First World War (1918) | UPSC Mains: World History PDF Download

The last offensives and the Allies’ victory

The Western Front, March–September 1918

• As the German strength on the Western Front was being steadily increased by the transfer of divisions from the Eastern Front (where they were no longer needed since Russia had withdrawn from the war), the Allies’ main problem was how to withstand an imminent German offensive pending the arrival of massive reinforcements from the United States. Eventually Pétain persuaded the reluctant Haig that the British with 60 divisions should extend their sector of the front from 100 to 125 miles as compared with the 325 miles to be held by the French with approximately 100 divisions. Haig thus devoted 46 of his divisions to the front from the Channel to Gouzeaucourt (southwest of German-held Cambrai) and 14 to the remaining third of the front from Gouzeaucourt past German-held Saint-Quentin to the Oise River.
• On the German side, between Nov. 1, 1917, and March 21, 1918, the German divisions on the Western Front were increased from 146 to 192, the troops being drawn from Russia, Galicia, and Italy. By these means the German armies in the west were reinforced by a total of about 570,000 men. Ludendorff’s interest was to strike from his temporary position of strength—before the arrival of the major U.S. contingents—and at the same time to ensure that his German offensive should not fail for the same reasons as the Allies’ offensives of the past three years. Accordingly he formed an offensive strategy based on taking the tactical line of least resistance. The main German attacks would begin with brief but extremely intense artillery bombardments using a high proportion of poison gas and smoke shells. These would incapacitate the Allies’ forward trenches and machine-gun emplacements and would obscure their observation posts. Then a second and lighter artillery barrage would begin to creep forward over the Allied trenches at a walking pace (in order to keep the enemy under fire), with the masses of German assault infantry advancing as closely as possible behind it. The key to the new tactics was that the assault infantry would bypass machine-gun nests and other points of strong resistance instead of waiting, as had been the previous practice on both sides, for reinforcements to mop up the obstructions before continuing the advance. The Germans would instead continue to advance in the direction of the least enemy resistance. The mobility of the German advance would thus be assured, and its deep infiltration would result in large amounts of territory being taken.
• Such tactics demanded exceptionally fit and disciplined troops and a high level of training. Ludendorff accordingly drew the best troops from all the Western Front forces at his disposal and formed them into elite shock divisions. The troops were systematically trained in the new tactics, and every effort was also made to conceal the actual areas at which the German main attacks would be made.
• Ludendorff’s main attack was to be on the weakest sector of the Allies’ front, the 47 miles between Arras and La Fère (on the Oise). Two German armies, the 17th and the 2nd, were to break through the front between Arras and Saint-Quentin, north of the Somme, and then wheel right so as to force most of the British back toward the Channel, while the 18th Army, between the Somme and the Oise, protected the left flank of the advance against counterattack from the south. Code-named “Michael,” this offensive was to be supplemented by three other attacks: “St. George I” against the British on the Lys River south of Armentières; “St. George II” against the British again between Armentières and Ypres; and “Blücher” against the French in Champagne. It was finally decided to use 62 divisions in the main attack, “Michael.”
• Preceded by an artillery bombardment using 6,000 guns, “Michael” was launched on March 21, 1918, and was helped by an early morning fog that hid the German advance from the Allied observation posts. The attack, which is known as the Second Battle of the Somme or the Battle of Saint-Quentin, took the British altogether by surprise, but it did not develop as Ludendorff had foreseen. While the 18th Army under von Hutier achieved a complete breakthrough south of the Somme, the major attack to the north was held up, mainly by the British concentration of strength at Arras. For a whole week Ludendorff, in violation of his new tactical emphasis, vainly persisted in trying to carry out his original plan instead of exploiting the unexpected success of the 18th Army, though the latter had advanced more than 40 miles westward and had reached Montdidier by March 27. At last, however, the main effort of the Germans was converted into a drive toward Amiens, which began in force on March 30. By that time the Allies had recovered from their initial dismay, and French reserves were coming up to the British line. The German drive was halted east of Amiens and so too was a renewed attack on April 4. Ludendorff then suspended his Somme offensive. This offensive had yielded the largest territorial gains of any operation on the Western Front since the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914.
• The Allies’ cause at least derived one overdue benefit from the collapse of one-third of the British front: at Haig’s own suggestion, Foch was on March 26 appointed to coordinate the Allies’ military operations; and on April 14 he was named commander in chief of the Allied armies. Previously, Haig had resisted the idea of a generalissimo.
• On April 9 the Germans began “St. George I” with an attack on the extreme northern front between Armentières and the canal of La Bassée, their aim being to advance across the Lys River toward Hazebrouck. Such was the initial success of this attack that “St. George II” was launched the next day, with the capture of Kemmel Hill (Kemmelberg), southwest of Ypres, as its first objective. Armentières fell, and Ludendorff came to think for a time that this Battle of the Lys might be turned into a major effort. The British, however, after being driven back 10 miles, halted the Germans short of Hazebrouck. French reinforcements began to come up; and, when the Germans had taken Kemmel Hill (April 25), Ludendorff decided to suspend exploitation of the advance, for fear of a counterstroke against his front’s new bulge.
• Thus far Ludendorff had fallen short of strategic results, but he could claim huge tactical successes—the British casualties alone amounted to more than 300,000. Ten British divisions had to be broken up temporarily, while the German strength mounted to 208 divisions, of which 80 were still in reserve. A restoration of the balance, however, was now in sight. A dozen U.S. divisions had arrived in France, and great efforts were being made to swell the stream. Furthermore, Pershing, the U.S. commander, had placed his troops at Foch’s disposal for use wherever required.
• Ludendorff finally launched “Blücher” on May 27, on a front extending from Coucy, north of Soissons, eastward toward Reims. The Germans, with 15 divisions, suddenly attacked the seven French and British divisions opposing them, swarmed over the ridge of the Chemin des Dames and across the Aisne River, and, by May 30, were on the Marne, between Château-Thierry and Dormans. Once again the attack’s initial success went far beyond Ludendorff’s expectation or intention; and, when the Germans tried to push westward against the right flank of the Allies’ Compiègne salient, which was sandwiched between the Germans’ Amiens and Champagne bulges, they were checked by counterattacks, which included one sustained for a fortnight from June 6 by U.S. divisions at Belleau Wood (Bois de Belleau). An attack from Noyon, against the left flank of the Compiègne salient, came too late (June 9).
• Overtaken by the inordinate fruition of his own offensives, Ludendorff paused for a month’s recuperation. The tactical success of his own blows had been his undoing; yielding to their influence, he had pressed each too far and too long, using up his own reserves and causing an undue interval between blows. He had driven three great wedges into the Allied lines, but none had penetrated far enough to sever a vital rail artery, and this strategic failure left the Germans with a front whose several bulges invited flanking counterstrokes. Moreover, Ludendorff had used up many of his shock troops in the attacks, and the remaining troops, though strong in numbers, were relatively lower in quality. The Germans were to end up sustaining a total of 800,000 casualties in their great 1918 offensives. Meanwhile, the Allies were now receiving U.S. troops at the rate of 300,000 men per month.
• The next German offensive, which opened the Second Battle of the Marne, was launched in Champagne on July 15. It came to nothing: a German thrust from the front east of Reims toward Châlons-sur-Marne was frustrated by the “elastic defense” that Pétain had recently been prescribing but that the local commanders had failed to practice against the offensive of May 27. A drive from Dormans, on the left flank of the Germans’ huge Soissons–Reims bulge, across the Marne toward Épernay simply made the Germans’ situation more precarious when Foch’s long-prepared counterstroke was launched on July 18. In this great counterstroke one of Foch’s armies assailed the Germans’ Champagne bulge from the west, another from the southwest, one more from the south, and a fourth from the vicinity of Reims. Masses of light tanks—a weapon on which Ludendorff had placed little reliance, preferring gas instead in his plans for the year—played a vital part in forcing the Germans into a hasty retreat. By August 2 the French had pushed the Champagne front back to a line following the Vesle River from Reims and then along the Aisne to a point west of Soissons.
  
