by John Keegan
What the German infantry could not know, though they might guess, was that they constituted their country’s last reserve of manpower. Britain and France were in no better case, both having reduced their infantry divisions from a strength of twelve to nine battalions in the previous year, and both lacking any further human resource from which to fill gaps in the ranks. They, however, had superior stocks of material—4,500 against 3,670 German aircraft, 18,500 against 14,000 German guns, 800 against 10 German tanks—and, above all, they could look to the gathering millions of Americans to make good their inability to replace losses. Germany, by contrast, having embodied all its untrained men of military age not employed in absolutely essential civilian callings, could by January 1918 look only to the conscript class of 1900; and those youths would not become eligible for enlistment until the autumn. A double imperative thus pressed upon Hindenburg, Ludendorff and their soldiers in March 1918: to win the war before the New World appeared to redress the balance of the Old, but also to win before German manhood was exhausted by the ordeal of a final attack.
The choice of front for the final attack was limited, as it had always been for both sides, since the theatre of operations in the west had been entrenched at the end of the war of movement in 1914. The French had tried for a breakthrough in Artois and Champagne twice, in 1915, and then again in Champagne in 1917. The British had tried on the Somme in 1916 and in Flanders in 1917. The Germans had tried, in 1916, only at Verdun and then with limited objectives. For them, the era of limited objectives was over. They now had to destroy an army, the French or British, if they were to prevail, and the choice of front resolved itself into another effort at Verdun or a strike against the British. The options had been reviewed at the fateful conference at Mons on 11 November 1917. Colonel von der Schulenberg, Chief of Staff of the German Crown Prince’s Army Group, there advocated a reprise of the offensive on its front, which included Verdun, on the grounds that a defeat of the British armies, however severe, would not deter Britain from continuing the war. If France were broken, however—and the Verdun front offered the most promising locality for such an undertaking—the situation in the west would be transformed. Lieutenant Colonel Wetzell, Head of the Operations Section of the General Staff, concurred, and amplified Schulenberg’s analysis: Verdun, he said, should be the place, for a victory there would shake French morale to its roots, prevent any chance of France mounting an offensive with American help and would expose the British to a subsequent German attack.
Ludendorff would have none of it. Having heard his subordinates out, he announced that German strength sufficed for only one great blow and laid down three conditions on which it must be based. Germany must strike as early as possible, “before America can throw strong forces into the scale,” which would mean the end of February or beginning of March. The object must be to “beat the British.” He surveyed the sectors of the front on which such a blow might be launched and, discounting Flanders, announced that an attack “near St. Quentin appeared promising.”58 That was the sector from which the great strategic withdrawal to the newly constructed Hindenburg Line had been made the previous spring. In front of it lay what the British called “the old Somme battlefield” of 1916, a wasteland of shell holes and abandoned trenches. By attacking there, Ludendorff suggested, the assault divisions, in an operation to be code-named Michael, could drive up the line of the River Somme towards the sea and “roll up” the British front. There the matter was left. There were to be further conferences and more paper considerations of alternatives, including an attack in Flanders, code-named George, another at Arras, code-named Mars and a third nearer Paris, code-named Archangel, but on 21 January 1918, Ludendorff, after a final inspection of the armies, issued definite orders for Michael. The Kaiser was informed of the intention that day. Preliminary operational instructions were sent on 24 January and 8 February. On 10 March, the detailed plan was promulgated over Hindenburg’s name: “The Michael attack will take place on 21 March. Break into the first enemy positions at 9:40 a.m.”
Much tactical instruction accompanied the strategic directive. A Bavarian officer, Captain Hermann Geyer, had consolidated the army’s thinking on the new concept of “infiltration”—though the word was not one the German army used—and the obvious difficulties in his manual The Attack in Position Warfare of January 1918, by which Operation Michael was to be fought. It stressed rapid advance and disregard for security of the flanks.59 “The tactical breakthrough is not an objective in itself. Its purpose is to give the opportunity to apply the strongest form of attack, envelopment … infantry which looks to the right or the left soon comes to a stop … the fastest, not the slowest, must set the pace … the infantry must be warned against too great dependency on the creeping barrage.”60 The specialised storm troops of the leading waves were above all to “push on.” Ludendorff summed up Michael’s object with a disavowal of the concept of a fixed strategic aim. “We will punch a hole … For the rest, we shall see. We did it this way in Russia.”61
There were enough attack divisions which had served in Russia to bring to France some of the confidence won in a succession of victories over the Tsar’s, Kerensky’s and Lenin’s armies. The British, however, were not Russians. Better equipped, better trained and so far undefeated on the Western Front, they were unlikely to collapse simply because a hole was punched in their front. Ludendorff had, however, chosen better than he might have known in selecting the Somme as his principal assault zone. It was garrisoned by the Fifth Army, numerically almost the weakest of Haig’s four armies, and one that had suffered heavily in the Passchendaele fighting and had not fully recovered. It was also commanded by a general, Hubert Gough, whose reputation was not for thoroughness, while the sector it occupied was the most difficult of all in the British zone to defend.
