1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  Some four miles north-east of Villers-Bretonneux lay a ridge surmounted by the ruined village of Hamel, with a small wooded area – Vaire Wood – just to the south. The ridge gave excellent observation to the Germans of the positions held by the Australian Corps, and their commander, Sir John Monash, was eager to capture it.

  Monash was a Jew – and it is indicative of his ability that despite the prejudice which existed both in military circles and in the Dominion against members of his race, he had risen to the rank he then held. As he was an engineer by profession and not a regular soldier, this feat was even more remarkable, but examination of his subsequent career provides the clue to his military success on the Western Front. After the war, he created the Victoria State electricity scheme, one of the greatest works of engineering in the world, vast in scale and a masterpiece of organization: he possessed, in fact, the ‘Big Business’ type of brain which the vast complex of the modern army had made necessary for successful command.

  For the operation, Monash was given the use of five companies of the Tank Corps, comprising sixty fighting and twelve supply tanks. There was some opposition to this in Australian circles, for their previous experience of co-operating with tanks had been limited to an unfortunate episode at Bullecourt during the previous year, when the machines had broken down, and through a tragedy of muddle and mismanagement the action had ended by the tanks firing on their own infantry.

  These tanks now being offered, however, were the new Mark Vs, and when once Monash had been convinced of their efficiency, he organized and rehearsed the whole operation in such detail that no misunderstandings could wreck the enterprise. Ten battalions of Australian infantry were to make the attack along a front of three and a half miles, against objectives which would require a penetration a mile and half deep, and as the American 33rd Division of National Guardsmen was training in the area, the offer was made and accepted for four of their companies to go forward with the Australians. ‘You’re going into action with some mighty celebrated troops …’, the American colonel announced to his men, ‘and you’ve got to get up to their level and stay there with them. There’ll be a whole heap of people looking on at you … and you’ve got to make good!’

  In the Americans’ honour, the chosen date of the attack was July 4th – a gesture which was nearly rendered vain by an order received from Pershing on the previous day that they were not to take part. They showed such disappointment, however, that the army commander, Sir Henry Wilson’s friend Rawlinson, declared that it was too late for dispositions to be altered: and according to one authority, in order to ensure that any late action taken by Pershing to enforce his will was ineffective, many of the American troops disguised themselves in Australian uniforms.

  At 3.10 a.m., by which time there was just sufficient light to distinguish friend from foe, the first wave of infantry began to move forward with the leading tanks just behind them. Gradually the tanks overtook the infantry and began to forge ahead, but the enormous noise of their engines was effectively disguised by aeroplanes flying low up and down the line of the advance, while artillery plastered Vaire Wood and Hamel with smoke and a certain amount of high explosive. As these positions had been subjected to a gas and high explosive bombardment of similar magnitude at exactly the same time each morning for the past week, the Germans were unaware of the vital difference on this particular morning until it was too late.

  In the cool, soft air of early morning, the smoke clouds billowed into fantastic shapes, occasionally lit by soaring rocket or bursting shell, but the tanks and infantry were well on the way towards their first objectives before the doomed occupants of the village and the woods realized their danger. The previous slow succession of gunfire along the German front – almost casual, irregular, countable – suddenly quickened with urgency, and the Australian lines and the areas behind were pocked with shell-fire.

  But by this time the British artillery had shortened their fire into a creeping barrage, the tanks were crunching through the German defences and the infantry were swarming through after them.

  In Vaire Wood, many of the enemy were surprised still wearing their gas-masks, and were hampered by them to such effect that they put up little defence. In Hamel, whenever the attacking infantry were held up by machine-gun nests, they waited until tanks either shot the posts to pieces or crushed them beneath their ponderous weight. Within two hours, a tricolour – placed there by an Australian officer – was flying from a roof in the farthest outskirts of the village, and when day broke completely, a growing crowd of prisoners was seen by observers in the original Australian lines, gathering on the ridge. All objectives had been gained, the first Congressional Medal of Honour to be awarded to a member of a National Guard division had been won by Corporal Thomas Pope for his action in disposing of the crew of a German machine-gun solely with his rifle and bayonet, and 1,500 prisoners had been captured, together with two field-guns and 171 machine-guns.

  Australian casualties had been 775, American 134, and the Tank Corps had lost no tanks, although five of them had been damaged and thirteen members of their crews had been wounded. And in order to ensure that these losses were not increased by a sudden successful German counterattack, pickets and wire were carried forward by the supply tanks, and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition were dropped into Hamel and Vaire Wood by parachute – the first time such an operation had ever been attempted, possibly because no one of sufficiently high rank on any of the army Staffs engaged in the war so far had possessed the imagination to think of it.

  When asked how the Americans had conducted themselves, an Australian is reputed to have replied: ‘They play a bit rough; but they’ll learn the rules in time.’

  They had made firm friends among the Dominion’s troops – and so had the Tank Corps.