  Engineers of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division preparing to cross the Marne River
• Having recovered the initiative, the Allies were determined not to lose it, and for their next blow they chose again the front north and south of the Somme. The British 4th Army, including Australian and Canadian forces, with 450 tanks, struck the Germans with maximum surprise on Aug. 8, 1918. Overwhelming the German forward divisions, who had failed to entrench themselves adequately since their recent occupation of the “Michael” bulge, the 4th Army advanced steadily for four days, taking 21,000 prisoners and inflicting as many or more casualties at the cost of only about 20,000 casualties to itself, and halting only when it reached the desolation of the old battlefields of 1916. Several German divisions simply collapsed in the face of the offensive, their troops either fleeing or surrendering. The Battle of Amiens was thus a striking material and moral success for the Allies. Ludendorff put it differently: “August 8 was the black day of the German Army in the history of the war.…It put the decline of our fighting power beyond all doubt.…The war must be ended.” He informed Emperor William II and Germany’s political chiefs that peace negotiations should be opened before the situation became worse, as it must. The conclusions reached at a German Crown Council held at Spa were that “We can no longer hope to break the war-will of our enemies by military operations,” and “the objects of our strategy must be to paralyse the enemy’s war-will gradually by a strategic defensive.” In other words, the German high command had abandoned hope of victory or even of holding their gains and hoped only to avoid surrender.
• Meanwhile, the French had retaken Montdidier and were thrusting toward Lassigny (between Roye and Noyon); and on August 17 they began a new drive from the Compiègne salient south of Noyon. Then, in the fourth week of August, two more British armies went into action on the Arras–Albert sector of the front, the one advancing directly eastward on Bapaume, the other operating farther to the north. From then on Foch delivered a series of hammer blows along the length of the German front, launching a series of rapid attacks at different points, each broken off as soon as its initial impetus waned, and all close enough in time to attract German reserves, which consequently were unavailable to defend against the next Allied attack along a different part of the front. By the early days of September the Germans were back where they had been before March 1918—behind the Hindenburg Line.
• The Allies’ recovery was consummated by the first feat executed by Pershing’s U.S. forces as an independent army (hitherto the U.S. divisions in France had fought only in support of the major French or British units): the U.S. 1st Army on September 12 erased the triangular Saint-Mihiel salient that the Germans had been occupying since 1914 (between Verdun and Nancy).
• The clear evidence of the Germans’ decline decided Foch to seek victory in the coming autumn of 1918 instead of postponing the attempt until 1919. All the Allied armies in the west were to combine in a simultaneous offensive.

