The following is an excerpt from The Last Four Months — The End of the War in the West by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice of the British Army, explaining in detail why the Allies allowed Germany to get out of the war with an armistice, instead of pushing on to inflict definitive defeat as recommended by U.S. General Pershing, who argued that:

By agreeing to an armistice under the present favorable military situation of the Allies and accepting the principle of a negotiated peace rather than a dictated peace the Allies would jeopardize the moral position they now hold and possibly lose the chance actually to secure world peace on terms that would insure its permanence.

As the failure to clearly defeat the German Army enabled Hitler to later claim that it had been only a "stab in the back" by Jews and Bolsheviks that had brought Germany down, history proved Pershing right. And doubly right, because the Japanese were watching, and the Japanese-language historical record shows they believed that by convincing the allied democracies that decisive victory could be obtained only at the same costs they'd lacked the resolve to pay in 1918, Japan could force a negotiated peace like that which ended WWI.

As the full text is rather long, a summary generated by chatGPT is presented first.

Summary

The Armistice of November 11, 1918, is often criticized as premature, with some arguing that forcing a German surrender in the field or advancing further into Germany would have more effectively secured lasting peace. Many in the Allied nations were dismayed by the triumphant reception of returning German troops and the persistent German narrative that they had not been defeated, fostering fears that Germany might not fully grasp the consequences of war.

However, evidence shows the German armies were decisively beaten, with supply lines in disarray, severe shortages of food, ammunition, and transport, and a collapse in morale. German documents and reports from the time described their troops as unfit for battle, plagued by desertions, heavy casualties, and a lack of basic supplies. The Allies, however, faced logistical challenges of their own. Their supply lines were overextended, roads and railways were severely damaged, and their resources strained by the need to feed liberated civilians and support advancing armies.

While Allied troops, particularly the American forces, were eager to continue the fight, the reality was that sustaining an offensive would have required a pause to repair infrastructure and reorganize supply chains. This would have given the Germans time to regroup and establish strong defensive positions, potentially leading to another costly and prolonged battle.

On the Lorraine front, an attack was planned and could have resulted in another Allied victory, but it would have caused significant destruction to valuable territory. The decision to accept the Armistice reflected a balance between military practicality and the desire to minimize further loss of life and damage.

The criticism of the Armistice stems largely from the perception that it allowed the German population to believe their armies were not defeated. However, this belief was fueled by misinformation from German military and press officials. Over time, as the truth about the state of the German army became apparent, most Germans came to understand the scale of their defeat.

In hindsight, while the Armistice may not have fully eradicated German denial of defeat, it is unlikely that continuing the war would have made Germany less capable of resistance in the long term. The decision to stop fighting on November 11 avoided further bloodshed and widespread destruction, making it a practical and, arguably, necessary choice.

Full Text

The full text of the excerpt follows below. Page numbers of original are in square brackets at end of preceding text.

The opinion is widely held that the Armistice of November 11 was premature. It is argued that we had the German armies at our mercy, and that the foundations of peace would have been more sure if we had ended the war by forcing the surrender in the field of a great part of those armies, or, failing that, had driven our beaten enemy back across the Rhine and followed him into the heart of Germany. The reception of the German troops by the German people, their march into the German towns through triumphal arches and beflagged streets with their helmets crowned with laurels, and the insistent statements in Germany that the German armies had not been defeated, that the Armistice had been accepted to save bloodshed, and to put an end to the sufferings of the women and children aroused amazement and disgust in the victors. There was very real anxiety lest after all we had failed to convince Germany that war did not pay; it was felt that we ought to have brought the realisation of what war means home to the German people in their own country, and that, had we done so, the long-drawn-out negotiations in Paris would have been concluded more speedily and more satisfactorily. It is worth while, therefore, examining the situation as it was at the time of the Armistice, and considering the case as it presented itself to the men who had to decide whether hostilities should cease or not.

