CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BATTLES OF AMIENS AND PÉRONNE
The second battle of the Marne was brought to an end only two days before the next allied attack was launched, at Amiens on 8 August. This time it was a joint Anglo-French enterprise, with the British taking the lead after three months’ licking their wounds and sending reinforcements to the French as required. Amiens was their first major deliberate offensive since Cambrai eight months earlier, but they had forgotten none of their art of attack during the intervening time. All the careful planning, deception, camouflage and secrecy that had gone into preparing the raid on Cambrai was also bestowed on the ‘first day’ at Amiens, although on this occasion with much stronger reserves close at hand, and a much weaker enemy defensive system to attack. Only at zero hour did 2,000 guns open fire, using a mixture of pre-registered and predicted fire. Some 324 heavy tanks accompanied the initial assault, with a further 200 tracked armoured vehicles, of various types, in reserve. There was also a technically sophisticated Corps de Chasse waiting behind the lines to exploit early success with horsed cavalry, machine guns mounted on motor cycles, armoured cars and ninety-six Whippet fast tanks. Large-scale air operations were co-ordinated with the attack, first to drown out the noise of tank movements during the assembly phase, and then to conduct intensive ground attack against the enemy's troops in and just behind his defensive lines, and to destroy the Somme bridges in his rear. Of particular interest were the plans for close liaison between the RAF and the Corps de Chasse in the breakout phase. This was surely the direction in which mobile operations would evolve not only during the remainder of 1918, but also through all the remainder of military history.
The troops of Rawlinson's Fourth Army went over the top on 8 August in a thick fog which greatly assisted their attack, even if it hindered all their supporting air operations. They consisted of (from south to north) one army corps each of Canadians, Australians and British. They enjoyed success in that order, with the Canadians on the right winning the most ground, and the British doing least well. Indeed, their relative failure provoked a new burst of the now-routine ANZAC fury against the imperial power, this time because it was claimed that the British failed to secure the Australians’ left flank in the later stages of their advance. On the Canadians’ right flank, by contrast, there was a generally successful attack by the French First Army, which prevented enemy intervention from that direction.
It was also on the Canadian sector that the Corps de Chasse went through and created considerable mayhem in the enemy's rear. It did not manage to achieve a technical ‘breakthrough’, but it certainly earned its pay in a way that previous attempts to exploit an initial infantry ‘break-in’ had signally failed to do. It captured a rich harvest of prisoners and guns, and pushed the front line still further forward than the infantry and heavy tanks had advanced, to a total of about seven miles from the start line. Significantly, the horsed cavalry caused distinctly greater damage to the enemy than the Whippet tanks, and surely no less than the armoured cars. One cavalry regiment even captured an entire train full of enemy soldiers. For all that, it was the mass of (ill-distinguished) tanks that weighed most heavily upon German minds, especially since the deployment of a total of over 600 tanks at Amiens came so soon after the French had used 346 tanks in their Soissons offensive. The total was about 1,000 in all, which contrasted vividly with the poor twenty (including six captured from the British) that the Germans had deployed against Gouraud on 15 July. In 1937 General Heinz Guderian would write his seminal book Achtung Panzer!, which dwelt at length upon precisely this disparity and called – with, alas, only too much success – for the German army to be equipped as a matter of urgency with a large and effective Panzer arm.
The late summer of 1918 also marked the first time since the Somme in 1916 when the side that was winning on the ground was also winning in the air. In 1917 the Germans had been on the defensive but had often enjoyed local air superiority, while in the spring of 1918 they had been rampant on the ground but constrained by bigger and better allied air forces. Now at last those air forces were free to support a major allied offensive on the ground, which allowed them to develop a number of new roles and tactics that would soon become standard practice for every air force. One was to drop ammunition to forward troops who had outrun their logistics by the very speed of their advance, which happened on a small scale on 8 August. This pointed the way forward to many much larger air resupply operations during the remainder of the twentieth century, not least the Berlin Air Lift of 1948–9. The battle of Amiens also saw a major attempt at ‘battlefield interdiction’ designed to destroy bridges just behind the enemy fighting line, to stop the flow of his supplies and reinforcements. On this occasion it was not successful, and a total of ninety-six RAF aircraft were lost while trying to cut the Somme bridges around Péronne, but it nevertheless remained a pointer for the future use of air power.