Other developments in 1918

Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Poles

• Something must now be said about the growth of the national movements, which, under the eventual protection of the Allies, were to result in the foundation of new states or the resurrection of long-defunct ones at the end of the war. There were three such movements: that of the Czechs, with the more backward Slovaks in tow; that of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes); and that of the Poles. The Czech country, namely Bohemia and Moravia, belonged in 1914 to the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy, the Slovak to the Hungarian half. The Yugoslavs had already been represented in 1914 by two independent kingdoms, Serbia and Montenegro, but they were also predominantly numerous in territories still under Habsburg rule: Serbs in Bosnia and Hercegovina (an Austro-Hungarian condominium) and in Dalmatia (an Austrian possession); Croats in Croatia (Hungarian), in Istria (Austrian), and in Dalmatia; Slovenes in Istria and in Illyria (Austrian likewise). Poland was divided into three parts: Germany had the north and the west as provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia; Austria had Galicia (including an ethnically Ukrainian extension to the east); Russia had the rest.
• The Czechs had long been restless under the Austrian regime, and one of their leading intellectual spokesmen, Tomáš Masaryk (in fact a Slovak), had already envisaged the carving of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states out of Austria-Hungary in December 1914. In 1916 he and a fellow émigré, Edvard Beneš, based respectively in London and in Paris, organized a Czechoslovak National Council. The western Allies committed themselves to the Czechoslovak idea from 1917 onward, when Russia’s imminent defection from the war made them ready to exploit any means at hand for the disabling of Austria-Hungary; and Wilson’s sympathy was implicit in his successive peace pronouncements of 1918.
• For the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary the Yugoslav Committee, with representatives in Paris and in London, was founded in April 1915. On July 20, 1917, this committee and the Serbian government in exile made the joint Corfu Declaration forecasting a South Slav state to comprise Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
• The Polish nationalist leaders in the first years of the war were uncertain whether to rely on the Central Powers or on the Allies for a restoration of Poland’s independence. So long as the western Allies hesitated to encourage Polish nationalism for fear of offending imperial Russia, the Central Powers seemed to be the most likely sponsors; and Austria at least allowed Józef Piłsudski, from 1914, to organize his volunteer Polish legions to serve with Austrian forces against the Russians. Austria’s benevolence, however, was not reflected by Germany; and when the Two Emperors’ Manifesto of Nov. 5, 1916, provided for the constitution of an independent Polish kingdom, it was clear that this kingdom would consist only of Polish territory conquered from Russia, not of any German or Austrian territory. When, after the March Revolution of 1917, the Russian provisional government had recognized Poland’s right to independence, Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee, which from 1914 had been functioning in a limited way under Russian protection, could at last count seriously on the sympathy of the western Allies. While Piłsudski declined to raise a Polish army to fight on against the new Russia, a Polish army was formed in France, as well as two army corps in Belorussia and in the Ukraine, to fight against the Central Powers. The Bolshevik Revolution and Wilson’s Fourteen Points together consummated the alignment of the Poles on the side of the western powers.

