Michate wrote:1918 shows how far Germany had fallen behind. It's attack technique was far more dependent on excellent and self-sacrificing infantry than that of its opponents. As usual, even when a Great War army was forced back it wasn't encircled or routed (perhaps Brusilov 1916 is the only example of this occurring) and let's not forget that the British were fighting Lloyd-George as well as the Stormtroops.
[1] Nope, it was dependant on heavy concentrations of secretly deployed artillery firing LOTs of shells (3.1 million shells on 21 March in support of operation Michael and an additional 1.3 million across the rest of the front), to destroy the enemy communication system, blind and suppress his artillery and morally shake his infantry.
Infantry force was of course heavy, too, but that was due to the specific requirement to attack simultaneously along a rather broad front - the aim behind that was that the enemy should not have enough reserves available to fill the gap after the breakthrough.
All this "Stosstruppen" balleyhoo is mainly made for high school kids turned armchair generals. You won't find much of it when reading the more serious literature or contemporaneous manuals and pamphlets. Infantry certainly should adapt its attack technique to the emerging battlefield situation - attack in less dense formations formated more in depth than width ("Lichte Haufen" = Stosstrupps) and integrate modern "troop" weapons (light machineguns and mortars), once they arrived in numbers. Allied infantry did the same, of course. The density of the infantry divisions in the attack should actually be slightly less than that of Allied infantry divisions in attacks (2.5-3 km as compared to 1.5 km).
The most obvious difference to Allied technique was that the Germans urged their troops as far as possible, insetad of stopping and contining at another time and space, as the Allies frequently did. [2] This was mainly due to the difference of the strategic situation both sides found themselves in - the Germans knew they had only a limited number of chances before the Americans arrived in force.
[3] And of course there was a large plethora of technical and logistical and air forces around, more or less of the same character as those of the enemy.
[4]Infantry was of course demanded to accept taking heavy losses, but that applied to all armies on the Western front (you can compare losses for both sides during 1918, they were roughly similar for both sides during the period of German attacks and Allied attacks).
[5]Which all worked fairly well at instances as the 21 March and especially 27 May 1918, and not so well at Mars (partly because preparation was missing, the attack depended on rapid shifitng of heavy arillery from Michael northward) or 15 July 1918, when the French, east of Reims, based on excellent knowledge of the attack very well applied defense in depth techniques so that the German artillery preparation lacked in effect. Then they could shift reserves to the Western side of that city, where the Germans initially had made better progress, but were in a very difficult situation after crossing the Marne in a confined bridgehead.
[6]As to routed, during the Michael operation the Allies lost more than 90,000 PoWs in 10 days. BTW, a good part of the Russian army was routed in 1915 following the German-Austrian breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow.
[7]But no, forget it, this is all rubbish, actually each British defeat can be completely attributed to 1. weather and 2. D.L. George
Perhaps Ludendorff's esoteric beliefs were not as unsound as the might appear to the uninitiated early 21 century observer
The Germans had divided their army into first- and second-class segments and used the best bit which obtained operational successes rather than the strategic decision which was the only thing which could save Germany. Later the British with the French and Americans used a vastly more mechanical and integrated weapons system to ease a less efficient yet more homogeneous infantry force through some of the strongest defences in the world. The losses the Germans inflicted were some of the highest in the war yet it was the German army which disintegrated. I suggest that the beginning of this can be found in the 1916 battle.
[8]Anyone had better and less good divisions, in particular the Germans and the French, because they had to scrape to the bottom of their manpower reserves, creating divisions from overaged Landwehr men. The Brits were spared this, because they always held but a small (if relatively densely covered) sector of the Front. Plus they had been spared the early slaughter in 1914-15. Nevertheless they had their "shocktroops" too, mainly from the dominions, which were heavily used in attacks.
The German decision to further strengthen the division between mobile and less mobile divisions is of course debatable. However it was absolutely indispensable if any attack was to be tried at all. The shortage of motor vehicles combined with the extreme shortness of horses simply did not allow to make more than a limited part of the army mobile. In simple words, there were simply to few horses available to move all guns and all carriages.
The Germans lacked mainly in two areas. One was the often mentioned absence of tanks, which meant of course a critical combined arms weakness. For example tanks allowed the Allied articles to skip any preparation against enemy infantry and just concentrate on moving barrage and counterbattery. The Germans did not have that option.
[8a]And the mentioned lack of mobility meant that any offensive, even after succesfully breaking through enemy lines, would run out of steam before objectives in operational depth could be reached, and that there would be larger intervals between large scale attacks - moving Ludendorff's battering ram took time.
[9]BTW, the "strongest defense in the world" is just a myth - read what German commanders had to say about the "Siegfried" line in spring 1917, and again in 1918. Nevertheless, and despite the preparedness of part of the German forces to surrender more easily, the Allied advance was at snail's pace at high losses, [10]until the Germans decided to retreat to the Antwerp-Meuse line. Except an Austrian token force, they had no Allies to bolster them after defeats, like the French did with Gough's army, or later the Americans did with the French at the Marne.