Gough, a cavalryman and a favourite of Douglas Haig, a fellow cavalryman, had played a leading part in the Passchendaele offensive and his army had suffered a major share of the casualties. Officers who served under him formed the opinion that lives were lost in the battles he organised because he failed to co-ordinate artillery support with infantry assaults, failed to limit his objectives to attainable ends, failed to curtail operations that had patently failed and failed to meet the standards of administrative efficiency which the commander of the neighbouring Second Army, Plumer, so estimably did. Lloyd George, during the winter of 1917, had tried to have Gough removed, but Haig’s protection had spared him from dismissal. He now had to cope with two problems which exceeded his capacity to handle.
Neither was of his own making. The first concerned a major reorganisation of the army. At the beginning of 1918, the British, accepting a necessity recognised by the Germans in 1915 and the French in 1917, began to reduce the strength of its divisions from twelve battalions to nine. The change could be justified as a fulfilment of the trend to increase the proportion of artillery to infantry in each division, as it partly did, a recognition of the growing importance of heavy fire support as the war became one of guns rather than men. The underlying reason, however, was simply a shortage of soldiers. The War Cabinet had calculated that the British Expeditionary Force would require 615,000 men in 1918, simply to make good losses, but that only 100,000 were available from recruits at home, despite conscription.62 The expedient accepted, besides that of dismounting some cavalry units, was to disband 145 battalions, and use their manpower as reinforcements for the remainder. Even so, nearly a quarter of the battalions had to leave the divisions in which they had served for years and find a new accommodation with unfamiliar commanders, supporting artillery batteries and engineer companies and neighbour battalions. It was particularly unfortunate that a high proportion of the disbanded and displaced battalions belonged to Gough’s Fifth Army which, as the most recently formed, contained the largest number of the more junior war-raised units on whom the order to change divisions fell. Though reorganisation began in January, it was not completed until early March, and Gough’s administrative fa
ilings then still left much work of integration to be done.
Gough had also had to position his army not only on a difficult battlefield but, in parts, on an unfamiliar one. As a help to the French, after the breakdown of so many of their formations in 1917, Haig had agreed to take over a portion of their line precisely in the sector chosen by Ludendorff for his great spring offensive. Gough had therefore to extend his right across the Somme, into the notoriously ill-maintained French trench system, while at the same time attempting to deepen and strengthen the extemporised defences dug by the British in front of the old Somme battlefield after the advance to the Hindenburg Line a year earlier. The task was onerous. Not only were the trenches behind the front line sketchy; the labour to improve his sector was lacking. The war in France was, quite as much as a shooting war, a digging war, and while his weakened divisions lacked the necessary hands in their infantry battalions, the specialist pioneer labour enlisted to supplement the work of the infantry was deficient also. In February, Fifth Army’s labour force numbered only 18,000; by ruthless drafting from elsewhere, and by recruiting Chinese and Italian workers, the total was raised in early March to 40,000; but the majority of diggers were employed on roadwork.63 Only a fifth of the available hands were building defences, with the result that, while the first of the Fifth Army’s three lines, the Forward, was complete, and the main, the Battle Zone, well provided with strongpoints and artillery positions, the third, or Brown Line, to which the defenders were to retire as an ultimate resort, was only “spit-locked.” That meant that the surface had been excavated only to a foot’s depth, that there were but occasional belts of wire and that machine-gun positions were indicated by notice boards.64
It was against these sketchy defences that the storm broke on the morning of 21 March. A compact mass of seventy-six first class German divisions fell upon twenty-eight British divisions, of unequal quality, the Germans advancing behind a surprise artillery bombardment across a front of fifty miles, on a morning of mist thickened by the use of gas, chlorine and phosgene, and lachrymatory shell. The gas was lethal, the lachrymatory an irritant designed to make the British infantry remove their respirators. “It was impossible to see beyond a few yards outside as the misty fog was now thick and the cascade of screaming shells, explosions and vivid flashes everywhere was something one just endured,” wrote Private A. H. Flindt, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, “and waited for it to go—but it didn’t.”65 The barrage, intermixed with blistering mustard gas, went on for five hours, from 4:40 a.m. until 9:40 when, as Hindenburg’s operation order of 10 March had laid down, the German storm troopers emerged from their trenches, passed through the gaps in their own wire, crossed no man’s land and began to penetrate the positions of the dazed defenders opposite.