The loss of ninety-six aircraft on a single mission was certainly exceptional, but even without that, in most months of the Great War there was more than a 65 per cent loss of front-line aircraft to all causes, although only some 7 per cent in combat. In other words a fighting air force of 600 machines could expect to lose an average of 390 within thirty days, or thirteen per day, which implied that production had to run at some 4,680 per year if full strength were to be maintained. In the circumstances of 1914–18 this placed an incredible strain upon the industrial resources of the state, especially in the mass production of high-performance engines, which was a science that was still in its infancy.1
The Germans did not totally disintegrate in the battle of Amiens, although they came very close to doing so. Mutinous shouts and graffiti were encountered in their rear echelons, which added a newly ominous undertone to what was already a dramatic loss of territory, armaments and men. The promises made in July that the Reims offensive would end the war in a day were rebounding badly on the high command. Ludendorff called 8 August ‘the black day of the German army’, and in his mind, as well as in the minds of many of his generals, it conclusively reinforced the main lesson of the Franco- American success at Soissons earlier the same week. Nor did subsequent events help to calm him down. Although German reinforcements were already arriving in force during the following day, the allies were able to make a new advance of about half as far as they had on 8 August, and on the day after that it was still about a quarter as far. The French also widened the front further to the south, and recaptured Montdidier. On the other hand, the tank strength available to the allies was more or less halved on each of these days until it wasted away to almost nothing, exactly as it had done during the first few days of both Cambrai and the French Soissons counter-offensive. All three of these battles confirmed the very short combat life of a fighting tank, and therefore its unsuitability as a weapon of breakout.
On 11 August, the fourth day at Amiens, the British closed down their offensive, following the wise maxim of the French General Marie Fayolle that ‘after the third day, an offensive is just a waste’. Marshal Foch, who always wanted any attack to be pressed on and on to its bitterest end, was furious. He was no friend of the ‘bite and hold’ mentality. Yet this was exactly the same day that Ludendorff offered his resignation to the Kaiser, who refused to accept it but decided nevertheless that the war was lost. Nor was he wrong, since there were many other allied forces waiting to take over the baton from the temporarily stalled British Fourth Army. Each of them in turn was ready to bite and then hold in its own time, regardless of whatever Foch might think. At least the overall effect would soon add up to something very much like a ‘general offensive along the whole front’, which is surely what Foch really wanted to see, even if he may not have been entirely clear about it in his own mind.
The casualties at Amiens finally totalled about 75,000 Germans, from the BEF and 24,000 French, although it was doubtless more significant that the rude shock to the Germans' morale was just as great as the corresponding boost to the allies'. Yet the high casualties from just four days' fighting were an ominous pointer to the future. During the next ‘Hundred Days’ of allied offensives the losses to all participating forces would continue to run very high indeed, despite the undoubted shift of the initiative – and the ultimate victory – to the allies. No battle on the Western Front would ever have a small ‘butcher's bill', even when the enemy was on the run or, as in this case, merely waiting for the war to end.
The next attack after Amiens was launched on 21 August by Byng's Third Army on the northern end of the old Somme battlefield, and by General Henry Horne's First Army even further to the north. Meanwhile the French were resuming their attacks all the way south from the Amiens battlefield to Noyon. There was success everywhere, and Byng's inexperienced young troops won a particularly notable victory on 22 August when, instead of pressing their attack, they held the ground won the previous day and shot down a series of counterattacks, thereby making it all the easier to resume their advance on the 23rd. That day, 22 August, was also the day on which Rawlin- son's Fourth Army recaptured Albert. The whole front was shaking itself down, rising from its trenches and moving eastwards in a slow, methodical but nonetheless insistent manner.
In the First Army's battle of the Scarpe on 26–28 August the Canadian corps pushed forward some six miles over the parts of the old Arras battlefield that had not been captured in April 1917. Meanwhile Byng's army was advancing on either side of Bapaume, capturing the town on the night of 28–29 August, and the Australians in the Fourth Army were reaching towards Péronne. Ludendorff had ordered the construction of a ‘Winter Line’ in that area, based on the south–north section of the Somme river up to Péronne, and its northerly extension along the Canal du Nord. As the name suggests, his hope was that he would be able to consolidate his army in this strong position, hold out through September, and then sit back over the remainder of the winter while the weather closed down further allied offensives.
