Michelstellung 1916 – 1918

The Michelstellung (Michel-Stellung, Michel Zone) was a German defense system approximately 35 kilometers long and comprising around 1,000 concrete structures on the eastern chord of the St. Mihiel salient. The Michelstellung was a manifestation of a military-strategic realignment beginning in the war year of 1916. This included the creation of large rear position systems and front shortenings. More famous than the Michelstellung was the widely described Siegfried Position in the northern sector of the Western Front, where the British and French fought against the German defense as early as March 1917. All of these rear defense lines were uniformly referred to by the British and Americans as “Hindenburg Line”.

The Michelstellung was planned in its concrete form starting in the autumn of 1916. Because other front sectors received priority at this time, it was constructed only hesitantly and only partially completed. It was not until the course of the Franco-American offensive in September 1918 that it was occupied by German troops. During American attacks, heavy fighting occurred until November 11, 1918, the day of the armistice. The Michelstellung remained completely in German hands until the end of the war.

On November 16, 1916, at Château de Chantilly near Paris, the headquarters of the French army, the principal military decision-makers on the Allied side met. The operational objectives for 1917 were to be determined. Germany was viewed as being at the limits of its capabilities, and it was certain that a breakthrough could be achieved the following spring. These expectations resulted on December 12, 1916, in the shift of French Chief of Staff Ferdinand Foch to the position of Allied commander-in-chief. Command of the French army was entrusted to Robert Nivelle. He advocated a more aggressive strategy than his predecessor. Through two operations, Nivelle intended to break through the German front. In addition to an attack near Arras, the decisive main attack, the double battle on the Aisne and in Champagne, was to take place starting in April 1917.

Falkenhayn’s Resignation – Meeting in Cambrai on September 8, 1916

On the German side, Romania’s entry into the war made it necessary to withdraw strong troop contingents from the Western Front and deploy them in the East. Thus, the already difficult situation against the French and English deteriorated considerably.

The lack of success in the West, various intrigues by high-ranking officers, and specifically the accusation that he had been surprised by Romania’s entry into the war, prompted the Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, to submit a request for resignation. After initial hesitation, the Emperor granted this on August 28, 1916.

The new leadership assumed office during the most severe crisis of the war up to that point. As Ludendorff later wrote, operational choices were no longer dictated by the Supreme Army Command, but by the opponents and the poor supply situation. An initial assessment of the overall situation revealed that the German war economy was no longer equal to the increased demands and the capabilities of the adversaries. On August 31, 1916, the OHL submitted an extensive list of demands to the Reich government, which essentially aimed to bring about a massive expansion of ammunition and weapons production by focusing the entire social and economic system on military concerns. These plans, which became known as “Hindenburg Program”, hardly came to fruition because they could not be implemented in the desired radical form in terms of domestic and, above all, social policy.

In addition to material inadequacies, the lack of sufficient troop replacements made upcoming tasks in the east and also effective warfare in the west appear questionable. On September 2, 1916, the Army Group German Crown Prince was therefore ordered to cease all offensive efforts before Verdun. When Allied attacks began again the very next day on the Somme and it became apparent that sufficient troop contingents could not be freed from the Verdun front, initial considerations arose to free up units through front shortenings and tactical withdrawal.

The findings gained from the deliberations were alarming. The high losses in the Somme fighting could no longer be absorbed. Nevertheless, the retreat plans brought into play were viewed skeptically by many officers. The effect of such defensive measures on the troops was assessed as too negative. In any case, one first had to wait for a favorable development regarding the Russians and Romanians attacking in the East in order to regain room for maneuver in the West. In addition, the Battle of the Somme should be fought to the end and one should wait until the “Auxiliary Service Act” came into force at the beginning of December 1916 to avoid the impression of weakness. Ludendorff concurred with this argument for the moment.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff returned after the end of the talks to Great Headquarters, which was established at that time in the Upper Silesian town of Pleß (Polish: Pszczyna) . Fundamental decisions had to be made. On September 15, 1916, instructions were issued to Army Group Crown Prince Rupprecht to plan a rear position on the Arras – Laon line. From this emerged the so-called Siegfried Position. Further rear position systems were also envisaged, such as the Flanders Position in northern France and Belgium as well as the Wotan Position, which connected in the north to the Siegfried Position. South of the Siegfried Position, the Hunding Position was planned, which was to run in the rear area of the Champagne front, the Argonne sector, and the battlefield of Verdun (here: Kriemhild Position). The Army Group German Crown Prince was ordered to prepare a withdrawal from the St. Mihiel salient to a chord position to be established between Étain and Pont-à-Mousson. That was the birth of the “Michel Position”.

