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1 results

  • 13 - The air war

  • from Part II - Theatres of War
  • Edited by Jay Winter, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the First World War
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2014, pp 349-375

  • Summary

    A peace treaty with Soviet Russia was signed in the Belorussian town of Brest-Litovsk on 918, but the treaty only confirmed what everybody had known since autumn 1917: that the central powers had won the war on the Eastern Front. After Germany and Austria-Hungary had lost the war they placed their hopes on the programme outlined by American President Woodrow Wilson. German general Erich Ludendorff shared the imperialist dreams of some of the military, political and economic elite, and wanted to exploit the collapse of the Russian-Empire and the power vacuum it created by expanding borders, promoting colonisation and securing German dominance in Eastern-Europe for the foreseeable future. Bulgaria was the first of the central powers to accept defeat. Ludendorff hoped that a democratic Germany would get better terms but he also wanted the democrats, especially the Social Democrats, to take the responsibility for the defeat.