  8. The Tilting Scale:

  Second Battle of the Marne

  BESIDES the instruction to hold divisions ready to send north to aid the British, Foch’s orders to Pétain (which had caused the latter’s use of his Right of Appeal to Clemenceau) had contained a tactical direction to the effect that first and second defensive positions on any part of the front should be occupied in strength as soon as an attack in that particular area was foreseen. Furthermore, in order to counteract Pétain’s pessimism and ‘defensive outlook’, Foch ordered the replacement of Pétain’s Chief-of-Staff, General Anthoine, by the younger and more ardent General Buat – an action of gratuitous disparagement in that Foch did not even pay Pétain the courtesy of a pretence at consultation about the move. There followed an exchange of letters which can have done little to smooth relations between the two men holding the highest positions in France’s army, at a time of one of her greatest crises.

  Foch’s attitude to his subordinate was doubly unfortunate in that it severely restricted the power of the man whose view of the developing situation was more nearly correct than that of any other military leader on the Allied side, and that Pétain was obviously in some disfavour offset in the eyes of the French Army, the fact that twice in the immediate past events had proved him right.

  It is one of life’s major pitfalls that the experience which age brings is almost invariably accompanied by hardening of the arteries: and the arteries are as often mental as physical. Foch had been an apostle of the ‘Spirit of the Offensive’ for such a large proportion of his life that it was impossible for him to appreciate (or perhaps to admit) that in some circumstances a manœuvre entailing a planned retreat could pay high military dividends. Conditioned by this life-long attitude of mind, he was not happy with subordinates who thought otherwise, and although his position was not yet strong enough for him to dispense with Pétain as French Commander-in-Chief, he could, nevertheless, ensure that army commanders at lower levels were more in sympathy with his own viewpoint. His recall of Mangin from virtual disgrace (brought about by the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of 1917) was an example of his intentions in this respect, as was the appointment of Buat: and he could not have been
unhappy that the French Fourth Army, holding the line eastwards from Rheims, was commanded by General Gouraud.

  Gouraud was a man very much after Foch’s heart. He had indeed become something of a legend in the French Army as a result of his personal bravery – one arm had been shattered at Gallipoli, and both his legs had been broken – and he was naturally anxious that the legend should not be besmirched. Thus when Pétain approached him during the first week of July with plans for an elastic scheme of defence upon his front, Gouraud was sufficiently outraged as to refuse outright at first to comply with them, and when Pétain persisted, to hint at an appeal to Foch over Pétain’s head.

  Pétain, however, could turn a soft answer when occasion demanded, and Gouraud had none of the egregious arrogance of a Duchesne: gradually, over the next week, Pétain brought Gouraud to see that his troops could be just as heroic beyond the range of the German artillery, and thus alive, as within the range, and dead. As, in common with most of his confrères, Gouraud had not clearly appreciated this point before, it must be said that for a man of his age, this acceptance of military reality was an intellectual advance of no mean order. And having made it, Gouraud quickly solved the purely tactical and local problems of turning his command area into a death-trap for any German troops unfortunate enough to be ordered to attack it.

  But south-west of Rheims, Pétain was not so successful in persuading either General Berthelot, commanding the French Fifth Army, or Degoutte commanding the Sixth, of the wisdom of his system of defence. This is not really surprising in the case of General Degoutte, for he commanded the forces holding the south bank of the Marne, a geographical location which had gained an almost mystical significance in the eyes of the French nation in 1914. He had only just received his command (in the place of Duchesne) and against suggestions that he begin his first battle with a voluntary withdrawal, he could, with apparent justification, point to the extreme difficulties facing any attempt by German forces to breach his forward positions, for they were guarded immediately in front by the river – eighty yards across at that point, and flowing fast. There were no bridges across it now, and marshes on the northern bank would surely slow the attacking troops, and thus allow his own front-line machine-gunners and massed riflemen to shoot them down. Faced with such arguments, and such confidence, and aware of the distinct lack of support from his immediate superior, Pétain had to be content with issuing his instructions, and turning a blind eye to their disobedience.

  So far as Berthelot, commanding the Fifth Army below Rheims, was concerned, there was little real chance of ever persuading him to adopt any plan containing the elements of success, for although not lacking himself in subtlety, he seems to have been invincibly wrong-headed. Berthelot was a large, corpulent man, much given in summer to spending his entire working day still clad only in his nightshirt, and he shares History’s booby prize with Sir Henry Wilson in that they were both almost invariably wrong in their military judgements, with a consistency which would be appealing had it not been so dangerous. Wilson’s position had been such that he could be wrong more often, but Berthelot’s errors were always greater in degree, as was typified in a discussion between the two men on September 12th, 1914. They were considering – five weeks after the outbreak of the war – how soon the Allied armies would fling those of the Central Powers back across the German frontier. Wilson’s conjecture was four weeks, whereupon Berthelot rated him for undue pessimism and announced firmly that French troops would cross the Rhine by the end of the month.

  In the face of such ingenuousness, Pétain’s plans for a yielding and elastic defence on the eastern flank of the Marne bulge – along the line running south-west from Rheims to Château Thierry – met with little response, and so the French and Italian divisions under Berthelot, and the French and American divisions under Degoutte, were to be packed into position to act as compressed cannon-fodder for the German artillery barrages, with tragic results for themselves and considerable danger to the Allied cause.

