by Barrie Pitt
But the main emphasis should be on Michael, supplemented by Mars to the north – and possibly even by Archangel to the south, although this was an unlikely possibility as the most vital part of the Michael scheme was the smashing in of the British front along the Flesquières Salient, the sweep through Manancourt and Ytres to the Albert–Bapaume line, and the break out to the north. The southern sector around St. Quentin – which Archangel would aid – was only a limited advance to secure the flank of the main attack.
Once the offensive was launched and under way, the British line would start to totter, and when their reserves from the Ypres front were rushed south to contain the attack, then St. Georges 1 and 2 would flatten the Ypres Salient, tear the line away from its anchorage on the sea and roll it up from the north. It would be supported by artillery, trench-mortars and air cover transferred north from the St. Michael’s front as soon as circumstances allowed.
One of the factors which may well have persuaded Ludendorff to attack on both sides of St. Quentin and to place his main reliance upon St. Michael, was information which had reached the German Staff during the week before his decision that the British, although protesting that they were already short of men, had agreed to extend their line southwards and relieve the French along a further twenty-five miles of the front. This took the British line down to the village of Barisis, south of la Fère, and meant in effect that with a little extension, the St. Michael 3 attack might strike the point of juncture of the Allied armies. On January 16th, Lieutenant-Colonel Wetzell had received from the Chief-of-Staff of von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army, General von Sauberzweig, a letter which contained the following passages:
It may now be accepted that the British have taken over the front of the French III Corps. They will no doubt take over that of the XXXVII Corps up to the Oise, so that in future the Oise will be the boundary between the French and the British. (Not quite correct, but very nearly.)
The Eighteenth Army will therefore have only British opposite to it. This will make the situation more favourable to us.
The offensive is principally intended to strike the British. They now stand opposite to us on the whole front of the Group of Armies which is to make the offensive. It need not be anticipated that the French will run themselves off their legs and hurry at once to the help of their Entente comrades. They will first wait and see if their own front is not attacked also, and decide to support their ally only when the situation has been quite cleared up. That will not be immediately, as demonstrations to deceive the French will be made by the German Crown Prince’s Group.
All in all, therefore, the prospects for the German Spring Offensive seemed excellent, and Ludendorff and his Staff had every right to face the immediate future with hope and confidence.
3. Prospect of Battle
ON December 14th, 1917, there had been issued from Field-Marshal Haig’s headquarters a series of instructions with regard to the forthcoming activities of the armies under his command. Somewhat to the surprise but greatly to the relief of those regimental officers who received a copy, the emphasis was for the first time in the war to be placed upon defence. This meant in effect a complete reversal of principle and thought, and a moderate amount of re-training for the troops, almost all of whom had been thoroughly prepared for the Sommes and Arrases of the war, but not many for the glorious retreat at Mons.
During this period of retrenchment, however, their offensive spirit was not to be allowed to wither. It would receive continual nourishment from the series of trench raids carried on during the winter and early spring, some undertaken by a handful of men led by one officer, some mounted on ambitious lines and using the strength of two or three companies. As always with the British, an attempt was made to recapture the atmosphere of school sports, and some divisions instituted a monthly cup for award to the battalion with the greatest success. One point was awarded for identification of opposing enemy units by articles taken from dead bodies, two points were awarded for each live prisoner captured, three for each enemy machine-gun or trench-mortar brought in.
On the night of February 10th/11th, men of the Australian 3rd Division mounted a raid on the German-held village of Warneton. Possibly because their Divisional Commander, Major-General Sir John Monash, possessed one of the few ‘Big Business’ type of brains among the Allied commanders, his officers and men too, thought in large-scale terms: one hundred and ninety-five men under nine officers took part in this raid, and they had the support of well-organized artillery and strategically placed covering fire.
The River Lys crossed the lines at Warneton, and to the south it flooded almost the whole of no-man’s land and the trenches each side of it. But to the north, the trenches were continuous and strongly held, and in the area of the proposed raid some two hundred and fifty yards apart. The raid was to be made upon a frontage of nearly five hundred yards, between the northern edge of the flooded Lys and the remains of the Armentières–Warneton railway line. A road once bisected this front, running eastwards from the centre of the Australian positions, and the vague lines of its embankments were still perceptible, piercing the enemy line and continuing to the ruins of the village some two hundred and fifty yards behind.
The night was warm, with promise of rain and no moon, and just after nine o’clock the leading groups of Australians crept out into the shell-holes in front of their positions and began to work their way forwards to the edge of their own wire: Bangalore torpedoes had previously been laid in selected positions, each with a length of fuse leading back towards the raiders.
At ten o’clock, a heavy barrage opened up on the enemy front line, the fuses were fired and the charges blown, cutting the necessary gaps in the wire. The width of the trench-mortar and artillery barrage had been extended well north of the railway line in order to deceive the enemy, and to heighten the deception, plywood figures of crouching men had been fixed into position in that part of no-man’s land as well. Small parties lying in shell-holes operated these figures by controlling wires: they lay under a horizontal tapestry of machine-gun and rifle bullets and it was not long before the wooden figures were split to pieces by bullets or blown apart by grenades.
