1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  The night of August 7th/8th was moonless and fine, after a hot, cloudless day; and towards 3 a.m. – as on the night of March 21st – a ground mist began to form in the river valleys, gradually thickening and spreading out over the whole plateau. Under its cloak, the eastward movement of the spearhead force into their final positions was concluded, and by 3 a.m., from the banks of the Ancre in the north down across the Somme and past Villers-Bretonneux to the Luce, waited the British and Dominion troops, with the tanks a thousand yards to the rear. South of the Luce were the troops of the French First Army under General Debeney, who despite orders from Foch that his whole army was to advance frontally with the main attack, had decided that protection of the Canadians’ right flank by his own left-hand divisions was the maximum role it could play. In view of the total absence of tanks on the French sector, this decision was wise.

  © CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962

  Twelve minutes before zero hour, the tanks began rumbling forward, guided through the thick mist by white marker tapes laid out to direct them through the infantry positions, while above, the air squadrons circled and swooped, roaring low over the German lines, effectively deafening the troops and diverting their attention.

  At 4.20 a.m. – with still an hour to go before dawn – the artillery opened fire, a creeping barrage crashed down two hundred yards in front of the attack infantry, while steel and high explosive shattered known German gun-positions further afield. After two minutes, the barrage lifted forward another hundred yards, and after another two minutes, a further hundred yards.

  Behind the barrage, the Canadians on the right, the Australians in the centre and the British on the left moved forward, the ranks of the Dominion troops dotted along the whole length of their line by the squat, frightening, mastodon shapes of the fighting tanks.

  The Allied advance to the Rhine had begun.

  As with Mangin’s attack on July 18th, the initial thrust forward was successful along its entire length. Shaken by the sudden impact of the assault, blinded by the fog, and panic-stricken by the sounds of clanking armour which seemed to come from everywhere in front, the German troops were ripe for surrender or flight many minutes before the Dominion infantry came storming at them out of the murky, flame-shot darkness. Even the German machine-gunners – deservedly recognized as some of the toughest-minded troops of any army – succumbed to an understandable psychological reaction, and wasted precious time and ammunition in vain attempts to stop the tanks, upon whose armour their bullets rained with tremendous clatter but small effect, while the Australians and Canadians closed in from uncovered angles.

  The fog also caused confusion among the attackers, and for the first two hours they fought their way forward more as isolated units – like the fingers of many hands – than as a broad, co-ordinated fighting front, and if this was unintended it was also successful, and when light came, the sections of the attack soon linked up again. By 8 a.m., the first objectives along the whole length of the front between the Somme and the Amiens–Roye road had been obtained, and on the left flank the Australian 4th and 5th Divisions came up, passed through the positions already gained by their 2nd and 3rd Divisions, and pressed forward towards the second objective.

  ‘When a machine-gun post gave trouble,’ wrote the Official Historian, ‘the infantry lay down whilst a tank tackled it; in most cases the crew surrendered as the machine came near, or fled.’

  Not always, however, and in the village of Marcelcave, six machine-gun posts so enfiladed the flank of the Australian advance that they were held up for some time. It took one of the Male Mark V tanks nearly half an hour to eliminate these posts, each one of which fought until it was either crushed beneath the tank tracks or received a direct hit from one of the tank’s six-pounder guns: after which the tank commander handed over the village to the accompanying infantry, having duly received from them an authorized receipt.

  In the centre, the Canadian 4th Division passed through the positions of their 3rd Division on the line of their second objective – which had been reached by 11 a.m. – and as they advanced, they were overtaken by thirty Mark V Star Tanks, each of which carried two infantry machine-gun sections in addition to their crews. These tanks in turn passed through the infantry with the idea of pressing immediately forward to the third objective, dropping the machine-gun sections and then returning to aid the general advance – but unfortunately for this otherwise far-seeing project, the tanks ran into the fire of an unscathed and heroically manned German battery, and as by this time there was neither surprise nor darkness to aid them, only eleven of the tanks reached their objective. Here – as on the Australian front where a similar experiment was being tried out – it was found that the machine-gunners were so exhausted by the heat and fumes inside the tank that they were in no state to take full advantage of their positions behind the enemy lines.

  Another operation of enterprise and initiative, however, had been crowned with the success it deserved. Shortly before the 4th Australian Division had reached its second objective, an armoured-car battalion came up and its endeavours to assist the infantry revealed a weak patch in the German defence. Probing forward, the sixteen cars passed rapidly through a light artillery barrage, and before its commander could be assailed by doubts as to his orthodoxy of behaviour, he found his command rapidly approaching a convoy of enemy horse-drawn transport. The leading cars immediately opened fire, causing the head of the column to try to turn about, with the result that confusion and at the end chaos, engulfed the convoy. The armoured-cars swept down, their machine-guns raking the blocked and tangled traffic, killing the drivers and causing the horses to rear and bolt across country with their wrecked and disintegrating waggons bumping and crashing behind them.

