by Lloyd, Nick
In the days before the battle, it is possible to detect the fatal signs of laziness and complacency among the German High Command. Although the few aircraft that tried to survey the Allied lines were soon brought down in flames by the powerful and ever-alert British and French air forces (that were tasked with ensuring no photographic reconnaissance could take place), suspicions gradually began to rise. Leutnant Albers remembered that they could ‘clearly hear the Tommies at work; the rattling of the engines [of the tanks] was clearly audible and had already been regularly reported to those in command’. Yet little was done. Those who did report ominous preparations on the other side of the line were told to be quiet; they were merely ‘phantoms of the imagination of nervousness’. For Marwitz and his staff, the idea of an Allied counter-attack was too painful to contemplate, so it was disregarded. Anyway, even if the reports were true, what could be done about it? Second Army was over-stretched, desperate for reinforcements and at the end of a long logistical tail.27
The Allied preparations before Amiens were a remarkable feat of care, attention to detail and sheer hard work. Statistics can provide some illustration of the scale and size of the endeavour undertaken by Rawlinson and Debeney. In Fourth Army alone, over 257,000 men and 98,000 horses had to be fed, housed and watered, while 1,242 field guns and 246 heavy guns had to be maintained and stocked with shells (600 rounds per 18-pounder and 500 rounds per 4.5 inch howitzer). This took up huge amounts of space. In the French XXXI Corps for example, nearly 8,000 tons of artillery ammunition were stacked near its batteries, enough for five days of heavy fighting.28 As well as firepower, casualty clearing stations and field hospitals were set up, leading some worried staff officers to wonder where everything was all going to fit. Fortunately, the area behind the front line was blessed with many small copses and woods, as well as valleys and sheltered areas, where large numbers of horses, supplies, guns and trucks could move up in relative secrecy. Indeed, in the run-up to Amiens almost every area of covered ground was packed with infantry, horses and tanks. Because it was feared that German aircraft would spot any purpose-built gun emplacements, batteries were simply deployed in the open, with their ammunition stacked beside them, all netted over with camouflage or covered with cut wheat. Staff officers then buzzed between the units checking that everything was in its right place and everyone where they should be; all the time hoping to God that the Germans were not about to launch a counter-bombardment.29 Originally scheduled for 10 August, an earlier date of attack was petitioned for by Currie and Haig agreed. By the evening of 7 August everything was in place.
In the final few hours before the attack Paul Maze, a liaison officer with Fourth Army, made his way forward. ‘For a while,’ he wrote:
I stood watching the progress of the troops on the Longueau–Villers-Bretonneux road, the prolonged clatter of cavalry horses reminding me of earlier days. They were marching slowly to keep within their time. I overtook infantry and tanks moving along in weird masses in the dark, following troops all the way to the Gentelles Plateau. There the ground was taped and pegged; boards indicated the way each unit was to take as far as the approach to the line, to avoid any mix-up or delay. The whole area might have been the scene of a gymkhana. Aeroplanes were droning loudly overhead so as to drown the noise of the approaching tanks. Every object looming in the darkness hid something – the woods sheltered hundreds of silent guns awaiting their signal.