In the meantime, however, the raiding parties had worked their way through their own wire (one party each side of the road) and were searching for gaps in the enemy’s defences. The party on the left found them easily enough and went through into the enemy trenches, but the right-hand party ran into trouble due to the fact that some enemy troops, instead of sheltering from the barrage in their dug-outs, had thought it wiser to avoid it altogether by moving out into the shell-holes in front of their own lines. As the right-hand party of Australians searched for gaps in the wire they were thus sniped at from these positions, and also machine-gunned from a nest set out from the enemy line on their own right flank. The Australians went to ground, pulled the pins from their grenades, and endeavoured to bomb their way forwards.
Then the left-hand party already clearing the front enemy positions realized the situation on their right, charged along the trench and attacked the enemy snipers from behind, thus allowing the men trapped in the open to swarm through a gap they had themselves blown in the wire. There was a brief, vicious hand-to-hand struggle over the shell-holes and then the second party were in the enemy positions.
The raiders spread out and began penetration of the communication trenches. Danger of mistaken identity during the confusion was minimal because, apparently, of the phrases used by the Australians as they fought, and the separate parties linked up time and time again in the web of trenches behind the front position. Prisoners were dispatched overland (many were killed by their own machine-gunners), a nest of dug-outs on the left flank was blown in, but a concrete multiple machine-gun nest in the second line on the right proved invincible.
After half an hour, the withdrawal began and the tumult rose to a height. Both Australian and German artillery and trench-mortar batteries were in action now, each trying to block the movement o
f the troops: the Australians wished to stop German reinforcements re-occupying their own trenches so they shelled the village and its communication lines, the Germans endeavoured to stop the return of the raiders by dropping a curtain of fire into no-man’s land.
Through this inferno the raiders and their prisoners made their separate, precarious ways. Very lights and star shells lit the scene with garish intensity, trench-mortar and minenwerfer bombs exploded violently in clouds of earth and the horrid debris of battle, machine-guns laced the darkness with glowing tracer.
Shortly after eleven o’clock the Australians began to pour back over the lips of their own trenches, chalk-faced beneath their cocoa-butter or burnt-cork camouflage, panting, arid with thirst, many bloodstained. They had lost two officers and eight men killed, twenty-nine men had been wounded and nine men of the 37th Battalion were missing. They brought back with them thirty-three prisoners who were immediately hurried off to divisional headquarters for questioning, and claims to the effect that whilst in the enemy trenches they had killed just over a hundred of the original occupants. This information was not regarded as particularly important, and indeed was received with a certain amount of scepticism.
But the information obtained from the prisoners was considered of consequence, especially when it reached GHQ – for it added to an accumulation of evidence which suggested that the expected enemy attack would fall on the northern half of the British line. Five days later at a conference of army commanders held at Doullens, the Commander-in-Chief mentioned that in view of the presence of important coal-mines around Béthune, it might well be that the main enemy thrust would be in that direction. However, it was too early to say for certain.
Sir Douglas Haig had, in fact, a number of rather pressing problems on his mind at the time, the most important of which was that it looked distinctly possible that he would shortly lose his chief henchman and support in London, Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. From what Sir Douglas could deduce from reports, it seemed that Robertson had been manœuvred into a situation by the ‘frocks’ in which he would be reduced to a mere cypher – one moreover, in the politicians’ hands, instead of in Haig’s.
As soon as the conference ended therefore, the Commander-in-Chief motored to Beaurepaire Château, had lunch, and went at once to Boulogne, where a destroyer waited to take him across the Channel. By 6.30 p.m. he was in London.
Calm, immaculate and apparently imperturbable, the figure of Sir Douglas Haig will present an enigma to historians for generations to come.
At the moment he was concerned with the loss of yet another of the men who had surrounded and supported him since his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies on the Western Front. His Chief Intelligence Officer, Brigadier-General Charteris, had been taken from him in December, he had been forced to change his Chief-of-Staff the following month, and now it looked as though he was to lose his spokesman in London.
There was also the problem presented by the formation of the Versailles Inter-Allied Supreme War Council during the previous November, with as the British military representative the very officer who had incurred Haig’s most intense dislike and distrust, Sir Henry Wilson. At first this Council had been relatively harmless, as it had been invested with purely advisory capacities – but at the end of January, by what Haig regarded as a piece of typical chicanery, Lloyd George and the French Premier Clemenceau had put their heads together and decided to give the Council executive powers. They had, moreover, requested that Haig should provide several divisions from his already exiguous forces in order to set up a general reserve; this reserve to be moved and employed by order of the Council. This meant in effect to put them at the disposal of the French representative, General Foch, at whose command General Wilson had always leapt like a lap-dog.