There is no question but that the German armies were completely and decisively beaten in the field. The German plenipotentiaries admitted it when they [223] met Marshal Foch, and von Brockdorff-Rantzau admitted it at Versailles, when he said after the Allied peace terms had been presented to him: “We are under no illusions as to the extent of our defeat and the degree of our want of power. ... We know that the power of the German Army is broken.”

Even if these admissions had not been made, the condition of the German lines of retreat to the Rhine is conclusive evidence of the condition of their armies. Every road was littered with broken-down motor trucks, guns, machine-guns and trench mortars. Great stacks of supplies and of military stores of all kinds were abandoned. Every railway line was blocked with loaded trucks which the Germans had been unable to remove. The sixty miles of railway in the valley of the Meuse between Dinant and Mezieres was filled from end to end with a continuous line of German freight trains carrying guns, ammunition, engineering equipment, and other paraphernalia. On the Belgian canals alone over eight hundred fully charged military barges were found. It is beyond dispute that on November 11 the lines of communication immediately behind the German armies had been thrown into complete disorder by the streams of traffic which were converging on the Meuse bridges, disorder greatly intensified by the attacks of theAllied airmen. The German armies, unable to resist on the fighting front, could no longer retreat in good order, partly because of the congestion on the roads and railways behind them, which not only hampered the movements of the troops, but prevented the systematic supply to them of food and ammunition, partly owing to the fact that there were not horses left to draw the transport of the fighting troops. The following description of the condition of the German Army at the time when it began its march back to the Rhine in accordance with the terms of the Armistice has been recently published in Berlin.

Many of the units of the army were unable to move for lack of transport horses. Even those which were able to march had but little of their former mobility because the loss of horses had been so great. The majority of the troops were unaccustomed to long marches, the horses were m very poor condition, and the daily losses even during the retreat to the Antwerp-Meuse position had been very great. There was a deficiency of boots, winter clothing, hoof-pads, and frost nails, and winter weather might set in at any time. Almost all the casualty clearing stations, the ambulances and the hospitals were overcrowded owing to the continuous stream of wounded and sick, which poured in in consequence of the fighting which continued right up to the Armistice.*
*Die Rückführung des Westheeres, Berlin, 1919

Not less remarkable is a report from the headquarters of one of the divisions of the 17th German Army of the Crown Prince Rupprecht’s group. The number of the division is obliterated on the report, which is dated November 8, 1918, and was found in a Belgian farmhouse. I have therefore been unable to identify the division, but it appears to have been one of those which was opposed to our First Army. The report runs : “ The division can only be considered as unfit for battle. Owing to the extremely heavy casualties, to sickness and to numerous desertions, the average strength of regiments* is under 600. Still more important as regards efficiency in battle is the shortage of officers, of which no regiment of the division has more than twelve, and one regiment has only nine. Almost all the machineguns in the division have been lost or are out of repair, and half the guns of the artillery are deficient. Owing to lack of horses, less than half the transport of the division can be moved, and if the retreat continues many guns and vehicles will have to be abandoned. Owing to lack of petrol, much of the motor transport of the division cannot be moved. The division has not received rations for two days, and the condition of the horses .which remain is becoming very bad, because owing to constant movement there is no time to collect supplies from the country, and forage for them is not arriving.”

If ever armies were in a state of hopeless rout, the German armies were in the second week of November, 1918. The moral of the troops was gone, the organisation of the services on which they [226] depended for their needs had collapsed. This being so, why did we allow the German armies to escape from a hopeless position? Why did we not at once follow up the military advantage which we had gained at such cost?

* A German regiment consisted of three battalions, and its full strength was about 3,000 men and 64 officers.

