ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1918 Germany’s alleged decline as a military power was hardly evident on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Victory on the eastern front enabled it to launch an offensive in the west that brought the German armies to within forty miles of Paris before their advance was checked. By the end of the summer, however, the German army was in full retreat and incapable of further serious resistance to the Allied forces. The entente powers had seemingly been saved from defeat or deadlock on the western front by the intervention of the United States, which entered the war in 1917, though the benefits of this were slow to materialize. Hence Adamthwaite’s assertion that ‘the war showed that Germany, with only modest help from Austria-Hungary, could defy a coalition of four leading European powers.’