Eastern Europe and the Russian periphery, March–November 1918

• The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) gave Germany a free hand to do what it liked with Russia’s former possessions in eastern Europe. While they pursued their plan of 1916 for a kingdom of Poland, the Germans took new measures for the other countries. Lithuania, recognized as independent, was to be a kingdom under some German prince. Latvia and Estonia were to be merged into a grand duchy of the Baltikum under the hereditary rule of Prussia. An expeditionary force of 12,000 men, under General Graf Rüdiger von der Goltz, was sent to Finland to uphold the Finnish general C.G.E. Mannerheim’s nationalist forces against the Red Guards, whom the Bolsheviks, despite their recognition of Finland’s independence, were now promoting there. And finally, the Ukrainian nationalist government, which had already been challenged by a Communist one before its separate peace with the Central Powers (Brest-Litovsk, February 9), was promptly displaced by a new regime after the advance of German and Austro-Hungarian troops into its territory.
  
  Delegates at negotiations for the treaties of Brest-Litovsk, 1918
• The Romanian armistice of December 1917 was converted into the Treaty of Bucharest on May 7, 1918. Under this treaty’s terms, southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria; northern Dobruja was put under the joint administration of the Central Powers; and the latter obtained virtual control of Romania’s oil fields and communications. Romania, on the other hand, had some consolation from Bessarabia, whose nationalists, after receiving Romanian assistance against the Bolsheviks, had voted in March 1918 for their country’s conditional union with Romania.
• Even Transcaucasia began to slide into the German camp. The short-lived federal republic was dissolved by its three members’ individual declarations of independence—Georgia’s on May 26, Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s on May 28. Treaties of friendship were promptly signed between Georgia and Germany and between Armenia and Turkey, and Turkish troops advanced into Azerbaijan, where they occupied Baku on September 15. The western Allies, meanwhile, were hoping that some new semblance of an Eastern Front could be conjured up if they supported the various and growing forces in Russia that were opposed to the peacemaking Bolsheviks. Since the Black Sea and the Baltic were closed to them, the Allies could land troops only on Russia’s Arctic and Pacific shores. Thus, the Allied “intervention” in Russia on the side of the anti-Bolshevik (“White”) forces, long to be execrated by Soviet historians, began with an Anglo-French landing at Murmansk, in the far north, on March 9, 1918. The subsequent reinforcement of Murmansk made possible the occupation of the Murmansk railway as far south as Soroka (now Belomorsk); and a further landing at Arkhangelsk in the summer raised the total Allied strength in northern Russia to some 48,000 (including 20,000 Russian “Whites”). By this time, moreover, there were some 85,000 interventionist troops in Siberia, where a strong Japanese landing at Vladivostok in April had been followed by British, French, Italian, and U.S. contingents. A “White” provisional government of Russia was set up at Omsk, with Admiral A.V. Kolchak as its dominant personality. The “White” resistance in the south of European Russia, which had been growing since November 1917, was put under the supreme command of General A.I. Denikin in April 1918.