As early as 1 September, however, Monash and his Australians had blown the German plan to smithereens by one of the most notable actions d'éclat of the entire war. In a three-day battle, and without either a creeping barrage or tanks, they crossed three trench lines and seized the linchpin of Ludendorff's whole system at Mont St Quentin, just north of Péronne. The ‘Winter Line’ had to be hastily abandoned and Ludendorff was forced to think instead in terms of holding out on the main Hindenburg position along the St Quentin Canal, some seventeen miles further to the east. Unlike the ‘Winter Line', these fortifications had existed for over eighteen months and were formidably deep. There was much discussion in both GHQ and the war cabinet over the question of whether it would be sensible to attack them at all, especially since so much of the BEF was either exhausted by repeated battles since 21 March, or inexperienced boys fresh from home. At some points in the debate it looked as though Ludendorff would get his way and be allowed to ride out the winter without coming under serious attack.
The Canadians, ably supported by some British divisions, went some way to answering GHQ's doubts on 2 September when they won a particularly brisk success by penetrating the Drocourt-Quéant line some ten miles south-east of Arras. Strictly speaking this was already a part of the Hindenburg system, with wire barriers up to 100 yards deep. To that extent the Canadians had already demonstrated that it could be breached, some three weeks before the Third and Fourth Armies came up against the ‘main’ part of it north of St Quentin. During the first of these weeks Ludendorff performed a general step back by all his armies from the ground they had won in the spring, including in Flanders. On many occasions there were scenes reminiscent of the original step back to the Hindenburg Line in February and March 1917, as the pursuit plugged on forward. Then in the second week the defence firmed up and the approaches to the Hindenburg Line had to be cleared in a series of local attacks, such as at Epéhy on 18 September. Meanwhile the logistic preparations for the great assault were begun.
On the Franco-American front there was an attack to clear the St Mihiel salient on 12 September. It was entirely successful because the German commander had read the allied plans in the newspapers, and had begun to evacuate the salient about twelve hours before the attack began. Most of the bombardment by 3,000 guns therefore fell on empty space, but this did not delay the rapid advance, and the whole salient was cleared within twenty-five hours, with 14,500 prisoners captured for the very light cost of 8,000 allied casualties. There had been an acrimonious argument between Pershing, Foch and Haig over where the Americans should go next, but in the end it had been agreed that they should drive north through the Argonne forest towards Mézières, rather than north-east to Metz. Haig had urged this decision upon his allies because it represented a line of advance that was more convergent with the direction being taken by the BEF.
The Americans were to begin their attack on 26 September, after which the British First and Third armies would strike towards Cambrai, then the Second Army eastwards from Ypres and finally, on the 29th, Rawlinson's Fourth Army would make its carefully prepared frontal assault to break the Hindenburg Line (Siegfried position) north of St Quentin. Meanwhile the French were preparing their own advances in step with the general offensive, south of St Quentin and on the Aisne and Champagne fronts. They were of course perfectly happy to allow their allies to shoulder the main weight of the fighting at this stage in the war, since they could not forget the first two years on the Western Front, when the British had to all intents and purposes fought to the last Frenchman.
We will return to the Americans in the next chapter; for the moment suffice it to say that both the Cambrai and the Ypres attacks went like clockwork. The first took less than a day to capture Bourlon and its wood, which had eluded Byng in his offensive of November 1917. This effectively outflanked the Siegfried position from the north, thereby greatly increasing the uncertainties in the minds of its defenders facing the Fourth Army nearer to St Quentin. Cambrai itself would fall on 8 October. In Flanders the triumph was if anything even sweeter, since almost the whole of the Gheluvelt plateau fell to Plumer's men in a day, whereas in the previous year it had defied them for four long and blood-soaked months. By 2 October the attack was finally knocking at the gates of both Roulers and Menin, which in 1917 had existed as objectives in the minds of Haig and his GHQ staff, but which in the minds of the front-line troops had seemed to be rather further away than the moon.