In order to get an answer to these questions I visited the fronts of the Allied armies shortly after the conclusion of the Armistice. I there found, after travelling down the line from north to south, that amongst the fighting troops of the Belgian, British, French and American armies the opinion was unanimous that they had got the Germans on the run and could have kept them on the run indefinitely, or until they laid down their arms. On the American front in particular, where there were large numbers of troops ready and eager to go forward who had not yet taken part in a great battle, there was a very strong feeling that they had been robbed of the fruits of victory. When, however, I inquired the opinion of those behind the fighting fronts who were responsible for feeding the troops and keeping them supplied with all that was necessary to enable them to march forward, I heard a different story. Everywhere I was told that the Allied armies, which were on or were marching towards the Meuse, had on November 11 reached, or very nearly reached, the farthest limit at which for the time being they could be kept regularly supplied. The reasons for this were twofold. In the first place the Allied lines of communication [227] grew steadily longer as the Germans were driven back, and even before our victorious advance began the state of the railways and the amount of rolling stock in France had caused anxiety. For four and a half years the railway systems of north-eastern France had been strained to the limit of their capacity, and the effects of that strain were beginning to be serious in 1918. Both we and the Americans had made great efforts to improve and extend the railway systems in our respective zones. During 1918 the British military railway administration in France built or reconstructed 2,340 miles of broad gauge and 1,348 miles of narrow gauge railways, while to supplement the French rolling stock we sent to France 1,200 locomotives and 52,600 cars. The shipment across the Channel of such cumbrous and heavy objects as locomotives and trucks was a slow and difficult business, and the needs of the armies were always growing faster than were the resources of the railways. During the last four months of the war the weekly average load carried by the British military railways in France amounted to over half a million tons.

If these were our difficulties, those of the American army were greater, owing to the rapid growth of the army during the latter half of the year 1918, the shortage of shipping capable of crossing the Atlantic, and the necessity of giving first place to the transportation of troops and of war [228] material. Up to the end the railways under American control in France suffered from a deficiency in rolling stock, and had great difficulty in meeting the demands of the large forces engaged in the Meuse-Argonne battle at the end of an everlengthening line of communications. The French armies, which in the middle of September had been extended along the outside of the great bow made by the German lines between St. Quentin and Verdun, had the longest distances to advance in following up the German retreat, and before the advance began the French Government had cut down the railway transportation in the interior of the country to the bare minimum necessary for the preservation of the industrial and social life of France, and even then was unable to meet the full demands of the French armies and to supplement the railway material which Great Britain and America had been able to produce. The Belgian armies had hardly any resources of their own and no means whatever of developing their means of transportation. The result of all this was that the mere lengthening of the Allied lines of communications by the German retreat, apart altogether from any other action by the enemy, threw a very great strain upon the Allied railway administrations.

The Germans were, however, very active and skilful in damaging the roads and railways before they retreated, and this damage was extended by [229] the destructive power of the artillery of both sides. Every railway bridge, large or small, was blown up, the railway embankments were cut, long stretches of track were destroyed, the stations were burned down, and the telegraph lines were almost obliterated and the instruments removed. The Germans had left behind them mines buried under the railway lines, and these exploded often after the first damage had been repaired and the trains were running, with the result that there was constant interruption to the traffic. One of our Army Commanders told me that, owing to the constant explosion of mines behind his front, during the last stages of the advance of his army his railhead was retreating faster than his troops were advancing.

The consequence of this was that on November 11, despite the most strenuous and devoted work by all concerned in the repair and working of the railways, the farthest points at which supplies could be delivered by rail were from thirty-five to fifty miles in a direct line behind the front, and often double this distance by road. This gap had to be bridged by the motor transport, which, of course, had to use the roads. But the destruction of the roads by the Germans was as thorough as their destruction of the railways. Not only .were the bridges destroyed, but mines were sprung at every cross-road. I remember counting eleven mine craters on three miles of the main road between Le Quesnoy and Mons. This damage could only be very roughly [230] repaired, while the wet weather and the heavy traffic of the German retreat and of our advance increased the work of destruction. The heavy motor lorries, loaded with supplies and ammunition, had to plough their way slowly through these broken roads from the railheads to the troops, and return to the railheads to fill up. At the time of the Armistice the motor lorries were working in double and treble shifts, and the strain upon them caused by the bad roads and the incessant work was such that in the Fourth Army on November 11 more than half of the lorries at the service of the army had broken down. The troops were receiving no more than bare necessities, and at one time had with them nothing more than the day’s food carried by the men.

