The Great War

by Peter Hart

  I felt obliged to count on the new American formations beginning to arrive in the spring of 1918. In what numbers they would appear could not be foreseen; but it might be taken as certain that they would balance the loss of Russia; further, the relative strengths would be more in our favour in the spring than in the late summer and autumn, unless, indeed, we had by then gained a great victory.2

  Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, General Headquarters

  For the moment, as long as the ordinary soldiers could see the possibility of victory, German morale held good.

  Our superiors and the newspapers assured us that big events were approaching. As far as we were told there were only 30,000 Americans in France, most of them inexperienced soldiers. There were more Americans to come, but then we had hundreds of submarines that controlled the seas. Now that the whole Eastern Army had been transferred to the West, a million men strong, it seemed to us that the next offensive would bring victory and peace.3

  Corporal Frederick Meisel, 371st Infantry Regiment

  For the Germans, time was of the essence: whatever they were going to do they would have to do it quickly. They had six months to change the course of the war. This would be the narrative that drove events in 1918. Nothing else would matter. All the specious dreams woven by the ‘Easterners’, the campaigns in Mesopotamia, Salonika, Palestine and East Africa were now being seen for what they were – a waste of military resources. The war would after all be decided on the Western Front.

  The British High Command was well aware of the situation. In fact, the CIGS, General Sir William Robertson, had explicitly warned Lloyd George that the Central Powers would concentrate their resources on the Western Front and that they must match that concentration or risk defeat. Yet Lloyd George was blind to such warnings, convinced still that there was another way to victory through the soft underbelly of Italy and the Balkans, or indeed anywhere except the Western Front, where the British would have to face the might of the German Army. He had a horror of further offensives like the Somme or Third Ypres and had completely lost faith in his Commander in Chief Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. This was to prove a serious matter as Lloyd George, the consummate politician, was a formidable opponent for anyone. All that held him back from dismissing Haig outright was the necessity of working hand in glove with the Conservatives, who had been members of the Coalition Government since 1915. They were broadly in support of Haig and it was clear that an open move to dismiss him would probably trigger a political crisis that could bring down the whole administration.

  To act directly, however, is not a necessity in the noble art of politics. To bring Haig to heel and to reduce his capacity to launch any great offensives Lloyd George sought to reduce the number of men made available to the BEF. In the first instance he backed the French demands that Haig take over more of the front line on the Western Front. This appeared to be fair, as the British had only 100 miles of front compared to the 350 miles held by the French. But a large part of the French sector was not active and could be held with minimal troops. This was in sharp contrast to the British line, with its concentration of hot spots at Ypres, Arras and the Somme. Through Lloyd George’s intervention Haig was forced in January 1918 to take over another section of line south of the Somme River, with the consequence that half the German divisions on the Western Front were facing the British sector. This extra commitment had to be undertaken at a time when Lloyd George was also deliberately retaining huge numbers of troops in the British Isles, troops that Haig needed to restock his divisions eroded by the battles of 1917. He was left with the choice of either disbanding whole divisions or recasting them so that each brigade was reduced from four battalions to three, a reduction from twelve to nine battalions in each division. The spare battalions would then be broken up – cannibalised, if you like – to restock the depleted ranks of the others. This demanded an enormous shake-up of the entire BEF: relationships hammered out in the forge of war between regimental officers and brigade staff officers, established methods of working in a crisis, units with a proud battalion history – all were torn asunder. And all this while the Germans were preparing their great assault on the Western Front. In itself the reorganisation only brought the British into line with the system adopted by both the Germans and French, but its timing was unfortunate, promoting widespread anxiety and a great deal of avoidable stress. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were still engaged in the futile campaigns in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Salonika.

  The ‘Welsh wizard’ had other strings to his political bow. He recognised an opportunity lurking within the proposals for a Supreme War Council to provide a unified direction for the Allies war effort which had been agreed at the Allied conference held in the aftermath of the disaster at the Battle of Caporetto. The membership was intended to include the national prime ministers and a senior military representative from each of the Allies. Early on, Lloyd George saw this as a chance to evade the Westerner influence of Haig and Robertson, his official professional advisers. He had already curried favour with the French government by adopting its point of view on numerous occasions against his own military. Now, in return he gained French support when he proposed that a permanent Allied General Staff should be formed without the involvement of the national Chiefs of General Staff. His selection for the British adviser would be the controversial figure of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Wilson, who was not a confidant of either Haig or Robertson. From the start, Lloyd George was intent on using the Supreme War Council to evade the unwelcome advice proffered by his own military advisers. This ultimately forced the resignation of an outraged Robertson, who was then promptly replaced as CIGS by Wilson.

  The initial meetings of the Supreme War Council achieved little of note, for while everyone agreed on the necessity of establishing an Allied reserve force, no one was willing to contribute the troops that would make it a reality. But Lloyd George had removed a powerful ally of Haig with the departure of Robertson and he had certainly secured a more malleable source of professional advice in Wilson. Overall, he had ensured that Haig was forced to put his forces on to a defensive standing on the Western Front in 1918. In truth, the darkening strategic situation would have forced a more defensive approach in any event and all that Lloyd George achieved was to starve his field commander of the troops he needed to hold back the German offensive in one of the decisive battle of the war.