FROM THE HINDENBURG LINE TO THE ARMISTICE
The big test, and the crunch point upon which Haig's whole offensive would either prosper or collapse, was the attack on the Siegfried position on 29 September. In the ‘semi-mobile warfare’ of the Hundred Days that started on 8 August, few of the British attacks had been preceded by a well-prepared bombardment, let alone a long one. Occasionally there had been predicted fire; more usually there had not. Sometimes there had been a creeping barrage; sometimes not. Six hours was probably about the longest preliminary bombardment that had been seen, certainly nothing like the week-long or two-week bombardments of 1916 and 1917. On the other hand most of the attacks had been launched against ill-prepared fortifications, mostly built in the spring by German troops at the end of long and exhausting offensives, at a moment when defence was the very last thing on their minds. Even if it were, the various salients that Ludendorff had carved out represented very long frontages which required far more time, labour and building materials than were actually available. Thus relatively unsophisticated artillery preparations had been used against relatively unsophisticated fortifications.
When it came to the Hindenburg Line, by contrast, everyone from Lloyd George downwards was acutely aware that the fortifications were very deep and well built, and had been in place ever since the winter of 1916–17. In this case it was felt that a long and careful preliminary bombardment would be absolutely essential. Some 1,600 guns opened fire on 26 September with a new type of mustard gas shell, switching to HE the next morning and following up during the next two days until the assault was finally unleashed at 5.50am on 29 September. Altogether some 750,000 shells were fired, although there were complaints that this was relatively light compared with some of the bombardments earlier in the war. Ammunition supply was especially difficult in the conditions of fast-moving warfare, which contrasted radically with the leisurely stockpiling that had been possible over weeks and months in the static warfare of previous years. The weather was also particularly bad in late September, which limited observation, particularly from the air. On the crucial sector between Bellicourt and Bony, where the American 27th and 30th Divisions were to attack across a ‘land bridge’ over the St Quentin Canal tunnel, there were further complications. Not all the approaches had been cleared of the enemy, but a number of small US detachments had become isolated behind enemy lines. This limited not only the observation that was available over the battlefield, but also the areas into which shells could be fired, for fear of hitting friendly troops. Altogether, therefore, the preliminary bombardment fell short of what would ideally have been required.
The main attack was to be by the Americans, supported by the Australians and some 165 tanks, over the Bellicourt ‘land bridge’ yet this was the sector in which most difficulties and complications were encountered. A secondary attack by 46 (North Midland) Division was also planned further to the south, despite the protests of Monash, directly across the St Quentin Canal at a point opposite Bellenglise where it did not pass through a tunnel. This was widely considered to be a death trap, but the corps commander, General Walter Braithwaite, concocted an unlikely plan whereby the troops would use all sorts of ladders, ropes, light boats, life rafts and buoys to get across the canal by any possible means. He also arranged for sixteen tanks and a particularly large and impressive creeping barrage to precede the infantry on their attack frontage of 500 yards, and in the event this was totally successful. The Fourth Army was also lucky that its smoke shells on the morning of the attack were supplemented by a thick natural fog. The enemy was blinded, although the same was also true of the 337 allied aircraft that were available in support.
As the attack developed, it gradually became clear that although the two American divisions achieved as much as they possibly could, they had been asked to do too much. Their training and experience had not equipped them to follow a creeping barrage to the depth that was now expected, and in any case there were many problems with the way the barrage was laid on. A break-in was achieved on the Bellicourt ‘land bridge’, but it was frustratingly narrow and insufficiently deep. Too many German machine gunners remained active in the rear of the advancing spearheads, and the Australians had difficulty coming forward as the second echelon. Overall this attack, which it had been hoped would be decisive, fell below the expectations of the high command. On the other hand the unprepossessing 46th British Division achieved spectacularly more than expected. Suffering only light casualties, it swarmed down the hill through several enemy trench lines, and then straight across the fearsome canal itself. In some places it crossed a dry canal bed; at others it found light German bridges that had not been destroyed. Elsewhere its men had to swim or row, but all in all they got across and were ready to push onwards on the east bank by late morning. This constituted a remarkable feat of arms, and to this day it is still possible to find North Midland folk who take particular pride in the fact that it was their local boys – and not the much more famous Guards, Highlanders or ANZACs – who ‘broke through the Hindenburg Line’.
