by Barrie Pitt
There is a wealth of significance in that last sentence. To a Commander capable of believing that any Army could be a ‘perfect instrument’ – composed as it is of frail humanity – the first signs of serious infirmity in his own, will come as a considerable shock: and possibly owing to the narrowness of Ludendorff’s knowledge and experience, he lacked mental resilience. That the German Army had suffered a defeat and that some of its elements had failed to uphold its highest military traditions were undoubtedly facts of high importance: but their effect upon Ludendorff was infinitely more so.
This was the crisis.
The most significant event of 1918 did not occur on the field of battle. It occurred in Ludendorff’s office – for as he read the reports of the fighting of August 8th, he began to believe that his Army was breaking up from within.
And history is made in men’s minds.
It was not, of course, very long after the conclusion of his lunch with Rawlinson that Mr. Churchill was making his way across the newly captured ground in order to observe the battle at closer quarters. (‘Cavalry cantered as gaily over the reconquered territory,’ he remarks with scathing innocence, ‘as if they were themselves the cause of victory.’) In the late afternoon he reached the scene of what was, in fact, a dying battle.
Only one hundred and forty-five tanks had been found to be still serviceable on the morning of August 9th, and although the crews of these were just as keen to push forward as were the Dominion infantry who accompanied them, they were to do so under two major handicaps. Firstly, there was no carefully prepared and beautifully dovetailed plan for the second day’s fighting as there had been for the first, and secondly, the tanks very soon found themselves upon the edge of the torn and devastated area of the old Somme battlefields, with its maze of derelict trenches and its forests of rusty wire, which if no handicap to the tanks would still delay the supporting infantry. Moreover, it must be remembered that the tank crews had no body of past experience upon which to draw: they were, in fact, the men making the mistakes from which others might reap benefit.
As a result, the progress on the second day of the battle was spasmodic and uneven, and in the face of the German reaction to the previous day’s fighting it is a matter for wonder that any occurred at all. Three German divisions had arrived to hold the rear defence line by the evening of August 8th, three more came up during the night and three more by mid-afternoon of the 9th – while the only force attacking them was still the one which had begun moving forward thirty-six hours before, and its members were by now very short of sleep. They were also outnumbered, and their superiority thus lay solely with the diminishing tank force.
In all, an average advance of three miles was made on this second day of the attack by the British and Dominion troops, but further south, the French General Debeney now threw his right-hand divisions into action, thus widening the front by some fifteen miles. The French troops also made some advance – of varying depth – together with the delightful (and illuminating, if only they had realized its implications) discovery that Ludendorff had evacuated Montdidier during the previous night. Examination of the map, and a comparison with the events of the July 31st and August 1st between Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois, would have been revealing had anyone cared to make it.
And on the third day of the attack (August 10th) although a fresh British division was brought up through the tired but still aggressive Australians and Canadians, there was an advance of rather less than a mile – and that only in the centre, for there were but sixty-seven tanks now left in action, and the immutable laws of the Western Front applied to British advances just as much as to those of Germany.
These laws were not, of course, ones of which Foch was prepared to take cognizance. At 11 a.m. on this third day of the attack, he met Haig in order to urge further reinforcement of that section of the front which was already close up against an almost rock-hard defence, while he for his part ordered Debeney to continue to attack on the right, with an even further extension of the front by Humbert’s French Third Army (still in the Noyon cleft). Haig countered – possibly through force of habit – with a suggestion that, instead, the British Third and First Armies to the north should take up the offensive, to which Foch enthusiastically agreed – so long as Rawlinson’s Fourth Army kept up the pressure as well in order to force the Germans back across the upper Somme, and thus recapture Péronne. Constant frontal attacks everywhere would seem to have been the limit of Foch’s military imagination, and the idea of turning a line, rather than steamrollering over it, seems never to have occurred to him.
But by August 11th, Rawlinson knew that so far as his own front was concerned, the law of diminishing returns was in operation, and he managed to persuade Haig – who visited him that morning – of the realities of the situation; not, in fairness to Haig, that much persuasion was needed.
That evening, the battle of Amiens came officially to its end from the point of view of the British Fourth Army – and as Debeney’s French First Army was short of ammunition for its artillery, the fighting stopped on the right flank as well. The tanks were withdrawn, the Australians began to dig in, and the Canadians – as a result of orders issued by Haig before he left Rawlinson’s Headquarters – to withdraw.
For at last it had been realized – by some of the Allied commanders at least – that to continue an attack when once resistance had hardened, was a useless waste of lives.
There ensued during the next few days between Foch and Haig, the most serious difference of opinion of the whole period of their co-operation. The fact that acrimony was never exchanged between them might possibly have been due to the fact that neither spoke the other’s language sufficiently well – but despite the urbanity of the exchanges, Haig remained so inflexibly opposed to an immediate renewal of attack by Rawlinson’s Army, that Foch was in the end forced to give way.
