Promotion, intelligence failure, and an unwinnable war

Holtzendorff was promoted to grand admiral on 31 July 1918, the final Imperial German Navy officer to receive the rank. He increasingly quarrelled with the German high command because the strategic situation had deteriorated beyond recovery. American troops were arriving despite the assumptions on which he had sold the campaign. The video links those assumptions to intelligence reports about Britain and America that had been compromised or otherwise proved unreliable, and uses the episode to explain the later poor reputation of German military intelligence and the Abwehr. It is a reminder that an operational plan may rest on information whose weaknesses are invisible to the planner at the time.