1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  Except for these isolated groups, which held out until the evening, Mont Kemmel was in German hands by 10 a.m., and Anglo-French relations, which had not been markedly cordial of late, were further strained.

  To the east of Mont Kemmel – on the left of the vacated French positions – stood the British 9th Division, upon whose right brigade had fallen the main weight of the German attack. The attack had, in fact, been planned in the form of a hook to take the hill indirectly from the east, but with the unlooked-for success of the frontal attack, four German divisions (two of them fresh) swept straight across the British brigade, not a man of which escaped death or capture, and were then carried on by their own momentum beyond the set limit of their advance.

  They hit first a Highland Brigade in reserve, and then a South African Brigade which came across in support, and during the remainder of the afternoon these two brigades gradually absorbed the attack impetus by conducting a dogged retirement to Vierstraat. Here the Germans were held.

  Throughout the afternoon, the South Africans had managed all the time to retain contact with the 21st Division on their left who were employing exactly the same Fabian tactics, in a withdrawal from their original positions at Wytschaete to a line between Voormezeele and Hill 60. On the right of the Highlanders, however, where had stood the unfortunate French, yawned a four-mile gap from Vierstraat to a point west of Mont Kemmel where the other French divisions put into the line by Foch still stood, apparently awaiting the infantry attacks which, they felt, should have followed their share of the early morning bombardment.

  They waited all day, but the attacks never developed: so from shortly after 10 a.m. until late in the evening, when the British 25th Division arrived from reserve (with orders to retake Mont Kemmel), there had existed in front of the victorious Germans on the hill a gap through which they might have poured. It was fortunate for the Allies that Ludendorff had restricted his objective and that his troops had been satisfied merely to gain it for him – for there had been virtually nothing to stop them from advancing along main roads to the Mont des Cats and thus taking the vital east–west ridge from the rear.

  All next day the battle raged, from north of Bailleul to Zillebeke, the Allies striving to recapture their lost ground and the German troops, given now the fresh objective of Poperinghe by their Army Commander Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, trying to create again the opportunity they had lost by default. No success attended either side, but during that night, more Allied reserves were created for the battle by yet another shortening of the line around the Ypres Salient, under Plumer’s direction.

  And as these reserves were poured like cement into the Allied line, the line hardened and set, and nothing the enemy could do could break it thereafter. Neither the ponderous and fearful weight of Ludendorff’s battering train nor the undoubted valour of his troops could avail, though on the last day of the battle, April 29th, the German Fourth Army mounted yet another onslaught between Dranoutre and Voormezeele which used up all the reserves of men and ammunition which Ludendorff – agonizingly conscious once again of opportunities let slip – had been able to feed up to the front. They gained a slight and temporary success north of the village of Locre, which they then held for a few hours before being driven out by the French from whom they had taken it; but against the British front they made not the slightest impression. The crust had been given time to form.

  It had also been given time to form, even before this second stage of the battle of the Lys, on the southern flank – and no attempts to take either Givenchy or Festubert from the British met with any success.

  At 10 p.m. on the evening of April 29th, therefore, in agreement with the Chiefs-of-Staff of the Groups concerned, Ludendorff ordered the cessation of the attack, and in the words of von Kuhl:

  The whole ‘Georgette’ operation was finished. The Fourth and Sixth Armies had exhausted their offensive powers. … The attack had not penetrated to the decisive heights of Cassel and the Mont des Cats, the possession of which would have compelled the evacuation of the Ypres Salient and the Yser position. No great strategic movement had become possible, and the Channel ports had not been reached. The second great offensive had not brought about the hoped-for decision.

  If Ludendorff was depressed at the beginning of April, he must have been near despair at the end.

  The end of Georgette was anticipated surprisingly closely by the last spasms of the Michael offensive – for on the day before the successful attack on Mont Kemmel, there had been launched a final attempt to redeem the hollow triumphs in the south.

  At dawn on April 24th, after a virtual armistice of nineteen days, von der Marwitz’s Second Army began an attack by elements of nine divisions on a three-mile front between the small town of Villers-Bretonneux and the River Luce. In view of the time which had elapsed since the cessation of the previous fighting in the area, it had been obvious to both Ludendorff and von der Marwitz that the attempt would stand no chance of worthwhile success unless it held some element of surprise, comparable with the methods of infantry attacks employed on March 21st.

  In this case the surprise was to be provided by tanks.

  Despite Ludendorff’s undeniable mastery in the field of tactics, he had remained blind to the value of armoured vehicles on the field of battle until a surprisingly late date. Their appearance on the Somme during September 1916 had come as a complete surprise to him, and it was a stroke of good fortune for the Allies that despite that hasty revelation to the enemy of their new war-winning weapon, Ludendorff had failed to appreciate its significance.

