........resistance was possible only for one or two weeks more when the armistice was signed, due to lack of supplies of things like ammunition, as the home front had by this time also fallen apart,.......
The crucial factor was thus the collapse of the Home Fronts in Germany and Austria, which was not caused by a single factor such as Ludendorff's call in September for an armistice. Rather it was a long, slow process, a cumulative build-up of civilian disenchantment resulting from the hardships caused by the British blockade, together with the winding down of German industrial production due to the exhaustion of existing stocks of materials and the inability to import replacements. All those factors came to a head in October-November, resulting in a potentially revolutionary situation that would have led to a much greater societal explosion than actually occurred if the German military leaders had attempted to go on fighting. Wisely, those leaders chose to end the fighting on whatever terms they could get, so that they could lead the forces under their command back to Germany in a relatively intact condition to restore order.
The essential failure of the German Government was that it was not ruthless enough, both at home and in the territories it occupied. For example, it could have prevented starvation among the German population by extracting food from the occupied Russian and Romanian territories in the same way as it did during the Second World War, forcing the population of those areas to bear the burden of food shortages. Instead, the priorities adopted by the German and Austro-Hungarian Governments were to feed the army of occupation first, then the local population, and only then to use what was left over to feed their own starving populations.
Starvation was even worse in Austria than it was in Germany, the main reason being that the Hungarian rulers refused to export their country's traditional food surplus to Vienna, preferring to build up massive stocks at home so as to be sure of being able to keep their own people happy in any future emergency. Thus, Vienna starved while Hungary had plenty to eat, and an accumulated surplus. If the German Government had been more ruthless it would have sent its forces into Hungary and compelled the Hungarian authorities to resume exporting food to Austria to relieve the massive distress there.
Essentially, it was a matter of too little, too late. By the time Germany and Austria gained access to the food and other resources of the occupied Ukraine, after March 1918, the situation had become so bad on their respective Home Fronts that only a massive plundering of the occupied territories and a rapid shipping of huge quantities of food and other supplies back to their civilian populations could have restored morale. As it was, the German and Austrian occupiers never succeeded in extracting from the occupied territories the amounts they needed to keep their armed forces and civilian populations supplied, mainly because they were not ruthless enough, and the German and Austrian peoples continued to suffer great deprivation, leading to the collapse of the Home Fronts (and of the Austro-Hungarian Army) at the end of the year.