This Foch did the more gracefully, because on August 12th Sir Julian Byng reported that opposite the front of his British Third Army, it would seem that the Germans were thinning out and actually in the process of a limited withdrawal. There seemed, therefore, to be excellent prospects for another offensive between Albert and Arras, directed towards Bapaume, but Byng insisted that despite the Supreme Commander’s wishes, the attack could not be delivered before August 21st. So Foch, unwilling to wait but unable to stampede the stubborn British, issued orders direct to the one man of whom he could be confident of prompt obedience – Mangin.
As a result, on August 18th, the French Tenth Army carried out a local operation immediately north of Soissons – which did little, in fact, but send the opposing German troops to their battle positions. But on the 20th, the Butcher drove his armies two miles forward to capture eight thousand prisoners and two hundred guns, and to establish themselves on the heights between the Aisne and the Oise – from which position they constituted a distinct menace to the whole of Ludendorff’s position along the north bank of the Vesle.
One of the chief objections to the philosophy which holds that the end justifies the means, is that so often they bear such little relationship to each other, Foch’s doctrine that everyone should attack everywhere all the time, appears so fatuous that only its complete impracticability could have prevented disaster, especially in view of the history of previous battles on the Western Front, It is thus with some chagrin that one is forced to accept that on this occasion, the happiest ends resulted from unpromising means.
From a study of the August battles, one could easily assume that at last the value of time in military affairs had been fully appreciated. On August 8th, the Fourth Army had attacked at Villers-Bretonneux and advanced ten miles before the battle ended on the 11th. On August 9th, Debeney’s right wing had attacked and taken Montdidier, while the following day Humbert’s French Third Army – one stage further south – advanced towards Noyon and succeeded in liberating Lassigny in fighting which lasted until the 16th. And on the 18th, Mangin struck on Humbert’s right – and took the Aisne
heights on the 20th.
Each attack had been broken off as soon as it had lost its initial impetus, by which time another attack had been launched near enough in location to the one preceding it to profit from its successes – and again continued only until resistance stiffened to such a point that further attacks would be unprofitable. Had this series of operations been carefully prepared and guided throughout by a shrewd directing brain, it could not have presented a more perfect picture of the only technique which was practicable in the conditions which reigned, and with the weapons which were available, on the Western Front in 1918.
Yet although every one of these attacks – even Rawlinson’s – had been launched largely on Foch’s insistence, every one had been broken off in spite of it, that of the French Armies usually through lack of ammunition. Poor logistics had thus combined with poorer tactics to produce gratifying success – and as, while Mangin’s army fortified itself in its new positions on the Aisne, Byng’s British Third Army was making ready to attack north of Albert (on August 21st), the impetus was being maintained, the ball – to use a simile frequently on Foch’s lips, although usually with singular irrelevance – was being kept rolling.
To give added weight to Byng’s thrust towards Bapaume, nearly two hundred tanks had been hastily assembled – a total only achieved by the re-issue of Mark IVs to battalions whose Mark Vs had been destroyed in front of Amiens. Once again, there was no warning bombardment, only a creeping barrage behind which tanks and infantry advanced, and their task to begin with was so easy that one historian has described progress as an ‘amble forward’, while another states that their only hindrance was provided by the early morning mist.
But when the mist lifted, the situation changed considerably. The attackers then found themselves close up against the main resistance line to which Ludendorff had withdrawn his troops during the previous fortnight, and they suffered accordingly during the remainder of the day. As a result, there was little sign of aggression from the British on the following morning, for they had wisely decided to await the arrival into new positions of their field artillery, before attempting further progress. And in his attempts to discover the reason for the lull in the attack, the local German commander made a curious, and to him heartening, discovery: fifty per cent of Byng’s infantry could well be described as ‘boys’ – and undernourished ones at that, for they consisted largely of those troops hastily rushed out to France after a most inadequate training in Britain, in response to the emergencies created by the St. Quentin and Lys battles. For many of them this was, in fact, their first taste of action.
Thus encouraged, the Germans brought up close reserves and launched one of their more aggressive counterattacks – which ran headlong into point-blank fire from the field artillery, then arriving on the scene with a fortunate but unusual timeliness. Despite heavy casualties, the counterattack was pressed until it was finally broken – and indeed, flung back – by the unyielding defence of the ‘boys’, who had had time by now to dig themselves in and who were armed, not only with an adequate supply of machine-guns, but also with their own ignorance augmented by an as yet unshaken faith in their leaders. By nightfall the Germans were back in their own lines, leaving their dead to utter the battlefield, and feelings of considerable satisfaction to hearten their enemies.
And while counterattack and repulse had raged along a fifteen-mile front north of Albert, Rawlinson had moved his left flank forward south of Albert – between Albert and the Somme – thus straightening the line between the advanced positions reached by the Canadians and Australians in the centre of his front, and the new positions reached on his left by Byng’s army, recapturing Albert at the same time.
Thus the front line of the two armies was made continuous – running on the evening of August 22nd along the edge of the old Somme battlefield, upon which had fallen two years before the elder brothers, the uncles, and often the fathers of those boys who now lay waiting to attack across it once more. Thiepval, Pozières, Martinpuich, High Wood and Delville Wood, Bazentin and Mametz – all those places whose names had passed into British history during the summer of 1916 were now again to be the scene of a British assault.
© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962
There were, however, important differences between the prospects then and now. If time and occasion had reduced many of the villages in the Somme Valley to little but rubble-strewn and cratered wildernesses, they had also affected the morale and calibre of the German troops who sought to defend themselves there – and their numbers had been drastically reduced by the abortive counterattacks they had just been called upon to deliver. So when the ‘boys’ of the Third Army rose from their trenches at 4.45 a.m. on the morning of August 23rd – still triumphant from their success of the previous afternoon – they faced an opposition far less grimly determined than that which had shot down 60,000 of their predecessors in a single hour two years before. All day long the pressure on the German line kept up, and by evening, the twelve divisions of Byng’s army had advanced in places as much as three miles – taking over five thousand prisoners in the process – whilst Rawlinson’s Australian divisions had attacked south of the Somme again, and were punching forward towards Chaulnes and the river line beyond, where it ran south from Péronne. Everywhere the Germans had gone back, and no counterattack by them had been attempted.
August 23rd was thus another ‘Black Day’ for the German Army, during which, according to Ludendorff, one division completely disintegrated, while the effect upon several others he considered to have been disastrous. Nevertheless, neither that day nor later did the German line break, and once well within the web of trenches of the old battlefields the veteran infantry, stiffened as usual by their machine-gunners, fought with great skill until either overrun or out-manœuvred.
Usually they were out-manœuvred – for if the British army commanders were learning the value of outflanking techniques on a large scale, the infantry were just as quick to apply them in a hundred tiny, individual instances. The web of trenches which sheltered enemy posts also surrounded them, and during the days following August 23rd, the entire British line from the Amiens-Roye road in the south up as far as the bastion of Arras in the north, edged inexorably forward, as the young soldiers of Byng’s Army cannily threaded their way between the strongpoints. Those German troops who would not retreat were surrounded and either killed or captured – and a significantly large fraction now preferred to surrender than to die an heroic death for a failing Fatherland.
Then on August 26th, the line of attack was further lengthened as the British First Army – with the Canadian Corps once more lining the Vimy Ridge – joined in the battle, extending it northward to beyond Arras, driving forward until it reached the northern hinge of the Siegfried Position. And here, for the moment, it paused, for the onslaught upon this deep system of fortifications, stretching from Arras right the way down past the Flesquières Salient and St, Quentin to la Fère, was not one to be undertaken without much thought and considerable preparation. There were many men in London and in France who thought that it should not be undertaken at all, but that some method of outflanking even this barrier could be found.
But although the Siegfried Position was over fifty miles long, it was itself only a part of a much longer defensive system. Northwards for thirty miles as far as Lille, it was extended by the Wotan Position (known to the British as the Drocourt–Quéant Switch) while to the south, the Alberich, Brunehilde, Kriemhilde and Michel Positions took it in varying degrees of apparent impregnability right down as far as Metz.
On the face of it, it would seem that outflanking sweeps could only be made through the narrow gap between the Ypres front and the sea in the north, or between the St. Mihiel Salient and the Swiss border in the south, and neither of these fronts was wide enough to permit the passage of sufficient troops to encircle a defensive system some hundred and eighty miles long, at a time when the speed of advance was still dictated by the rate at which the infantry could ma
rch.
Even Haig’s newly acquired instinct for economy of force could inspire at the moment no better plan for future operations than that of an attempt to smash a way directly through the Siegfried Line – and his appreciation of the time values (also newly acquired, or at least lately renewed) told him that it must be quickly mounted if the enemy were not to be given the chance of consolidating the line once they reached it.
Except opposite Arras, however, the Germans were still falling back on the Line, as the British Third and Fourth Armies slowly forced shut the door which had been flung open by Ludendorff’s Michael attacks in March; and during the last week in August the pressure was maintained, heavy and unrelenting. From German accounts, each day was ‘spent in bloody fighting against an ever and again on-storming enemy, and nights passed without sleep in retirements to new lines’. By August 29th, Byng’s Army was past Bapaume to both north and south – with the result that the town was evacuated during the night – and Rawlinson’s Australians reached the Somme below Péronne. Further south still, the French First Army under Debeney was only slightly behind Rawlinson’s right wing, and beyond them again, Humbert’s French Third Army hinged forward, its own right wing resting on the advanced positions of Mangin’s army, the whole front slowly levering the Germans backwards.
From Arras in the north to Noyon in the south the battle raged as day succeeded day; and just south of the mid-point of this straight, seventy-mile long line lay Péronne, guarded from the Australians by the right-angle made by the Somme as it curved through the town.
On the evening of August 30th began the Australian assault across the Somme, directed at Péronne and the Mont St. Quentin heights which dominated the town from the north. This has been hailed as one of the most brilliant epics of the war: it was certainly one of the bloodiest, for the positions were defended by elements of five German divisions, including the 2nd Guards Division, which had been given instructions that Mont St. Quentin was not to fall.