Only a private agreement which Haig had already reached with the French Commander-in-Chief, General Pétain, for mutual support in emergency (for Pétain objected to the Council’s suggestions just as strongly as Haig did) avoided compliance with the thoroughly objectionable scheme. It would have made General Foch virtual Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, and Haig saw no reason to believe that British troops would fight any more successfully under French direction than they had already done under his own.
So far as Pétain was concerned, Haig got along with him very well, appreciating his cold manner, his dignity, his firmness, his lucidity. Relations between GHQ and the French CQG had never been more cordial, and Haig’s eventual but reluctant agreement to lengthen the British front an extra twenty-five miles down past la Fère, had sealed the concord.
In London, Sir Douglas found that he had arrived too late. Sir William Robertson had refused to continue as CIGS in view of certain restrictions of power which were to be placed on that post, and he had also refused to take Sir Henry Wilson’s position on the Versailles Council. Robertson was, in fact, to be placed on half pay the following Monday, pending relegation to a home command.
Sir Henry Wilson had been recalled from Versailles and was to take Robertson’s place in London.
Haig returned to France during the following week, after meetings with the Secretary of State for War, Lord Derby, with Sir Henry Wilson, already installed in his offices as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with Mr. Bonar Law, the Leader of the Conservatives in the House of Commons, and with the Prime Minister at Downing Street, about which he recorded acidly in the diary: ‘The PM’s house reminds me of summer lodgings at the seaside – a sort of maid-of-all work opened the door to us.’
One gathers an impression from the diary of long, courteous conversations, in which everyone stated his own point of view and then listened with interest to the others’.
But there seems to have been little concrete agreement and one cannot help wondering upon what grounds Haig wrote on Tuesday, February 19th: ‘I think I can fairly claim, as the result of my visit to London, that a generally saner view is now taken of the so-called military crisis, and the risk of a quarrel between “civilian and soldier” (which last Saturday seemed imminent) has been avoided.’
For the military crisis was still building up, and Lloyd George was still of the opinion that the Allied Armies would operate better under the command of one Supreme Commander, as long as it wasn’t Haig.
During the next few weeks, as the intelligence reports flooding into GHQ were interpreted, analysed, disregarded or emphasized according to the intuitions and preconceived ideas of their readers, a picture of the imminent German offensive began to form in the minds of those who were to direct the defence against it. Less than three weeks before it was launched, this picture was not inaccurate, although there was evidently some lack of important detail, for on March 2nd Haig wrote in his diary:
The usual statement on the position of the enemy was made by my Intelligence Officer (Cox). He gave reasons why we think the enemy is preparing to attack on the fronts of our Third and Fifth Armies. I emphasized the necessity for being ready as soon as possible to meet a big hostile offensive of prolonged duration. I also told Army Commanders that I was very pleased at all I had seen on the fronts of the three Armies which I had recently visited. Plans were sound and thorough, and much work had already been done. I was only afraid that the enemy would find our front so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his Army to the attack with the almost certainty of losing very heavily.
These fears might have been set at rest by a closer examination of the defences.
The front to be held by the Allies was some four hundred and forty-five miles long from the sea to Switzerland. The northernmost eighteen miles – from the sea past Dixmude to the banks of a small stream called the Coverbeek – were held by the single cavalry division and the twelve infantry divisions of the Belgian Army under nominal direction of their King, who rarely strayed more than ten miles from their front. Although it would invariably act in concert with the British on its right flank, it did not form an integral part of Haig’s command
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© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962
The southern one hundred and fifty miles of the front, from the St. Mihiel Salient to the Swiss border, was of secondary importance. Guarded by the immensely strong fortress positions built by the French and by the inaccessible Vosges country, it had never been seriously menaced by an offensive on the part of the Central Powers – which justified the British contention that they held as great a length of the really important section of the line, in proportion to their strength, as did the French.
It was this central section that was under threat, and by the middle of March the armies of the British and the French were holding themselves ready to withstand an attack anywhere along the line of entrenchments two hundred and seventy miles long between the Coverbeek and the St. Mihiel Salient, of which the British held one hundred and twenty-five miles and the French one hundred and fifty.
The British sector was held by four armies.
From the Belgian right flank on the Coverbeek, around the blood-drenched profile of the Ypres Salient to just north of Armentières, lay the twelve divisions of the Second Army – all breathing heartfelt sighs of relief at the news of the promised return to them of their beloved commander, General Sir Herbert Plumer. This was the army – though they were unaware of it – which would face the St. George 1 and 2 attacks.
From Armentières, along the dominant features of the Lorette and Vimy Ridges for thirty-three miles as far as the village of Gavrelle, just north of Arras, lay the First Army under General Sir Henry Horne. This army covered the Béthune coalfields and had been strengthened because of that. It comprised fourteen divisions, including two Portuguese divisions and the Canadian Corps. Here were concentrated 1,450 guns and howitzers, which together with the advantages of the ground were considered enough to beat off any strength which the enemy could accumulate opposite it: its northern half faced the southern section of Ludendorff’s St. George 1 scheme, its southern half the whole of Valkyrie.