together with the Foreign Minister and other leading officials of the empire. The Chancellor was succeeded by Dr.
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