The advance of the British army towards Germany did not begin until November 17, six days after all fighting had ceased, and actually only sixteen of- the fifty-nine British infantry divisions in France and Belgium at the time of the Armistice— that is, less than one-third of our whole army—moved forward. Though there was no interference by the enemy, and the advance was made by slow stages, it proved impossible to keep even this comparatively' small part of our army supplied with their full rations, and at the beginning of December it was necessary to call a halt because the supply trains were running more than forty-eight hours behind scheduled time. A very similar story could be told of the [231] situation on the Belgian, French, and American fronts.

Nor was the feeding of the fighting troops by any means the only problem of supply which the Allied armies had to solve. The Germans in their retreat had left behind them in the liberated provinces of France and Belgium a large civilian population on the verge of starvation. In the French provinces on the British front alone there were nearly 800,000 persons to be fed, and during a period of six weeks, until the French Government could undertake the distribution of supplies, we distributed more than 5,000,000 rations amongst the civilian population, a task which threw an immense additional burden upon the transportation services. Ihe rrench armies on their own front had very much larger numbers to deal with, and, as it taxed all their resources to repair the main roads and railways so that the troops on the front might be fed, many French villages and small towns off the main lines of communication remained isolated for long periods, and were only kept from starvation by having food brought to them by aeroplanes. Added to all this, the Germans as they retreated released large numbers of prisoners of war without making any provision for their feeding. The people of Belgium of their necessities made great sacrifices in order to do what was possible for these unfortunate men, whose sufferings were often intense, but their means were not equal to their [232] generosity, and yet another burden was added to the work of supply.

This being the situation on the front at the time when the Armistice was signed and during the days which followed its signature, it is obvious that a great and rapid advance to and across the Meuse by the Belgian, British, French and American armies, such as might have brought about the complete destruction of the German armies and ended the war with a colossal Sedan, was out of the question. It is true that on November 11 two British cavalry divisions had passed through the front and were ready to pursue the enemy. Sir Douglas Haig has expressed the opinion that this cavalry would have been able to turn the retreat of the Germans on the British front into a complete rout, but it is very improbable that any action by such a comparatively small force of mounted troops would have been able to affect seriously the situation on the whole long front, and their influence, though it would certainly have been considerable, must necessarily have been local. The plain fact is that on, or very soon after, November 11 it would, had hostilities been continued, have been necessary to call a halt of the Allied armies between the Dutch frontier and the Meuse until the roads and railways Behind them had been repaired and the services of supply were again able to work normally. That is to say, it would have been necessary to give the enemy a breathing space, which would have [233] allowed him to restore some sort of order in his ranks and make good his retreat to the Meuse, where he would have been able to establish himself on a very much shorter front and in very strong positions. This would have entailed fighting at least one more great battle and have cost us very many lives.