  The Germans decided to launch their offensive against the British, whom they recognised as the driving force of the Allies on the Western Front in 1918. Ludendorff considered that a crushing victory against the British would be decisive as the French would then collapse in tandem. During the planning process a variety of schemes were drawn up by the German staff: Operation George, attacking in the Lys River sector in Flanders, then lunging straight for crucial rail junctions and the Channel ports; Operation Mars, an attack in the Arras area; and finally Operation Michael, in the southern Arras and Somme areas. In the end, put off by the problems of a spring offensive in the damp Flanders lowlands and slightly apprehensive of the strong Arras defences, Ludendorff opted for Operation Michael. The onslaught would be truly terrific, with three strong German armies crashing into the thin British lines. In the south the Eighteenth Army, commanded by General Oskar von Hutier, would attack either side of St Quentin and then advance to guard the southern flank of the whole offensive effort. In the centre the Second Army, commanded by General Georg von der Marwitz, would pinch out the southern sector of the Flesquières Salient and thrust on to Péronne, while in the north the Seventeenth Army, under General Otto von Below, would attack south of the River Scarpe, pinching out the north side of the Flesquières Salient and driving on towards Bapaume. Having broken right through, the intention then was to advance north and roll up the British line. However, strategic issues were not dominant in the mind of Ludendorff. His concentration was on securing a tactical victory on the battlefield rather than worrying exactly what might be achieved in the subs
equent operations. If necessary, a few days later Operation Mars could be triggered attacking Arras directly, while finally Operation George was held in reserve should a further offensive be required in April to complete the destruction of the BEF.

  The Germans would be unveiling their new offensive tactics, which had been developed over the last three years, partly on the Eastern Front, partly in the west, and which had been tested most recently in the counter-attack at Cambrai. They would use their artillery to give the defending British the opportunity to experience at first hand what the Germans had been enduring since 1916 – the awesome power of a mass hurricane barrage, concentrated to suppress or destroy all resistance. The Germans collected 6,608 guns and 3,534 heavy trench mortars and harnessed them to the principles espoused by their foremost artillery specialist, Lieutenant Colonel Georg Bruchmüller.

  Haig was facing his most serious challenge yet, as he knew he did not have the troop numbers to be strong in defence everywhere, especially given the tremendous manpower implications of the switch to a defence in depth system, which sought to mimic many of the German measures of 1917. The Forward Zone was based on the old front line, but now with barbed wire and machine guns to cover the gaps between outposts and small redoubts. Behind this was the Battle Zone, constructed in lines but with strong redoubts to break up any German assaults. Finally, a further 4–8 miles further back was the Rear Zone, which was intended to be more of the same, but was mainly a theoretical construct with few trenches or strongpoints actually prepared on the ground.

  Ignorant as he was of where Ludendorff intended to attack, Haig was brutally realistic in analysing his predicament: his priority was the north, where the key strategic targets of the Channel ports and the major rail junction at Hazebrouck lay only a few miles behind the lines. There was very little room for manoeuvre here for General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army – it had to hold. Further south, General Sir Henry Horne’s First Army was responsible for the tactically significant heights of the Vimy and Lorette Ridges; next came General Sir Julian Byng’s Third Army covering Arras; and finally General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army held the Somme area. Here, in the most southern British sector, there were no really significant tactical or strategic objectives within forty miles of the front lines. Haig had to ignore Gough’s pleas for reinforcements even when reports coming in from the RFC observers made it clear that the Somme would be the seat of Ludendorff’s dreaded offensive. The Fifth Army would have to stand alone and, if attacked, fall back to a vaguely defined Emergency Line stretching along the Somme River.

  The German attack began at 04.40 on 21 March 1918 with a devastating artillery bombardment.

  With a crash our barrage begins from thousands and thousands, it must be from tens of thousands, of gun barrels and mortars, a barrage that sounds as if the world were coming to an end. For the first hour we only strafe the enemy artillery with alternative shrapnel, Green Cross and Blue Cross. The booming is getting more and more dreadful, especially as we are in a town between the walls of houses. The gunners stand in their shirtsleeves, with the sweat running down and dripping off them. Shell after shell is fired.4

  Lieutenant Herbert Sulzbach, 63rd Field Artillery

  The bombardment was in carefully planned phases building up to a veritable symphony of destruction. It is telling that some of the first targets were the guns of the Royal Artillery, which were splattered with a potent mixture of gas and high explosive shells. The gas shells held the less obvious, but more insidious, threat. There were three main types. The first were Blue Cross shells containing a non-lethal gas compound which promoted havoc in the human respiratory system, disrupting breathing and causing vomiting. This forced its victims to remove their masks, at which point they would succumb to the lethal phosgene gas contained in the Green Cross shells. Meanwhile, the Yellow Cross shells contained the mustard gas which not only forced the soldiers to wear their gas masks for long periods but could render an area almost uninhabitable. For the British gunners the sheer embuggerance of wearing gas masks had never been more obvious.