Maze tried to sleep but, like many, he could not and just lay there in his tent feeling the tension gradually increase around him like the fog that gathered in the low ground. He would doze, only to be startled awake, every now and again, by the noise of a tank engine or the scream of a lone shell. ‘The atmosphere had grown hazy, the ground felt clammy. I had a hint of troops through the mist moving down the slope to their assembly position like long shadows, darker than the night. All I could see of them was their fumbling feet.’30
For the British, Australian, Canadian and French troops anxiously awaiting the order to go, the scene was one of great tension. A French officer, Colonel Grasset, remembered how ‘with the first light of dawn a deep silence’ came over the battlefield. Men had been instructed not to talk or move or leave their trenches. ‘All was very calm on the surface, but feverish work in the woods, in the camouflaged shelters, in the ruins . . .’31 The hours and minutes before the attack were always the worst; the agonizing, ticking moments of waiting before Zero Hour when you were faced with dark thoughts of death and wounding, hoping that you and your fellows would come through alive. Some relied upon charms and amulets, bracelets and lockets of hair; others prayed to God and made vows of future service if only they would survive. One veteran of the battles of 1918, T. G. Mohan, was one of those who took solace in religion. ‘Personally,’ he would later write:
I always believed that I should come through safely. God gave me an unmistakeable assurance that He would bring me out of the war, yet how I should get home I did not know. I never thought that I would be wounded. Yet in spite of this assurance I felt to be in England again was only a thing to be experienced in dreams – it seemed impossible ever to be a reality. To feel that I was standing on dear, solid old England – to look round and say – this is England . . . the sun shining, the neat little hedges and pretty little country cottages, all so beautifully clean and sweet . . . in the town to be able to read the good old English names, and understand what people were talking about, to feel safe again . . . it was all so impossible.32
Gradually time would run out. Thoughts would return to the matter in hand. Equipment would be checked once more. Final orders would be issued and the troops readied. Writing after the war, Sir John Monash would try to describe ‘the stupendous import of the last ten minutes’ before Amiens.
In the black darkness, a hundred thousand infantry, deployed over twelve miles of front, are standing grimly, silently, expectantly, in readiness to advance, or are already crawling stealthily forward to get within eighty yards of the line on which the barrage will fall; all feel to make sure that their bayonets are firmly locked, or to set their steel helmets firmly on their heads; Company and Platoon commanders, their whistles ready to hand, are nervously glancing at their luminous watches, waiting for minute after minute to go by – and giving a last look over their commands – ensuring that their runners are by their sides, their observers alert, and that the officers detailed to control direction have their compasses set and ready.33
The two Allied armies were like coiled springs, taut and alert; waiting to strike. The Hundred Days was about to begin.
3. ‘Death will have a rich harvest’
Through the fog, I saw the outline of a tank appear . . .
Hauptmann Hatzfeld1
8–10 August 1918
The Battle of Amiens began at 4.20 a.m. with the roar of over 2,000 guns, which opened up a thunderous bombardment, banishing the darkness and lighting up the horizon. One witness, Private W. E. Curtis of 10th Canadian Battalion, remembered that ‘you could have read a newspaper whichever way you looked’ because of the light from the gunfire.2 The bombardment would have been effective against hardened German positions, but against the sketchy and unfinished defences in Second Army’s sector it was devastating. Barbed wire entanglements were torn apart; trenches were pulverized; whole companies were destroyed in a fury that came from above, shells sending great geysers of white earth up into the sky. At that moment, the leading waves of eight British, Canadian and Australian divisions were moving out of their positions and making their way towards their pre-assigned objectives, shuffling in the flickering darkness along taped lines and then shaking out into extended order as they crossed no-man’s-land. To the south, another three French corps were waiting in their assault trenches, keeping their heads down as a shattering forty-five-minute bombardment pounded German positions along the River Avre.
The German defenders, many of whom were woken from an uneasy slumber by the deafening roar of the barrage, could not, at first, work out
what was happening. Thick mist covered the battlefield and masked the opening movements of the attacking troops, preventing any meaningful response. In places it was also thickened by phosphorus grenades dropped from aircraft. As soon as the British barrage began, the familiar German signal flares – red and gold – fizzed up into the sky to request artillery support, but it was in vain. By the time many of the flares had been fired, Second Army’s artillery batteries were already under a rain of iron, with the gun crews scattered by the violence and accuracy of the shelling and able to do nothing about it. Although there was some desultory retaliatory shelling about five minutes after Zero Hour, most of it fell on the support lines, thus missing the assaulting battalions. For the men of Second Army, 8 August was going to be a miserable day.