In fact, however, there was a long way to go before the Hindenburg Line was fully broken, even though crossing the canal at Bellenglise had been an excellent start. A week of hard fighting still lay ahead, as the BEF's spearheads pressed forward through all the many preprepared rearward positions. The ‘land bridge’ over the canal tunnel was cleared at Bony only on 2 October, and the final defences of the Beaurevoir Line were securely in allied hands only by 6 October. The exceptional depth of the Siegfried position meant that it had to be ground down systematically over many days.
Nevertheless it was really just a matter of time, since it had now become obvious that the Germans were very seriously outclassed in almost every department. Quite apart from the vast quantities of territory, manpower and artillery that they had lost during the previous two months, the fighting morale of their soldiers remained questionable. They could show flashes of tactical resilience, and the tenacity of their rearguard machine gunners was legendary. Their staffwork and higher organization were still exemplary. However, the troops had been on short rations for many months, and they were acutely aware that their families at home in Germany were suffering even greater shortages. Since the failure of their ‘peace offensive’ of 15 July they had lost all faith in victory, and in their leaders. They had been pushed remorselessly back during the second half of 1916, and through most of 1917; now yet again they were being pushed back by an unprecedented series of allied attacks in the second half of 1918. By the start of October it was becoming increasingly clear to one and all that the German army was beaten.
On the allied side there were congenital optimists like Foch, who believed that nothing could go wrong as long as everyone attacked à outrance, and Haig, who had been confident for some time that it would all be over before Christmas. On the other hand there were pessimists like Pétain, who disagreed. In particular Haig's own chief of staff believed that the enemy was simply luring the BEF into a trap and would soon mount a fiendishly crushing counter-attack that would turn all the recent advances to dust. Such people would take some convincing. As for the Germans, Ludendorff apparently suffered a psychological fit on 28 September and on the following day advised the Kaiser that the war was lost. Both of them now realized that there was no longer any realistic hope that the war could last into 1919. Apart from anything else, their despised Austrian allies had also come to the end of their resolve and on 14 September had begun to make peace overtures. The allied forces in Salonika had finally advanced into the Balkans and were in the process of knocking Bulgaria out of the war. In Palestine General Allenby defeated the Turks at Megiddo on 19–21 September and was about to enter Damascus. Worst of all, however, was the rapidly deteriorating situation inside Germany itself.
After some bitter internal discussions and a change of government, on 4 October the Germans finally asked for an armistice and a peace settlement based on the US President Woodrow Wilson's ‘Fourteen Points’. These amounted to an idealistic blueprint for peace on earth and happiness ever after which, although splendid as a statement of general principles, and alluring to the Central Powers, was lamentably short of either small print or an understanding of hard diplomatic realities. The Fourteen Points were deeply unacceptable to America's allies for a wide variety of reasons, and so both the negotiations and the war went on. The German armies continued their sullen retreat, and the allied armies continued to push forward as and when they managed to gather sufficient logistic and command resources for a new ‘bite’. Overall their rate of advance averaged about one mile per day during three months, or a hundred miles in a hundred days. More significantly, perhaps, was the fact that in the last two or three weeks of this advance they were accelerating. The daily average in late October and early November was about twice what it had been in late August.
One notable incident came in the cavalry pursuit after the breaking of the Beaurevoir Line. On 9 October two cavalry brigades made a number of attacks on the road to Le Cateau which captured 500 prisoners, ten guns and no fewer than 150 machine guns. This action absolutely gives the lie to all the many sneering anti-cavalry commentaries that have constantly assured us that ‘the machine gun made cavalry obsolete’. If it could capture 150 machine guns on a single day, then where is the problem? Which two brigades of infantry ever captured as many in such short order? Admittedly the cavalry did suffer some 600 casualties on that day, which was about the same as the Light Brigade at Balaklava, but on 9 October the British and Canadian cavalry opened the way to rather more of an operational advance than the Light Brigade ever did. Nor do we have to look far to find infantry brigades which lost many more than 600 casualties in a day on the Western Front.