The Balkan front, 1918

• At Salonika the Allies’ politically ambitious but militarily ineffective commander in chief, General Sarrail, was replaced at the end of 1917 by General Guillaumat, who was in turn succeeded in July 1918 by General L.-F.-F. Franchet d’Esperey, who launched a major offensive in September with six Serbian and two French divisions against a seven-mile front held by only one Bulgarian division.
• The initial assault, preceded by heavy bombardment at night, began in the morning of Sept. 15, 1918, and a five-mile penetration was achieved by nightfall on September 16. The next day the Serbs advanced 20 miles forward, while French and Greek forces on their flanks widened the breach to 25 miles. A British attack, launched on September 18 on the front between the Vardar and Lake Doiran, prevented the Bulgars from transferring troops westward against the right flank of the penetration; and by September 19 the Serbian cavalry had reached Kavadarci, at the apex of the Crna–Vardar triangle. Two days later the whole Bulgarian front west of the Vardar had collapsed.
• While Italian forces in the extreme west advanced on Prilep, the elated Serbs, with the French beside them, pressed on up the Vardar Valley. The British in the east now made such headway as to take Strumica, across the old Bulgarian frontier, on September 26. The Bulgars then sued for an armistice; and on September 29, when a bold French cavalry thrust up the Vardar from Veles (Titov Veles) took Skopje, key to the whole system of communications for the Balkan front, Bulgarian delegates signed the Armistice of Salonika, accepting the Allies’ terms unreservedly.

The Turkish fronts, 1918

• The British–Turkish front in Palestine in the summer of 1918 ran from the Jordan River westward north of Jericho and Lydda to the Mediterranean just north of Jaffa. North of this front there were three Turkish “armies” (in fact, barely stronger than divisions): one to the east of the Jordan, two to the west. These armies depended for their supplies on the Hejaz Railway, the main line of which ran from Damascus southward, east of the Jordan, and which was joined at Déraa (Darʿā) by a branch line serving Palestine.
• Liman von Sanders, Falkenhayn’s successor as commander of the Turkish forces in Syria–Palestine, was convinced that the British would make their main effort east of the Jordan. Allenby, however, was really interested in taking a straight northerly direction, reckoning that the Palestine branch rail line at ʿAfula and Beisān, some 60 miles behind the Turkish front, could be reached by a strategic “bound” of his cavalry and that their fall would isolate the two Turkish armies in the west.
• Having by ruse and diversion induced the Turks to reduce their strength in the west, Allenby struck there on Sept. 19, 1918, with a numerical superiority of 10 to one. In this Battle of Megiddo, a British infantry attack swept the astonished defenders aside and opened the way for the cavalry, which rode 30 miles north up the coastal corridor before swinging inland to cut the Turks’ northward lines of retreat. ʿAfula, Beisān, and even Nazareth, farther north, were in British hands the next day.
• When the Turks east of the Jordan River began to retreat on September 22, the Arabs had already severed the railway line and were lying in wait for them; and a British cavalry division from Beisān was also about to push eastward to intercept their withdrawal. Simultaneously, two more British divisions and another force of Arabs were racing on toward Damascus, which fell on October 1. The campaign ended with the capture of Aleppo and the junction of the Baghdad Railway. In 38 days Allenby’s forces had advanced 350 miles and taken 75,000 prisoners at a cost of less than 5,000 casualties.
• In Mesopotamia, meanwhile, the British had taken Kifrī, north of the Diyālā left-bank tributary of the Tigris, in January 1918, and Khān al-Baghdāẖī, up the Euphrates, in March. Pressing northward from Kifrī, they took Kirkūk in May but soon evacuated it.
• The British centre in Mesopotamia, advancing up the Tigris in October, was about to capture Mosul when the hostilities were suspended. The Ottoman government, seeing eastern Turkey defenseless and fearing an Allied advance against Istanbul from the west now that Bulgaria had collapsed, decided to capitulate. On October 30 the Armistice of Mudros was signed, on a British cruiser off Lemnos. The Turks, by its terms, were to open the Straits to the Allies; demobilize their forces; allow the Allies to occupy any strategic point that they might require and to use all Turkey’s ports and railways; and order the surrender of their remaining garrisons in Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The centuries-old Ottoman Empire had come to an end.

