Trench warfare quickly became established; and the bullet, the spade, and barbed wire between them crushed every offensive between October 1914 and March 1918. The British High Command failed to exploit the possibilities of tank-warfare and fighting with armoured divisions, which had been advocated as early as 1915; so in 1916/17 there was the distinct possibility of a negotiated peace. But by that time Hindenberg and Ludendorff made the decisions, the civilian government in Germay was reduced to impotence; and Ludendorff made two crucial decisions, which in retrospect appear insane. He allowed Lenin to travel in a sealed train from Switzerland to Russia, where Lenin successfully took control of the revolutionary movement; and Ludendorff also initiated unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought America in on the Allied side. All compromise then became impossible. His gamble on the March 1918 offensive nearly succeeded, but in fact failed; and within 18 months of Lenin’s journey, revolutionary fervour was infecting German troops. What Ludendorff did was to turn winning the war into a policy, despite any political considerations suggesting it was unwise to attempt it by those means. If War was not a policy in 1914, it was by 1917.
This was to stand what Clausewitz had written in his treatise On War on its head. War for him was an instrument of political policy, and military operations must always remain firmly under political control. War must not become an end in itself. He was not a politician, and did not trespass into the political world in his treatise On War. Britain’s situation in 1940 was different from Germany’s in 1917. The political purpose was survival, as a nation, as a bastion of freedom, as a guarantor of freedom in Europe; and to achieve that political purpose victory was necessary, almost at any cost. This was not so for Germany in 1917.
Now when a nation uses War, not as an instrument of policy, but as policy itself, is it wise to contemplate a negotiated peace? No negotiations were possible with Hitler; he had broken his word too often in the past. What murky waters would Britain have entered if it had tried in 1943 to enter into negotiations with a provisional German government, which claimed to disclaim Hitler? A government possibly composed of people who had voted Hitler into power in 1933. Was it not wiser to say, “A plague on both your houses”; and insist on “unconditional surrender”? Being a lawyer, and not a politician, it is hardly for me to express a decided opinion.
Once the decision on “unconditional surrender” had been made at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, the rest followed. It undermined the opposition to Hitler within Germany, which might conceivably have overthrown him; it freed the war from the caution of political expediency; it led to the fire-storms of Hamburg and Dresden.