Despite the poor visibility, the opening assault went as well as could have been expected, the leading waves of the Canadian and Australian divisions sweeping forward behind their barrage and taking their objectives on time. German resistance differed across the front, ranging from non-existent to stubborn, but in many sectors, particularly those in the centre, the defending battalions were destroyed. Apart from some wild firing and the occasional shell, all that met the attacking troops was dazed clusters of German soldiers, their hands up, muttering, ‘Kamerad’. Fourth Army’s barrage was extremely heavy: a moving wall of shells, liberally sprinkled with smoke, that moved at a steady rate across the battlefield – like some kind of man-made hurricane – occasionally stopping, and then restarting exactly on time, doing everything that Rawlinson had hoped. And behind the barrage came thin lines of infantry supported by the heavy tanks, the ominous clanking and rumbling of the armoured vehicles causing many German soldiers to flee in terror. Others tried desperately to stem the attacks flooding against their positions, and Allied soldiers would sometimes glimpse their steel-helmeted foes running to and from their positions, crouching low with their Mauser rifles, their pockets stuffed full of stick grenades, desperately trying to find some cover. But before they could launch their long-cherished counter-attacks, they usually found that they were in danger of being outflanked or cut off and had to retreat.
Some German units were so badly hit by the opening salvos and the speed with which the Canadians and Australians were upon them that they had little idea what was happening. One of those who witnessed the assault was a Major Mende, commander of II Battalion of 157 Regiment (117th Division), dug in north of the Amiens–Roye road. ‘As soon as the enemy artillery fire began,’ he remembered, ‘I rushed to the telephone to inform the regiment of the attack; but the loop was already shut down. Then I ran outside to see what was going on, but it was so foggy that I could only see two steps ahead of me. I could hear quite light infantry fire, so I assumed that the attack had been driven back or was not yet underway.’ Mende could do nothing but wait for reports from his companies. He spent some time sitting nervously in his dug-out, noticing that small-arms fire had died away, but still no reports came in. He sent off despatch riders asking for news but again nothing came. An hour passed. ‘Finally, Vice Sgt. Beier of 5th Company arrived with the news that the enemy was right behind him and that his company commander had apparently been killed. Hardly had he finished speaking, than the first hand grenade flew into the dug-out.’ Mende was captured shortly afterwards.3
Others held their positions a little longer, like Leutnant Albers and his men of 43rd Reserve Division, who were captured later that morning after putting up fierce resistance against the British III Corps, which secured the left flank of the attack. At Zero Hour, they had to endure ‘murderous artillery fire’ from both field and heavy batteries for about fifteen minutes, during which they wrote their wills, crouched in their trenches or huddled in shell holes, hoping that they would survive. ‘Nothing could be seen in the thickening fog,’ he wrote. Then things began to happen. ‘The artillery fire suddenly moved further back. Screams, hand grenade explosions and the eerie noise of the tank engines was audible.’ As the sounds of tanks and the spatter of gunfire closed around their positions, they became aware that they had been cut off. Patrols were sent off to their right flank, but the line was broken and they were, as he put it, ‘just islands in a surging sea’. The question of whether they should surrender crossed his mind, but he was unsure. ‘Then we would have had to answer to the reasons for abandoning the position before the enemy.’ Albers hoped a counter-attack would relieve them, but it never came, only more and more British troops.
Unfortunately our hand grenades had all been used; there was no longer time to operate the machine gun amid the chaos. Every man fired and defended himself as well as he could. But a new wave of English arrived in force, firing pistols and throwing hand grenades and killing or wounding many of my colleagues. Completely surrounded, shot at and bombed from all sides, with resistance no longer possible, the 20 men remaining from my company had to surrender.4
Albers’s story was typical of the frantic action on that foggy morning on 8 August as German units – those ‘islands in a surging sea’ – were gradually swallowed up by the Allied tide.