Vittorio Veneto

• After the stabilization of the Italian front on the Piave River at the end of 1917, the Austrians made no further move until the following June. They then tried not only to force the Tonale Pass and enter northeastern Lombardy but also to make two converging thrusts into central Venetia, the one southeastward from the Trentino, the other southwestward across the lower Piave. The whole offensive came to worse than nothing, the attackers losing 100,000 men.
• Diaz, the Italian commander in chief, was meanwhile deliberately abstaining from positive action until Italy should be ready to strike with success assured. In the offensive he planned, three of the five armies lining the front from the Monte Grappa sector to the Adriatic end of the Piave were to drive across the river toward Vittorio Veneto, so as to cut communications between the two Austrian armies opposing them.
• When Germany, in October 1918, was at last asking for an armistice (see below The end of the German war), Italy’s time had obviously come. On October 24, the anniversary of Caporetto, the offensive opened. An attack in the Monte Grappa sector was repulsed with heavy loss, though it served to attract the Austrian reserves, and the flooding of the Piave prevented two of the three central armies from advancing simultaneously with the third; but the latter, comprising one Italian and one British corps, having under cover of darkness and fog occupied Papadopoli Island farther downstream, won a foothold on the left bank of the river on October 27. The Italian reserves were then brought up to exploit this bridgehead.
• Mutiny was already breaking out in the Austrian forces, and on October 28 the Austrian high command ordered a general retreat. Vittorio Veneto was occupied the next day by the Italians, who were also pushing on already toward the Tagliamento. On November 3 the Austrians obtained an armistice (see below).

The collapse of Austria-Hungary

• The duality of the Habsburg monarchy had been underlined from the very beginning of the war. Whereas the Austrian parliament, or Reichsrat, had been suspended in March 1914 and was not reconvened for three years, the Hungarian parliament in Budapest continued its sessions, and the Hungarian government proved itself constantly less amenable to dictation from the military than had the Austrian. The Slav minorities, however, showed little sign of anti-Habsburg feeling before Russia’s March Revolution of 1917. In May 1917, however, the Reichsrat was reconvened, and just before the opening session the Czech intelligentsia sent a manifesto to its deputies calling for “a democratic Europe…of autonomous states.” The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the Wilsonian peace pronouncements from January 1918 onward encouraged socialism, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, or alternatively a combination of both tendencies, among all peoples of the Habsburg monarchy.
• Early in September 1918 the Austro-Hungarian government proposed in a circular note to the other powers that a conference be held on neutral territory for a general peace. This proposal was quashed by the United States on the ground that the U.S. position had already been enunciated by the Wilsonian pronouncements (the Fourteen Points, etc.). But when Austria-Hungary, after the collapse of Bulgaria, appealed on October 4 for an armistice based on those very pronouncements, the answer on October 18 was that the U.S. government was now committed to the Czechoslovaks and to the Yugoslavs, who might not be satisfied with the “autonomy” postulated heretofore. The emperor Charles had, in fact, granted autonomy to the peoples of the Austrian Empire (as distinct from the Hungarian Kingdom) on October 16, but this concession was ignored internationally and served only to facilitate the process of disruption within the monarchy: Czechoslovaks in Prague and South Slavs in Zagreb had already set up organs ready to take power.
• The last scenes of Austria-Hungary’s dissolution were performed very rapidly. On October 24 (when the Italians launched their very timely offensive), a Hungarian National Council prescribing peace and severance from Austria was set up in Budapest. On October 27 a note accepting the U.S. note of October 18 was sent from Vienna to Washington—to remain unacknowledged. On October 28 the Czechoslovak committee in Prague passed a “law” for an independent state, while a similar Polish committee was formed in Kraków for the incorporation of Galicia and Austrian Silesia into a unified Poland. On October 29, while the Austrian high command was asking the Italians for an armistice, the Croats in Zagreb declared Slavonia, Croatia, and Dalmatia to be independent, pending the formation of a national state of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. On October 30 the German members of the Reichsrat in Vienna proclaimed an independent state of German Austria.
• The solicited armistice between the Allies and Austria-Hungary was signed at the Villa Giusti, near Padua, on Nov. 3, 1918, to become effective on November 4. Under its provisions, Austria-Hungary’s forces were required to evacuate not only all territory occupied since August 1914 but also South Tirol, Tarvisio, the Isonzo Valley, Gorizia, Trieste, Istria, western Carniola, and Dalmatia. All German forces should be expelled from Austria-Hungary within 15 days or interned, and the Allies were to have free use of Austria-Hungary’s internal communications and to take possession of most of its warships.
• Count Mihály Károlyi, chairman of the Budapest National Council, had been appointed prime minister of Hungary by his king, the Austrian emperor Charles, on October 31 but had promptly started to dissociate his country from Austria—partly in the vain hope of obtaining a separate Hungarian armistice. Charles, the last Habsburg to rule in Austria-Hungary, renounced the right to participate in Austrian affairs of government on November 11, in Hungarian affairs on November 13.