  It was not, in fact, until the spring of 1917 that the Central Powers began the manufacture of tanks, by which time the British were producing their Mark IV model, and the French their Schneider CA3. To modern eyes these first tanks appear rudimentary in the extreme. The British Mark IV, for instance, was rhombic in longitudinal section and moved on caterpillar tracks which clattered and banged around the entire peripheries of both its vertical sides. It weighed thirty-one tons, and its 125-h.p. engine could move it along at a maximum speed of 3.7 m.p.h. on level ground. Four men were required to drive it and four more to man its guns, of which one model, the ‘Male’, carried two short 6-pounders and four Hotchkiss machine-guns, while the ‘Female’ carried six machine-guns.

  The first German tank, the A.7.V., was not quite so heavy, but carried (in conditions of acute discomfort) a total crew of eighteen, packed into a space of less than twenty-four feet by eight. Its armour enclosed its tracks like a carapace, and having sprung tracks and two 150-h.p. engines, its speed over flat ground was as high as 8 m.p.h. – although if this speed was long maintained, the temperature inside could rise to as high as 140° Fahrenheit, thus quickly exhausting the crews.

  On April 24th, thirteen of these fearful-looking mastodons rumbled gigantically out of the fog (for Nature was once more aiding Ludendorff) at the head of the German attack – three to the north of Villers-Bretonneux and ten to the south – and in the words of the British Official History, ‘Wherever tanks appeared the British line was broken.’

  This was hardly surprising as no anti-tank weapons had yet been designed by the British, let alone issued to troops properly trained to use them, and it should also be remembered that when British tanks had first attacked élite German divisions in 1916, panic had touched even their stalwart hearts. On this occasion, however, aid for the defenders was at hand. Three tanks of the 1st Battalion of the British Tank Corps were lying up in the Bois de l’Abbé just west of Villers-Bretonneux, and although some of the crews were suffering from the effects of the gas bombardment with which the German attack had been preceded, the section started up their engines and drove their unwieldly vehicles out of the woods to engage in the first tank versus tank battle of history.

  Typically, it began with disaster for the British.

  The first two tanks to debouch from the woods were Female Mark IVs, armed only with machine-guns which made little impression upon the 30-millimetre armour
of the first German tank to be sighted. On the other hand, the captured Russian Sokol 57-millimetre gun of the German tank, holed the armour of the British tanks, causing the two Females to withdraw sedately into the concealing shadows of the wood.

  As they did so, the 6-pounder gun of the only Male Mark IV tank present came into action, its shell smashing against the side of the German tank with such devastating effect upon those inside that the German tank commander, endeavouring to avoid a repetition, ran his vehicle aslant on to a steep bank and overturned it. Two more German tanks now arrived on the scene, but were so fiercely engaged by the British tank that the crew of one incontinently deserted their vehicle and bolted back into Villers-Bretonneux (by now completely in German hands) while the other turned cumbrously on its tracks and followed them, its superior speed taking it quickly out of danger.

  Of the other ten German tanks which advanced to the attack that morning, the three on the north of the town returned to their assembly point having secured as complete a success as could be envisaged at that time and place; of those on the south of the town one fell into a shell-hole (from which it was afterwards salvaged by the French), two developed engine trouble and one, coming under heavy infantry machine-gun fire, was abandoned by its crew and fell into British hands. Thus ended the first tank battle, and it was appropriate that the triumphant Male Mark IV had been No. 1 Tank of No. 1 Section, A Company, 1st Battalion, Tank Corps.

  Other British tanks had also been in action that morning – as a result, moreover, of happy co-operation between the two latest arms of warfare.

  Shortly after 10 a.m., by which time Villers-Bretonneux was almost entirely in German hands, a British reconnaissance aircraft spotted two enemy battalions converging on the small village of Cachy, just south of the Bois de l’Abbé, in which had sheltered the three Mark IVs. Three miles away were leaguered seven British Whippet tanks – far lighter in design than the Mark IVs and speedier, for they were intended not so much to smash a breach in a defended line as to exploit it afterwards – and by a stroke of good fortune, the pilot of the reconnaissance aircraft saw them and dropped a scrawled note revealing the presence of the enemy troops.

  At 10.20 a.m., the two enemy battalions, who had by this time foregathered in a sheltering hollow, were utterly routed by the sudden appearance of the seven Whippets, in line and each spitting furiously from four machine-guns. The tanks charged down into the hollow and up the other side, then turned and charged back, crushing unnumbered wounded and dead beneath their tracks, and shooting down the panic-stricken survivors in swathes. Over four hundred of the Germans died within those few minutes and the two battalions as such had virtually ceased to exist. In all, the episode provided such a convincing demonstration of the value of armour, mobility and inter-Service co-operation, that it is difficult to understand upon what grounds they were so long denied.

  The gains won for the Germans by this last spasm of the Michael offensive did not remain in their hands for many hours. Shortly after 10 p.m. that night, a counterattack by one British and two Australian brigades, made in fitful moonlight and with the aid of a few isolated light batteries, swept up to the outskirts of Villers-Bretonneux, and in two hours of street-fighting with bomb and bayonet, cleared the town.

  In the morning, the front lines of both armies were virtually in the same positions as they had been twenty-four hours before. Only the wrecked tanks, the shattered, smoking buildings and the torn bodies weeping their blood into the impartial earth, told of the battle that had been fought.