  I adjusted my box respirator over my face, groped my way up the dark steps, crept under the first gas curtain, adjusted it behind me, then under the second and so found myself outside in the sunken road. It was still almost dark and there was a thick mist. Shells were falling everywhere. It was a perfect hell – no other words can describe how utterly beastly it was. I felt my way up the sunken road towards the guns. The eyepieces of the respirator got fogged immediately and you could see nothing. I eventually found myself at the guns. The layers were experiencing the utmost difficulty in laying the guns, as they could not see owing to the mist. They had got their respirators off their faces in order to see better, retaining the nose clip and mouthpiece. I went to the map room and took the magnetic bearing of the target they were firing on, then, armed with a prismatic compass, I laid the guns as accurately as I could. I should not like to vouch for the accuracy of the fire, but the great thing was to get some shells over.5

  Lieutenant Edward Alfree, 111th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery

  The German fire plan also played havoc with command and control across the whole battlefield. Headquarters previously identified by aerial reconnaissance were lashed with shells and the telephone lines were soon cut. No one knew what was happening; there could be little or no co-ordinated response. The confusion was exacerbated by the Germans’ secret weapon: fog. Not unexpected on an early spring morning, but the swirling mists that reduced visibility to just a few yards in the worst hit sectors proved a further severe handicap to the British. The survivors of the bombardment were left cut off in their battered outposts, peering into the fog, desperate to see what the Germans were doing. They would find out all too soon.

  The main German attacks began at around 09.40. Often the British did not see the Germans crossing No Man’s Land until it was too late and all their carefully planned interlocking fields of machine gun fire and artillery support fire were rendered almost useless as, in a matter of moments, they were upon them.

  The first attackers were into the trench long before the mist lifted. I was so occupied with the flanks that I barely saw them before they appeared out of the mist and leapt down into the trench. In a moment we were all mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting. I had two men coming at me with their bayonets, one of whom I think I shot with my revolver, while a sergeant standing just behind me shot the other at point-blank range with his rifle barrel over my shoulder. But almost at the same second a German stick bomb came whistling into the trench from the parapet right into the bunch of us, and killed or wounded practically the whole lot of us – English and German alike. Whether it was actually this bomb or a bayonet stab that gave me the wound in my neck I don’t know – it might have been either. For a moment we were clear but there was a nasty little shambles round us – Sergeant Adcock, who had just saved my life, having his head blown off. I felt awfully weak and discovered that a river of blood was flowing from my neck. I tried to bandage it, but the bandage wouldn’t hold. Before they attacked again they brought up some trench mortars and knocked seven bells out of us – then swarmed into the trench. By that time there were only a handful of us left on our feet and all I suppose wounded. I got another wound from a stick bomb, which put a bit of metal into my thigh. Before I collapsed I tried to give the surrender signal, and hope I succeeded thereby in saving a few lives. We had done our best.6

  Captain Charles Miller, 2nd Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers

  All along the front the British Forward Zone was over-run by German stormtroopers, who pushed deep behind the lines, leaving any remaining centres of resistance to the follow-up troops.

  The infantry commander shouts, ‘Drauf!’ and we rush forward. But where is the expected enemy fire? There is hardly any. His line is not so near as we thought and we had to run. I soon became out of breath and couldn’t see out of the eye pieces of my gas mask so I tore it off. After all we thought this was going to be our last day; th
ere isn’t going to be any escape for us. There was a little machine gun fire and some of our chaps caught it. Lieutenant Wiese was hit and the man carrying the explosive with me either fell over or was wounded. Then we reached the barbed wire, our objective. But there was nothing for us to do. The wire was completely destroyed. There wasn’t really any trench left, just craters and craters. Now I looked back the way we had come and there was a swarm of men following, I couldn’t stop a lump coming to my throat. Only a few of the enemy had survived the storm; some were wounded. They stood with their hands up.7

  Private Paul Kretschmer, 28th Pioneer Battalion

  Soon the Germans pressed forwards to attack the Battle Zone. This was where the main defence works were supposed to be, but a shortage of labour meant that they were not always ready for this kind of severe test. In some places the sheer speed of the German advance caught the defenders by surprise.

  There came an unholy ‘BANG!’ in the stairway, showering the dugout with acrid smoke and dust. I guessed it was a hand grenade – and I was right! Lucky for me the thing had exploded halfway down the stairway otherwise I would have caught the full blast. Then there was a commotion upstairs and a guttural voice screamed, ‘Come up Tommy! Raus! Raus!’ Simultaneously a revolver cracked out, the bullet slapping into a sandbag inches from my foot. We filed upstairs, our hands held high above our heads, to be greeted by a group of youngsters looking grim and threatening, bayonets fixed, rifles shoulder slung, each with a hand grenade swinging from his right hand. Some had pistols. My tongue felt like a dried frog.8