There was, however, a part of the front on which the Allied armies had made little progress and behind which their communications were in good order; that was the front between the Meuse, north-east of Verdun, and the Swiss frontier. As I have explained, Pershing’s victory of the St. Mihiel salient had given Foch an opportunity for invading Lorraine, and the French Marshal had all his plans ready for the extension of his long line of battle by an advance into Lorraine when hostilities ceased. In fact, the manoeuvres preliminary to this advance had begun on November 7, when the three French corps immediately east of the Meuse attacked in the direction of Montmedy, a movement followed by the advance of the second American Army through the Woeuvre, as the country east of the St. Mihiel salient is called, towards the famous ironfields of Briey. The left of the Second American Army had driven the Germans back some three miles in the Woeuvre by the morning of November 11. The general plan for this new attack was that the left of the Second American Army should be protected by the advance of the right of the First American Army and of the three [234] French corps on Longwy—the French fort on the Luxembourg frontier, about fifteen miles north of Briey, which had been captured in 1914 by the German Crown Prince in the first invasion of France—the Second American Army was to attack towards and across the Briey ironfields, which lie north of Metz, while another Franco-American attack .was to be made east of the Moselle and to the south of Metz. These two attacks, which were to have been in full swing by November 14, were intended to isolate the great German fortress. Now there is very little doubt but that this battle on the Lorraine front .would have ended in another great Allied victory, for the Germans would have been greatly outnumbered and their troops on this part of the line were not of the best quality; but it is equally certain that it would have exposed a great part of Lorraine to the ravages of war, and very probably also to the same widespread destruction which the Germans had carried out during their retreat farther north.

The general situation at the time of the Armistice, then, was that the Allied armies between the Dutch frontier and the Meuse were for the time being incapable of carrying on a sustained advance, though two British cavalry divisions were ready to begin a local pursuit on a portion of the British front. The Germans in front of them had been utterly defeated and were almost helpless, but we were not, and could not for some little time, be in a position to complete [235] their destruction as a military force. It was, therefore, reasonably certain that if the Armistice had been refused the Allied armies would have had to fight hard and would have suffered serious losses, while there was the risk of exposing the greater part of Belgium, including the cities of Brussels and Antwerp, and the great Charleroi industrial district —which were still in the hands of the Germans—to destruction. Everything was ready for another battle on the Lorraine front, but this, too, would certainly have cost us many lives and have caused much damage to valuable property, which is to-day intact and in the hands of the French. The problem which the Allied and Associated Governments and generals had to decide was whether they would continue to fight on these terms or would impose such conditions of armistice upon the enemy as would render him militarily impotent. They decided on the latter course, and I think there are very few who would have taken upon themselves the responsibility of deciding otherwise.

The criticism of the decision to stop fighting on November 11 has been due to the feeling that the German people do not recognise that their armies were beaten in the field, and the fear that this state of mind may sooner or later cause them to fight again. My own conviction is that the reception of the German troops in Germany and the statements made in the German press and by the German [236] people that the Armistice was not the consequence of defeat were not unnatural, and can be explained. In November, 1918, the German people could only get news of what was happening on the front through the newspapers, and the newspapers got their information through the military Press Bureau. The officials of that bureau, either because they were so inured to lying that they could not tell the truth, or in the hope of staving off revolution by continuing to deceive the people, announced, from the first days when things began to go wrong for them right up to the end, that the German armies were fighting splendidly, that the front was everywhere intact, and that the troops were falling back, slowly and steadily, according to plan to better and stronger positions. No inkling was given of the true state of affairs on the front, and the German people ascribed the surrender either to the revolution, if they were not in favour of it, or more generally to the desire of the new Government to get the blockade raised as quickly as possible. When the German troops came back to their homes and began to talk, the truth gradually became known, and the German people were able to see for themselves the state of the army which had once been their god. I do not think that there is to-day any intelligent German who does not know that the German armies were utterly beaten, though there may be many who would not admit as much to a foreigner. [237]

It has begun to dawn upon most Germans that it is more disgraceful to admit that they accepted defeat, ignominiously surrendered their navy, gave up the greater part of their artillery and aeroplanes, handed over large quantities of rolling stock and military stores, and permitted the armies of their enemies to occupy the Rhine unopposed, that they did all this when they still had the power to fight on, than to acknowledge that their armies were defeated in the field. I do not believe that we shall in the future hear much more of the unbeaten German armies, except perhaps from a few extremists like Bernhardi , nor do I believe that if we had not stopped fighting on November 11 it would have been possible to make Germany any less capable of resistancethan she is to-day. [238]