In the area of the small town of Étain, the Kriemhild Position was to merge into the Michel Position. Notable shortening of the front resulted from these plans only in the case of the Siegfried Position and the Michel Position. All other projects were merely intended to provide better depth organization of the troops and the option for further tactical operations.

Alternative Strategies

In fact, the heavy fighting on the Somme lasted until November 1916. Every division that could somehow be made available had to be deployed in exchange for worn-out units. Later, throughout the entire German army, there was hardly a regiment that had not served at the Somme Front at least once. Thus, it was ultimately possible to withstand all enemy breakthrough attempts.

Even though the result of the Somme fighting, which was sobering for the Allies, was propagated on the German side as a defensive victory, a realistic assessment showed that the army and war economy would no longer be able to endure another battle like the Somme Battle. This, along with the prospect that new major Allied offensives could be expected as early as the spring of 1917, and the foreseeable lack of sufficient resources for their own offensive efforts, made alternative concepts necessary in order to achieve the goal of bringing the war to an early end.

Two options came into focus: On the one hand, a military decision through a maximum increase in overall economic and military efforts, and on the other hand, a peace settlement through diplomatic means. A combination of both ensued.

The German Imperial Government had already made tentative attempts, starting in the summer of 1916, in view of the supply situation deteriorating dramatically due to poor harvests and the British naval blockade, to induce the formally neutral USA and its President Woodrow Wilson via diplomatic channels to take a peace initiative. The Americans did not generally reject such an initiative, but no corresponding efforts materialized either before or immediately after Wilson’s reelection in November 1916.

Time was running out for the Germans and their allies. At Austria’s suggestion and with the approval of the Supreme Army Command, the Imperial Government, through a note from German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg dated December 12, 1916, formulated a peace proposal.

This was followed by diplomatic statements from various Allied politicians in which the German proposal was sharply rejected. French Prime Minister Aristide Briand recognized on December 13, 1916, a maneuver to sow discord among the Allies. Shortly thereafter, Russian Foreign Minister Nikolai Pokrovsky stated that the offer to negotiate had solely the objective of deceiving the opponents. On December 19, 1916, David Lloyd George, who had just become the new British Prime Minister, also expressed sharp rejection in a speech before the House of Commons. This confirmed the negative forecasts of many high-ranking German military personnel, who doubted that an acceptable peace settlement could be brought about through negotiations.

The reason for the hostile attitude of the Allies lay in their increasingly realistic expectation of victory. Massive support from the USA with deliveries of ammunition and supplies gave them confidence. Already by late 1916, more than 50,000 American volunteers were fighting in the British and about 10,000 in the French army. In mid-December 1916, the French achieved a decisive success. In an attack by a mere four divisions, German troops before Verdun were thrown back to their starting positions at the beginning of the offensive in February 1916. In this euphoric atmosphere, peace negotiations appeared to the Allies neither politically opportune nor militarily necessary.

Thus it came about that the German peace offer was formally rejected by an official Allied note dated December 30, 1916. The response was deliberately formulated in a very brusque tone. To Wilson’s peace appeal published after all on December 21, 1916, in which he did not even address the previous German proposal, a renewed, sharply rejecting response followed on January 11, 1917. This made it definitively clear to the German side that an end to the war under acceptable conditions could not be achieved through negotiations.

The fateful consequences of this scenario were obvious. Germany was exposed. It would concentrate all its economic and military forces to seek a military decision. In doing so, it would also return to the unrestricted submarine warfare long demanded by the military to cut off England and France from supply shipments. By threatening maritime trade, the USA would find opportunities to agitate its hitherto war-averse population and subsequently a pretext to intervene in the conflict with its own troops. This had already been demanded by Republican circles since 1915, after on May 7, 1915, a German submarine had sunk the British luxury liner Lusitania. The hesitant American role constituted a major cause for the failure of peace efforts and also for the continuation of the war.