Rawlinson’s two colonial corps had conducted the main punch, but the attack would be extended to the south by Debeney’s First French Army, which was aiming to take the town of Montdidier. The poilus had moved forward at 5.05 a.m. after a forty-five-minute ‘hurricane’ bombardment. By the time the leading lines of XXXI Corps had deployed, the defensive system of 14th Bavarian Division had already been shattered by the advance of the Canadian Corps on its right. In many cases, the incredible scenes witnessed on the Australian and Canadian sectors were repeated in the French zone. Apart from sporadic enemy machine-gun fire, resistance melted away and French soldiers marched across an empty battlefield, following their creeping barrage, which stopped and restarted according to timetable. As Colonel Grasset, historian of 42nd Division, remembered:
When the infantry came to a halt . . . there was no further resistance from the enemy and we would very much have liked to push further forward. But the fixed barrage which was slamming into the ground 300 metres ahead of the front line ruled out any ill-considered initiative. Like it or not, companies split up by the march and the fighting had to regroup. People relaxed. The men, joyful, chatted, ate and smoked. The officers, gathered in friendly groups, tried to take in the importance of the victory.5
Some German units, cut off and surrounded, did what they could to impede the advance, firing all the weapons they had, but gradually, with their numbers worn down by shelling and gunfire, and often out of ammunition, they too had to surrender. One who experienced the French attack was Leutnant Stürmer. At 5.45 a.m., as ‘the thundering of guns rumbled behind us like an oncoming storm’, Stürmer’s troops noticed shadowy blue shapes making their way across no-man’s-land. Soon confused firing broke out. They retreated and tried to organize a counter-attack, but it was no good. ‘The machine guns are singing, hand grenades are exploding – death will have a rich harvest . . . The right section slowly crumbled; the munitions destroyed, the trenches overrun by a superior strength,’ wrote Stürmer, who was captured around midday.6
For those behind the front line, like Bertram Howard Cox, a former bank clerk from Winnipeg, it was an exhilarating day. He was serving with the artillery, and after three hours of constant firing from his battery he was nearly deaf. ‘Within ten minutes of the start,’ he wrote, ‘the tanks, by the hundreds, and cavalry, by the thousands, were passing our guns. It made an awful pretty picture to see the tanks and cavalry looming up in the mist, over the crest, just about dawn. The field guns began to pass us at a gallop, too, not to mention the infantry by the hundreds of thousands.’ By 5 a.m. German prisoners began to reach him; grey masses filled the road, dazed, shocked, shaking with fear. ‘The thing that struck me as being most funny, was the way the prisoners would dangle right along by themselves, no escort, to the prison cage about a mile away. If there were 30 or 40 together, they would have an escort, but they mostly passed in twos or threes, all alone or four w
ould carry one of our wounded on a stretcher. We spent a considerable part of the day checking them over; getting souvenirs and talking to those who could speak English. They nearly cleaned us out of cigarettes and emptied our water bottles.’7
By the time it got light and the mist had cleared – about 8 a.m. – the sight of the battlefield was suddenly revealed. One Canadian remembered how the fighting had streamed away to the east leaving it ‘as peaceful as an Ontario landscape after a storm, whose bolts and flashes still play over the distant horizon’.8 The supporting divisions, which would leapfrog the leading units, marched across the battlefield, passing the German gun line about 9 a.m.; their officers on horseback like the old days of 1914. They would come across clusters of dead Germans or straggling columns of prisoners of war, while sometimes being passed by cavalry units, their hooves clattering noisily over the dusty roads. Sergeant Walter Downing, a 25-year-old from Portland, Victoria, was serving with 5th Australian Division. Their progress had been ‘plain sailing’. There was little enemy artillery or sniper fire and whenever they found themselves in trouble, ‘we signalled to the tanks, and they turned towards the obstacle. Then punk-crash, punk-crash! As their little toy guns spoke and their little, pointed shells flew, another German post was blown to pieces.’ He would always remember what he saw that day.
For miles and miles infantry were everywhere advancing, dotted over hill and dale on either hand as far as the eye could see. Bayonets grouped and glinted in the charge as a battalion swarmed to the storming of a town miles away. Here and there thick columns of smoke and spluttering explosions told that the enemy dumps were burning. Red roofs and white walls trembled in the hot sunshine where villages drowsed beneath their lichened elms; the crops were lemon green, the pastured hillsides of a richer verdure; double rows of poplars shadowed the long straight roads.9