The German offensives, 1918
“Artillery was the great leveller,” wrote Private T. Jacobs, of the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, one of the regular battalions that had been in France from the beginning. “Nobody could stand more than three hours of sustained shelling before they started feeling sleepy and numb. You’re hammered after three hours and you’re there for the picking when he comes over. It’s a bit like being under an anaesthetic; you can’t put a lot of resistance up … On the other fronts I had been on, there had been so much of our resistance that, whenever Gerry opened up, our artillery opened up and quietened him down but there was no retaliation this time. He had a free do at us.”66
Enough of the British defenders and their supporting artillery had survived the German bombardment, nevertheless, to offer scattered resistance as the Germans came forward. Firing largely blind by the “Pulkowski” method, which depended on meteorological observation, the German gunners had missed or overshot some key targets. As the Germans appeared out of no man’s land, British guns and machine-gun nests sprang to life and surviving trench garrisons manned the parapet. “I took up my position and I could see the Germans quite easily,” wrote Private J. Jolly, of the 9th Norfolks, a Kitchener battalion, “coming over a bank in large numbers about 200 to 300 yards away. They had already taken our front line [in the 6th Division sector]. We opened fire and there appeared to be hundreds coming over that bank but they might just have been killed lying down. Their attack was certainly halted.”67 Some way to the north of the Norfolks’ position, a German NCO
went on further against only feeble resistance but then the fog lifted and we were fired on by a machine-gun post. I got several bullets through my jacket but was not hit. We all took cover … A platoon from another company joined me and between us we killed the six or seven men—every one of them—in the machine-gun post. I lost five or six men … I looked across to the right and there were British prisoners going back … about 120—a company perhaps. They were stooping and hurrying back to avoid being hit. I think the English position had been covered by the nest that we had just wiped out and this much larger number of enemy decided they had better surrender.68
British machine-gunners in another post were luckier. “I thought we had stopped them,” remembered Private J. Parkinson,
when I felt a bump in the back. I turned round and there was a German officer with a revolver in my back. “Come along, Tommy. You’ve done enough.” I turned round then and said “Thank you very much, Sir.” I know what I would have done if I had been held up by a machine gunner and had that revolver in my hand, I’d have finished him off. He must have been a real gentleman. It was twenty past ten. I know to the minute because I looked at my watch.69
By this time, only an hour after the German infantry had left their trenches for the assault, almost all the British positions in the Fifth Army’s Forward Zone, twelve miles wide, had been overrun; only behind the obstacle of the ruined town of St. Quentin was a stretch of line still held. It would soon fall as the Germans pressed on to the main battle zone, or Red Line. Much more strongly manned, the Red Line, attacked about noon, though in places earlier, put up a stronger resistance. Though it had been hit by the German preparatory bombardment, and then come under fire from the creeping barrage, artillery support for the German infantry naturally fell away as they entered their own beaten zone. The British artillery, which steadfastly refused to surrender some gun positions though outflanked to left and right, also helped to sustain the opposition the attackers met. A German corporal reported such an encounter.
Suddenly, we were fired on by a battery with shrapnel at close range and had to throw ourselves to the ground. Closely packed, we found cover behind a low railway embankment … We had advanced seven to eight kilometres as the crow flies and now lay under a mediumcalibre battery, under direct fire. The report from the guns and the explosion of the shells were simultaneous. A frontal attack against this made no sense … As suddenly as it had started, it stopped; we could breathe again. We rose up and were able to advance to the abandoned battery. The barrels of the guns were still hot. We saw some of the gunners running away.70
Much of the Red Line was lost to the British during the afternoon, either because the garrison ran away or was overwhelmed by the power of the attack. The worst loss of ground occurred south of St. Quentin, at the point of junction with the French Sixth Army, which held the confluence of the Oise and Aisne rivers. As the British divisions in Gough’s southernmost sector, the 36th (Ulster), the 14th, 18th and 58th Divisions, gave ground, the French were obliged to fall back also, opening a re-entrant that pointed towards Paris itself. In Gough’s northern sector, where the Flesquières salient left by the battle for Cambrai in the previous November bulged into the German line, the Germans achieved a dangerous envelopment menacing the security of the British Third Army and threatening to undercut the British hold on Flanders. Since the aim of Operation Michael was to “roll up” the British Expeditionary Force against the shore of the English Channel, it now promised to be achieving its object. In fact, the purpose of the German attack on each side of Flesquières was to cut off the salient, rather than capture it outright, thus adding to the bag of prisoners and opening a h
ole at the critical point of junction between Fifth and Third Armies through which a strong thrust north-westward could be pushed.
As evening fell on 21 March, the BEF had suffered its first true defeat since trench warfare had begun three and a half years earlier. Along a front of nineteen miles, the whole forward position had been lost, except in two places held heroically by the South African Brigade and a brigade formed of three battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment, and much of the main position had been penetrated also. Guns had been lost in numbers, whole units had surrendered or fled to the rear and heavy casualties had been suffered by those that did stand and fight. In all, over 7,000 British infantrymen had been killed but 21,000 soldiers had been taken prisoner. The events of the day were the contrary of those of 1 July 1916, when 20,000 British soldiers had been killed but almost none had been taken prisoner and the high command and press alike had claimed a victory.