The fact that the Germans were able to successfully defend themselves against the Allied offensives of the spring of 1917 was largely the result of the creation of front line straightenings and fallback positions described above, based on the meeting in Cambrai on September 8, 1916. This necessitated the abandonment of large tracts of land that had previously been captured in lengthy and costly operations. This met with harsh criticism from many unit commanders. General Ludendorff, however, remained steadfastly committed to the decisions made as early as the fall of 1916.

By March 1917, in the case of the Siegfried position, a defensive system approximately 150 kilometers long had been created from about 500,000 tons of gravel and crushed stone, 100,000 tons of cement, and 35,000 tons of steel. Added to this were obstacles consisting of about 5 million iron and wooden stakes, 13,000 tons of barbed wire, and countless Spanish horses. It was the largest uniform construction project of the entire war. None of the previous or later constructed positions even remotely approached the defensive value of the Siegfried position.

The creation of the Siegfried position was recognized early on by the French and British. It was viewed not as a threat, but as a weakness and an incentive for the offensive efforts planned for the spring of 1917. There was no anticipation of the complete withdrawal of the German army from the previous front-line positions, nor of the difficulties that would arise from the destruction of civil and military infrastructure in the evacuated areas. On the basis of massive Allied losses and only marginal territorial gains, the usefulness of a deeply echeloned, modern defense became apparent to the German Supreme Army Command.

As early as the summer of 1916, the then Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had recognized, from the experiences of the Verdun and Somme battles, the necessity of standardizing combat leadership and the construction of positions. Appropriate regulations had been lacking until then. Each army down to the division level had its own tactical and above all construction-technical specifications through the associated pioneer troops, in particular for the establishment of position systems, camp and concrete structures as well as their equipment and use. These regulations were frequently not compatible with those of other units. Thus, problems arose during the frequent reliefs, as different construction designs, weapon systems, and usage variants encountered one another.

The starting point for standardization was a collection of regulations that dealt first generally, later increasingly in detail, with individual aspects of trench warfare and gradually established specifications for all areas of combat leadership and the design of military structures. They ranged, for example, from the production of explosive charges, power poles, well systems, camp barracks to the design of entire position systems and complex communication networks, down to the precise designation of quantities and dimensions in the construction of buildings and bunkers. Its name was “Compendium of Regulations for Trench Warfare for All Arms.”

The Saillant de St. Mihiel, as the French called the area, reached a maximum depth of about 35 kilometers between the Meuse and the Moselle. Even in quiet periods, 7 to 10 divisions stood in the front line on both the German and the French side.

Militarily, the bulge in the front provided important protection for the cities of Metz and Thionville on the Moselle, which were essential for supplying the fighting troops. It also secured the sectors of the Verdun front further north. Throughout the war, it hampered all French operations in the central sector of the Western Front. In addition, it blocked the railway routes from the south and west towards Verdun and the front sectors further south, which were important for French supply.

From these battles, the German army leadership realized the necessity of preventing expected further attacks through intensive construction of positions. Particularly the terrain on the southern flank of the salient was characterized by very high groundwater levels. This hindered the construction of positions and practically invited the enemy to offensive operations. Without rear-area security for the front-line positions, alongside the aforementioned military concerns, serious risks were to be feared for the Longwy and Briey iron ore basin, which was important for raw material extraction and particularly for iron and steel production.

The Longwy and Briey iron ore basin contained vast deposits of iron ore at the time. It extended west of the Moselle across the Lorraine plateau and reached into the south of Belgium and Luxembourg. Of the total of approximately 45,000 hectares of mining area, just under 20 percent was already under the influence of German heavy industry before the First World War. In some cases, Germans held equity in French companies; in other cases, exclusive concessions for iron ore mining had been obtained from the French state, such as with the August Thyssen company. Alongside Thyssen, other mining and metallurgical companies still known today also played a role, above all the Dillinger, Röchling, and Krupp corporations.

The supply of Lorraine ore was urgently necessary from the perspective of the German steel and armaments industry. Before the First World War, the German Empire as the world’s second-largest producer of iron and steel imported nearly 50 percent of the required ore with about 14 million tons. Forecasts prepared before the start of the war indicated that its own deposits would be exhausted by 1973 at the latest under purely civilian use. The Lorraine ore deposits, whose iron content was significantly higher, would cover demand until 2023. From this it was concluded that the Lorraine ore could not be dispensed with in a peacetime economy, and even less so in a foreseeable wartime economy.