  It was fortunate that on the western flank of the Marne bulge, between the front opposite Soissons and Château Thierry, there was no need for Pétain to suggest a voluntary yielding of territory, as here waited the French Tenth Army, under the ferocious Mangin, with to his south the left-hand divisions of the Sixth Army under Degoutte. Mangin was no more likely in the circumstances to fall in with plans entailing retreat on the west than Berthelot or Degoutte were on the east, but by now it had become quite obvious that only the eastern sector of the front was under immediate threat, so the offensive characters of Mangin and Degoutte could be put to good use between Soissons and Château Thierry.

  Pétain’s plan to block Ludendorff’s intentions was divided into three phases. Firstly, the absorption of the German attack east and south of Rheims by elastic defence; secondly the attack by reserves, held in readiness, on the four sides of the two pockets formed as a result of this elasticity; and thirdly, when sufficient German reserves had been drawn into the pockets, by the launching of an attack on the west flank of the Marne bulge by Mangin’s army which, at the very least, should cut Ludendorff’s only supply route.

  Given complete success, Mangin’s force might drive through Soissons and straight across the base of the Marne salient, to fall upon the rear of the German armies, trapped in the pockets made by their own offensives.

  If this plan demanded coolness of nerve to put into execution, it also needed larger forces than were immediately available under Pétain’s command. As had happened before, he looked to Foch to provide them – from the British front.

  Although Foch was unreceptive to realities which challenged his basic military outlook, he was always prepared to change his mind with regard to the day-to-day prosecution of the war.

  On June 16th, believing that Flanders would be the area of the next German offensive, he had ordered the return to Haig’s command of all British divisions south of the Somme, including those guarding the Franco–British joint behind Amiens and also the battered remnants of the five divisions whose period of convalescence on the Chemin-des-Dames had been so brusquely curtailed. By the end of June, however, he was ready to issue a directive pointing out that Paris was still in great danger and that a concentration of force should be held ready to defend the capital from both north and east, while five days later, after an interview with Pétain, he was so far persuaded towards the truth that he instructed Pétain to reinforce the Champagne area, south-east of Rheims.

  At this point, he was obviously receptive to Pétain’s pleas for greater strength, and so on July 11th, Pétain was authorized to draw reserves from the Amiens area, while Foch appealed again to the British for four divisions with which to cover once more the Franco–British joint. Two days later, he sent again to Haig’s headquarters with a further request that the four divisions already on their way should now be placed immediately under Pétain’s orders for use in the battle to come, while yet another four divisions came south to take their place astride the Somme, and at Amiens.

  It is greatly to Haig’s credit that he immediately approved the movement of six of the eight divisions which had been requested, and merely asked that the movement of the remaining two should await the outcome of a meeting between himself and Foch on July 15th. For it had become increasingly obvious of late that if Ludendorff’s first thrust would endeavour to strike down through the Champagne front, it would be quickly followed by a hammer blow by Prince Rupprecht’s Group of armies, aimed at smashing the Flanders front to pieces against the Channel coast. Haig’s action in stripping his front of reserves at this particular moment was thus a striking testimony to his loyalty to the spirit of the Doullens and Beauvais Agreements, despite the fact that he had himself not benefited from them to the extent to which he had hoped.

  Many months after the war had ended, a distinguished ex-member of the German General Staff wrote that after the attack across the Chemin-des-Dames, ‘the Supreme Command renounced further plans for a decisive battle, and made other
diversive offensives in the hope of something turning up.’

  If this judgement is unduly harsh upon Ludendorff, it is nevertheless probable that it contains some elements of truth; for in the planning, mounting and delivery of the last German offensive, Ludendorff’s grip upon events was uncertain.

  He made several fatal errors.

  Possibly his greatest was with regard to morale, for he allowed the attack to be christened ‘Friedensturm’ – ‘Peace Offensive’ – and encouraged the belief that this was the final stroke which would win the war for Germany, and thus release the soldiers from their bondage of slaughter and destruction and their families at home from the grip of hunger. If this gave added impetus to the first attack, it was to reap a sorry harvest in the grim days which followed.

  But in the actual mounting of his offensives, Ludendorff disregarded two tactical factors essential for success. The first was consideration of the time element, for the battle of Noyon had ended on June 11th, while the first act of the ‘Friedensturm’ was not launched until July 15th. Granted that it was vast in concept – for the hammer-blow against the British in Flanders was to be delivered five days after the Rheims onslaught, and as such had been considered as an integral part of the plan – but time aids the defender more than the attacker, especially when the defender can watch the attacker’s every move, and prepare himself accordingly.

  For the second tactical factor which Ludendorff ignored was the provision of a cloak of secrecy over his concentration of forces. This lapse is the more difficult to understand in view of the exceptional pains he had taken in his first three offensives, to mask his strength and as far as possible his intention; and from this failure of concealment it may well be concluded that his mental and physical faculties were weakening under the enormous strain they had recently borne, and that he was no longer capable of retaining the initiative.