  Soon afterwards the cars reached a crossroads where they diverged right and left, those to the left racing into the village of Proyart where they shot up more enemy transport, set supply and ammunition waggons alight and left a trail of dead and wounded behind when they vacated the village ten minutes later.

  The cars that had gone south were even luckier. They reached the village of Framerville where they surprised a German Corps Headquarters at lunch in one of the houses. A fusillade of machine-gun bullets brought the meal to a hasty end, and as the Staff ran in panic from the building, they were hunted through the village and shot down like coursed hares: while this happened, the crew of one of the cars ransacked the headquarters building and removed all interesting-looking documents, including a detailed plan of the Hindenburg defence system which was to prove extremely useful in the relatively near future.

  The cars patrolled the area for the remaining hours of daylight and then returned to their own lines, having at last been given the opportunity to justify their existence on the Western Front. For many of their critics this was indeed an unhappy day, for these vehicles needed only lower reduction gears and wide pneumatic tyres to be enabled to take over completely all duties hitherto carried out on the field of battle by the Cavalry Corps.

  That this arm had become obsolete on the day the first efficient machine-gun was manufactured, had been once more convincingly demonstrated. Its role, in theory, had been to pour through the gaps torn in the enemy defences by the infantry and tanks, exploiting the breakthrough by wrecking the enemy’s rear communications. This they attempted to do when the Australians and Canadians reached their second objectives – and in those places where they found gaps between isolated machine-gun posts, they undoubtedly made satisfactory progress. But this progress became increasingly disjointed – for the horsemen were completely helpless against any form of concentrated fire which could be directed at them from as much as a quarter of a mile away, and a platoon of riflemen could bar the road to a cavalry brigade, if necessary, so long as daylight lasted and their flanks remained secure.

  Thus on this occasion, the only progress the cavalry could make in any specific direction was that across country cleared for them by the attached Whippet tank companies, a co-operation w
hich proved wholly unsatisfactory as the Whippets could only move at eight miles an hour. When there was no opposition, therefore, the cavalry raced ahead, but the moment fire from emplacements was opened upon them they had perforce to retire until Whippets came up to clear the way – and in the meantime, their situation was uncomfortable to a degree, because horsemen, unlike infantry, cannot lie down under cover. One would have thought that from four years’ experience of modern warfare, this fact could have been previously appreciated.

  By the time the Cavalry Corps reached the third objective – which they did, in general, just before the infantry arrived – it was obvious that only total failure confronted them if they tried to press further forward against a noticeably hardening defence. Despite their orders to advance to a line some seven miles ahead, one divisional commander now claimed that he had not received confirmation of those orders, and the other declared loyally that he could not advance on his own – although whether his loyalty was to his men or to his fellow member of the Cavalry Club is uncertain.

  It cannot, in all frankness, be said that these men were anything but wise – and it must have been a great disappointment to them that, after sitting on their horses for four years bemoaning the lack of that open warfare in which they had thought to distinguish themselves and bring added glories to their arm, they found themselves unable to do so when opportunity apparently presented itself.

  The commanders of the Whippet tanks were even more furious, as they had been held back near Amiens with the cavalry until well after zero hour, and not all were able to catch up with the main battle. One did, however, the somewhat winsomely named ‘Musical Box’, and its story has passed into Tank Corps history.

  Some two hours after watching the cavalry unit he was supposed to be escorting gallop bravely off into the distance, and shortly after he had overtaken the infantry and passed through them, the attention of the Whippet commander, Lieutenant Arnold, was drawn to a battle raging between some Mark V tanks and a German artillery unit. Two Mark Vs were already out of action, one with tracks blown off, the other holed and burning, and in order to divert a similar fate from the others, Arnold drove at full speed diagonally across the front of the German battery, spraying the gun-positions liberally from his machine-guns as he did so. He reached the sanctuary of a small belt of trees, doubled back behind them and attacked the battery from the rear, killing the gun-crews and thus releasing the heavier and slower-moving tanks for action further afield.

  He then found two cavalry patrols held up by rifle-fire on the edge of a cornfield, and removed their opposition for them by driving over the rifle-pits, after which he ran along the southern bank of the Amiens–Chaulnes railway until he found yet another cavalry patrol, this time blocked by a machine-gun post firing over the parapet of one of the bridges. He drove his Whippet up the bank and on to the line, clearing the gun-post from the bridge as he crossed it.

  He was by now completely alone, and, one gathers, enjoying himself hugely. According to his map, he was only a mile or so from a small valley reputed to contain huts in which were billeted a substantial number of German troops, and when a few minutes later he arrived there, he found many of these hastily packing their kits preparatory to evacuation. Those not immediately killed were pursued until completely dispersed, after which Arnold pressed on eastwards, undaunted but extremely uncomfortable, for he carried spare petrol in tins lashed to the tank’s roof and these had now been perforated. Petrol ran down inside the tank, flooding the floor, and filling the constricted space with fumes to such an extent that Arnold and his driver and gunner were all compelled to breathe through their box respirators. As the heat inside the tank was increasing all the time, there must have been some speculation in their minds as to the growing fire risk.