As early as the beginning of the First World War, scenario planning for subsequent annexations of French, Belgian, and Luxembourg territories envisioned the takeover of the Longwy and Briey ore basin as an essential war aim. Representatives of heavy industry, scientists, and politicians tried from the beginning of the First World War to convince the imperial leadership and big capital of the importance of the Lorraine mining region for the German economy and also for future military conflicts with a multitude of memorials and memoranda.

The St. Mihiel salient sector command, Armee-Abteilung Strantz, issued its own orders as early as September 26, 1916 (I.d. 1135 Geheim), specifically under the designation „Subject: Meuse – Moselle – Position“ .

For the establishment of the „Meuse-Moselle position“, several sectors and different areas of responsibility had been specified by the German Crown Prince Army Group. In the north, starting from the Meuse to the northern edge of the large forest area between the Bois de Fresnes and the Bois de Herméville, the construction of positions of the „Maasgruppe Ost-Verdun“ as part of the 5. Armee (Fifth Army) was assigned.

The main sector, in the north including the aforementioned forest area, to about one kilometer west of the village of Prény, located on a hill, was assigned to a newly formed pioneer detachment under the command of the then commander of Pionier-Regiments 19 (19th Pioneer Regiment), Colonel Müller. This unit had its headquarters in the important rear-area and military hospital location Labry near the small town of Jarny. There, in Château de Moncel, was the headquarters of Armee-Abteilung Strantz (Army Detachment Strantz). Overall directive authority remained with the General of Pioneers 5, based at that time in Montmédy, Brig. Gen. Heinrich Quentin.

To Armee-Abteilung Strantz, with the General of Pioneers 13 based in Château de Tichémont, Maj. Gen. Johannes Schroeter, only a relatively small construction sector was assigned. The route at the eastern edge of the chord position was to be developed, from about Prény to the Moselle. Various special tasks had to be carried out, such as the reconnaissance of cellars and buildings in the rear-area villages that could be made bulletproof, and the establishment of individual strongpoints on prominent heights behind the front line. In addition, the labor formations operating throughout the front salient were to be supported in all accommodation and supply matters.

Why the responsibility for the construction of the Michelstellung, despite its limited length of about 35 kilometers, was distributed among so many actors and command levels cannot be definitively answered due to a lack of evaluable documents. In the fall of 1916, at any rate, no empirical knowledge from corresponding large-scale position construction projects could be relied upon. It can be assumed that there was a reluctance to establish specific regulations above the established military command structures. In addition, it was unclear when the implementation of the order for the expansion of the “Maas-Mosel-Stellung” could be expected at all. North and south of the Somme, on the Chemin des Dames and in the Champagne, new Allied attacks were expected for the spring of 1917. In mid-September 1916, terrain reconnaissance for the Siegfried-Stellung had begun. All projects in less endangered front sectors had to subordinate themselves to the Siegfried construction and the work behind the Champagne front.

From the beginning, the Michel project lacked everything necessary, primarily a sufficient number of workers, but also supplies and technical equipment. Inquiries in this regard to the Supreme Army Command were consistently turned down. Initially, they were to make do with the existing forces. Until the spring of 1917, the Siegfried construction devoured the majority of the resources available on the Western Front.

For this reason alone, it is not surprising that the approximately 150 km long Siegfried position was already completed in its essential structure in the month of March 1917, after only five months of construction time. In contrast, the construction of the Michel position had not even progressed beyond the planning and reconnaissance phase. Only individual structures and short sections of wire entanglements had been undertaken. Even during the current year 1917, the work progressed only sluggishly. In addition to a lack of resources, there were also logistical and strategic reasons for this.

In the case of the Siegfried position, the basic concept was clear from the outset and, as can be seen from a noteworthy memorandum from April 1917, was largely implemented stringently. In view of the offensives to be expected for the spring of 1917, the possibility was to be created to withdraw in one go from the front positions between Arras and the Chemin des Dames to a strong rear line and to let the enemy attack run into empty space. This succeeded. However, the situation in the St. Mihiel salient was completely different.