After this, the Fourth Army found the enemy especially well dug in on the east bank of the river Selle, some twelve miles north-east of the Beaurevoir line. The second battle of Le Cateau did not begin until 17 October, and conditions were not good for either artillery observation or flying. The enemy fought back with unexpected tenacity, causing Haig an uncharacteristic moment of pessimism. Nevertheless by the 20th the British, including the two American divisions fighting with them, had pushed forward to the south of that town, and dislodged the Germans yet again. From there it was but four miles further to Ors, on the Sambre–Oise canal, and eight miles to Landrecies, just south of the looming forest of Mormal. All of these objectives were soon taken, and a canal-crossing operation was prepared on a wide front for 4 November. By this time British casualties were generally relatively light, although one of them was Captain Wilfred Owen, the poet, who fell on the canal bank north of Ors and was buried in the local village cemetery.
Meanwhile the First Army was approaching Valenciennes, which it had captured by 3 November, and the Third Army was closing on the ancient Vauban fortress of Le Quesnoy, which fell to the New Zealanders on the 4th. After this the road to Belgium was open, and during the period 5 to 11 November Haig's armies swept forward to take Maubeuge and finally Mons, the scene of the BEF's first battle of the war. To the north they had also taken Lille, Courtrai and Tournai, while the Belgians and French had cleared the coastline and were knocking on the gates of Ghent. To the south of the BEF the French had also advanced to the Belgian frontier and had almost reached Sedan.
This magnificent advance was not simply a factor of German weariness, starvation and moral collapse. It was also a technical triumph on the part of the allies, and perhaps more in the fields of logistics and staffwork than in those of tactics and heroics in the front line. We must remember that these armies had been formatted for the best part of four years as static organizations, advancing at best only a few hundred yards at a time, and relying on large stockpiles of supplies that had been laboriously pre-positioned over a period of weeks and months. During the ‘Hundred Days’, by contrast, they managed to make a rapid and successful transition to what at the time was called ‘semi-mobile warfare’, although in terms of miles advanced per day it was statistically no less mobile than the more celebrated allied advance from Normandy to the Baltic in 1944–5. To achieve this sustained offensive, much of the heavy equipment had to be left behind: for example, the supposedly ‘war-winning’ tanks could not be fielded in more than very small numbers except on 8 August and 29 September. More significantly for the style of fighting, the supply of artillery ammunition had to be slashed to a fraction of its normal scale as the fighting line advanced ever further ahead of its railheads and dumps. Equally the maintenance of communications became an ever growing headache, as telephone cable was consumed in unprecedented volumes and HQs moved from point to point in a disconcertingly rapid manner.
Overall since July the allies had captured over a third of a million Germans and 6,615 guns, although of course there were many more killed, wounded and missing Germans who did not become prisoners of war. The BEF had lost a third of a million overall casualties, which was still a high total. Up to the end this war continued to exact a heavy toll on its soldiers, even when they were making a war-winning offensive.
At 11.00am on 11 November an armistice finally came into force, some six weeks after Ludendorff's mental collapse of 28 September. Ludendorff himself had been dismissed from his command on 26 October, having left the ‘home front’ inside Germany in a state of near revolution. The High Seas Fleet had mutinied, demonstrations had spread to Berlin, and the army was in a state of obvious disarray. The Germans could no longer afford to continue the war, whereas the allies apparently could. When the German plenipotentiaries finally arrived in Foch's railway carriage at Compiègne on 8 November, they were forced to accept all the terms the allies demanded. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on the following day and fled to Holland where he lived on, secure from legal retribution, until 1941.
The Compiègne terms were the skeleton upon which the peace treaties of Versailles would be fleshed out in 1919–20, and in the long view of history we may say that they might have been drafted more wisely. In the short term, however, they brought the blissful, ever- longed-for, balm of true peace to the Western Front. The guns fell silent and the waiting battalions of monumental masons were at last let loose to do their work in every town and village of all the combatant nations. On the battlefields a carpet of ornamental cemeteries was rolled out to cradle the fallen, interspersed with some prestigious large constructions crafted by the most skilled architects in the world. The war had moved forward from its four years of lethality into a much longer era of sad remembrance.