  By 2 p.m., ‘Musical Box’ was some way in advance of all except the armoured-car units, (operating some two miles away to the north) and Arnold was now presented with the same type of targets as those which had first attracted the attention of the armoured-car commander – roads packed with transport.

  For almost another hour, he cruised along the roadsides, shooting up lorries, killing or so frightening the horses that they bolted, killing the packed infantry – but his tank was itself the target of such concentrated rifle-fire that the spare petrol-tanks were riddled, the tank itself so swamped inside and out with petrol, that it was only a matter of time before a spark ignited it.

  The end came just before 3 p.m. – by which time Arnold and his crew had spent nearly ten hours inside the torrid confines of their tank. A light field-gun opened fire upon them, and a glancing blow from one of the shells was all that was required; the Whippet became a flaming cauldron. Arnold managed to force the door open and drag out the other two members of his crew, who were practically unconscious, but as they recovered in the fresh air, they became aware that their clothing was alight, that they stood in the middle of a growing pool of flaming petrol, and that they were still under fire.

  As they staggered out of immediate danger and began rolling on the ground to extinguish the flames from their clothing, they were surrounded by infuriated Germans, who killed the driver, kicked the other two unmercifully as they lay on the ground, and subjected them to considerable brutality until they were taken over by other authorities. Even then Arnold’s treatment did not improve, as he refused to answer questions, and was struck in the face for his recalcitrance and then imprisoned in solitary confinement for five days before being taken to a properly organized prison camp.

  This in itself was a revealing piece of evidence of the decline of enemy morale, for such treatment is usually the result of anger and hatred, which in turn is caused by fear. There were many more instances of unusually harsh treatment of Allied prisoners taken about this time, giving good grounds for believing that by now confidence throughout the armies of the Central Powers was on the wane.

  Certainly Ludendorff was shocked when on the following day he appraised the results of the fighting of August 8th.

  Fifteen miles of his front had been stove in, with a maximum penetration of seven miles in the centre along the whole ten-mile stretch from Proyart in the north down to the Amiens–Roye road, while to the north and south the flanks sloped evenly back to the original start-line. In all, some hundred and ten square miles of country had changed hands, while thirteen thousand prisoners and three hundred and thirty-four guns had fallen to the Australians and Canadians. North of the Somme and south of the Amiens–Roye road, the British and the French had done little more than keep pace on their inner wings with the Dominion troops in the centre, in both cases possibly owing to lack of tanks, but on the British front owing also to organizational confusion at the beginning, plus a pronounced lack of ardour among the troops. These had been savagely mauled during the retreat from St. Quentin, and had as a result of their experiences even less faith in their command staffs than was usual; a condition possibly not unconnected with the discovery, on one of those disastrous days in March, of a divisional commander weeping disconsolately in a ditch.

  But however the British troops felt about conditions, the Germans felt far worse. Eight months had now passed since the first mass onslaught by tanks had fallen upon them at Cambrai, and their re-appearance upon the field had had the maximum psychological effect of a long-feared weapon suddenly wielded. The German troops were only too well aware of the fact that they had virtually no armoured vehicles themselves, and the sudden appearance in two different sectors of the front of hundreds of the dreaded machines, caused morale – already sagging as a result of the obvious failure of the ‘Friedensturm’ – to plummet.

  Mr. Churchill chose the day after the opening of the Amiens battle to visit his old friend Rawlinson, and two sentences of his account reveal a significant change of attitude on the part of the German soldier. Mr. Churchill had been delayed in his arrival at Fourth Army Headquarters by the endless streams of German prisoners trailing by on the hot and dusty roads.

  ‘No one who
has been a prisoner of war himself’, he wrote, ‘can be indifferent to the lot of the soldier whom the fortunes of war condemn to this plight. The woe-begone expression of the officers contrasted sharply with the almost cheerful countenances of the rank and file.’

  There were, of course, many more rank and file than officers, and troops glad to fall into enemy hands belong to a losing army. This was a point which was already impressing itself deeply into Ludendorff’s mind as he read, with growing horror, of various events which had taken place during that epochal first day of the Amiens battle. It was not so much the loss of territory, of material, or even of men, which worried him; the Allies had lost far more in all these categories every day for over a week during the March retreat, but they had not lost the war. It was an entirely different type of loss which spelt out to him the presage of doom. It was the loss of spirit.

  According to reports which reached him, six German divisions had collapsed that day in scenes unprecedented in German military legend. Companies had surrendered to single tanks, platoons to single infantrymen, and on one occasion retreating troops had hurled abuse at a division going forward resolutely to buttress the sagging line, accusing them of blacklegging and of ‘toadying to the Junkers’. These were, indeed, ominous happenings, and they sounded in Ludendorff’s already melancholy mind uncommonly like the first warning notes of disaster.

  ‘August 8th was the Black Day of the German Army …,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘It put the decline of our fighting powers beyond all doubt. The Army had ceased to be a perfect fighting instrument.’