  Thus Michael died – to be followed within a few days by Georgette.

  They had between them won a greater area of Allied territory for the Central Powers than all the attacks made by both sides on the Western Front during 1915, 1916 and 1917 added together. Yet they had failed to win victory. Only the graveyards, the hospitals and the prison camps benefited – if benefit can be said to accrue to such negations of life.

  Since March 21st, 28,128 soldiers of the Allied Powers had been killed, and 56,639 of the Central Powers; while respectively 181,338 and 252,186 nursed their wounds in hospitals, and the prison camps and lists of missing accounted for 330,000 more, 290,000 of whom were British or French. These figures, like all the dreary numbers in statistical tables, have been added and divided, sub-divided and subtracted, affirmed and denied in a hundred different permutations in order to support or condemn one or other theory of war.

  But taken as they stand, they tell the tale of human folly in terms of human suffering.

  Neither was to receive an even temporary check.

  6. Crisis:

  The Battle of Chemin-des-

  Dames

  WHEN in 1916 Hindenburg had assumed the position of Chief of the General Staff of the Field Armies, there had been some difficulty in deciding how the key figure in the partnership – Ludendorff – should be called. He had solved the problem himself by selecting the title of First Quartermaster-General – a traditional post in the Prussian Army which had, in fact, never been particularly concerned with logistical problems. Nevertheless, if Ludendorff’s duties, and more especially his powers, ranged far wider than those of even the most exalted storekeeper, the title in its generally accepted sense was by no means inapt.

  Ludendorff looked like a quartermaster. Moreover the class from which he came – solid and bourgeois middle-class – has produced the bulk of the quartermasters of this world, and it is possible that so far from breaking the tradition, Ludendorff was in reality nothing but the most brilliant offspring of his social milieu. All the qualities of the perfect quartermaster seem to have been his – integrity, industry, an immense capacity for detail, great powers of concentration and a fundamental ignorance of the world apart from his own. Above all, he possessed supreme competence – which is the most one can expect from a quartermaster, and a great deal more than one usually gets.

  Human nature being as it is, we rarely accord to those who possess an efficiency beyond our own, very much in the way of sympathy or compassion when, despite their earnest and worthy efforts, their plans miscarry. Genius tormented by capricious Fate is tragedy: honest endeavour mocked by Fortune sends us uncaring on our way, slightly relieved that we have now an excellent excuse for not trying harder ourselves.

  Ludendorff in 1918 was made much sport of by an extremely fickle Fortune. Twice his carefully laid and meticulously prepared projects had received at their outset such gratuitous and unexpected opportunities as to tempt him onwards to greater hazards than he had originally intended, only to lead him to final frustration. History has not accorded him much sympathy – one notable authority has even dubbed him the Robot Napoleon, an epithet hardly calculated to inspire memorial devotions.

  Perhaps he tried too hard to cover his bets.

  On April 17th, two days before the lull in the Lys battle, he had issued orders for the group of armies under the Crown Prince to prepare for the possibility of yet another large-scale offensive, this time against the French, in the area adjacent to the southern edge of the now moribund St. Quentin attack. It was here that the original line of the Western Front had curved around from a roughly north-south orientation to west-east, before commencing its sixty-mile straight run to Verdun.

  Here lay the Chemin-des-Dames.

  Although the name referred originally only to a road, usage and time had combined to extend the area covered by the appellation until it embraced the whole of a fifteen-mile long, deeply ravined ‘hog’s back’ ridge, lying between the River Aisne (to the south) and the Ailette (a tributary of the Oise), along the northern edge of which lay the German line. The French held the ridge, and had done since the previous October when an army under General Maistre had stormed it and hurled the occupants into the marshes fringing the Ailette below. For reasons which do not appear obvious the French now considered that the whole position need not be held in great strength, as its natural features rendered it completely impregnable. This was the quiet front to which the five British divisi
ons who had been battered on the Somme and then even more cruelly mangled on the Lys, were to be sent in due course to rest and recover their strength and morale.

  As reports upon the preparations made by the armies of the Crown Prince reached Ludendorff, coinciding with his growing realization of the opportunities still open to him for victory against the British in the Flanders plain now that the weather promised the essential firm ground for attack, his mind began to run on much the same lines as it had done a month previously. The most favourable operation in itself …’, he writes, ‘was to continue the attack on the English Army at Ypres and Bailleul. … Before we would attack here again, the enemy must become weaker.’ Having launched Georgette in order to sap the enemy’s strength away from the Amiens front and so prolong his Michael offensive, he therefore now decided to launch yet another attack in the south in order to sap their strength away from the Lys: and not only from the Lys itself, but also from the Arras front – for Haig’s staunch belief that Ludendorff wished to drive across Vimy Ridge to Béthune was by no means totally unjustified.

  Ludendorff was acutely aware that time was on the side of the Allies, and that if victory eluded him for too long the arrival of the American armies would deny it to him completely. It was thus essential for him to retain the initiative, and once stagnation engulfed Georgette as it had done Michael, then the only way in which he could do this was to launch a third offensive somewhere.