Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  To the east, Gaspard Ridout and his battery were under phenomenal strain. The German artillery was to fire 3.5 million shells on that single day, 1.6 million of them in the first five hours. As soon as it began Gaspard and his battery were ordered to put down a barrage in response, but the fog turned a nightmare scenario into a veiled, hellish reality as they flailed around blindly trying to work their guns. Shrapnel and gas came out of the thick mist. All lines of communication had severed. The only way to get word was to send a runner into the fog and hope that he would survive long enough to reach his destination. If he could find it.

  Elsewhere in the Forward Zone the infantry was sitting in the fog with no peripheral vision, waiting for the German infantry advance to begin and for the enemy to land on top of them. Their numbers were not high enough to maintain a continuous line and so they were strung out in a series of outposts. Paul Hobhouse’s company of the 6th Somerset Light Infantry was huddled in deep dugouts, listening to the crashing of shells outside. Runners were despatched back to take news to the 7th King’s Royal Rifles at Bernay. A significant infantry attack was quite clearly about to take place.

  Even further behind the King’s Royal Rifles, at Brigade HQ, they had no idea what was going on at all. They sent their own runners into the fog towards the Battle Zone to gauge the situation and find out if anyone knew what was happening to the Somerset Light Infantry. Delays made the flow of information irrelevant before it had even found a senior officer. By the time news came back, to say that despite the intense barrage the Somersets had not yet seen any signs of the German infantry, they had been all but wiped out by the enemy troops.

  After five hours of horrific shellfire the German infantry began their advance. The enemy was now becoming well versed in stormtrooper tactics. Firstly would come specially trained, handpicked troops, infiltrating the front line and bypassing strong points. They would rush for the artillery deep in the British lines with grenades, rifles and flame throwers following; attempting to take them by surprise. Attacking troops were now fully supported by aircraft flying low and firing on top of the British troops. The strong points they had ignored would then be hounded by heavily armed troops before finally the standard infantry would come over the top.

  The Somerset Light Infantry stood no chance. On the left, A Company withstood the brunt of the initial assault and was brutally attacked from behind before enemy troops pushed swiftly on and decimated C Company in support. Almost immediately Paul Hobhouse and his men were surrounded. Just after nine a young officer came along from the left and popped his head into a dugout with a message to say that the rest of the A company had been overrun and captured by the Germans. Paul appeared, dishevelled without his collar and tie, but in his hurry he had still managed to grab a revolver. He ordered the men inside up and out quickly to go and support whoever might be left.

  They moved up to the trench that had been occupied by A Company and found it deserted. There was not so much as a dead body about, which confirmed the young subaltern’s claim that they had been taken prisoner. The mist was so thick that they could not see more than 20 yards. They had only just arrived when a sergeant called along the trench and said that there were Germans inside it to their right. They ran back to get Paul who was in company HQ. ‘Tell Sgt Irving to block the trench,’ he ordered. ‘I will be up there in a minute.’ He jumped up into the open and made his way across to the platoon, arriving before the messengers themselves returned.

  They blocked up the trench with old limbers and other debris that they found and Paul sent men off to get more ammunition. They ran back to say that they couldn’t get into their support line to complete the task because there were Germans there too. Together they all scrambled out of the front side of the trench and turned around to fire on the enemy coming up from behind.

  Bullets fizzed about their ears. A few Germans approached the Somersets saying ‘prisoner’ and holding up their hands. A forty-year-old stretcher bearer who had been pressed into action was all for letting the confused-looking men surrender. ‘Don’t fire sir,’ he urged, but Paul was far more suspicious. ‘Don’t be a fool King, he retorted. ‘It’s one of their tricks.’ They opened fire and the Germans hunched over and ran away. One of the men called out, ‘We shall have to surrender,’ but Paul wasn’t having any of it. ‘We must fight to the finish,’ he shouted.

  Seeing their captain’s resolve the men steeled themselves and fell back 30 yards with Paul to take up a better position. The stretcher bearer was well and truly fired up now. He noticed two young men had stopped shooting. ‘Keep on firing,’ he hollered. Paul turned around and grinned at him. Stray bullets had begun picking off this fierce little band. King was on all fours bandaging one of them up when two more enemy soldiers popped into view. Paul fired at them with his revolver, and threw himself into a nearby shell hole. The stretcher bearer hauled his wounded charge to his feet and they began making their escape too. By noon up and down the front the Germans had decimated the Forward Zone. They were now streaming past the 7th King’s Royal Rifle Corps in the Battle Zone and they too were compelled to retire.

  Meanwhile Gaspard Ridout, whose belongings had been blown sky high by enemy fire and his brigade of artillery overrun by the enemy, was swamped by men fleeing the Forward Zone, pouring past the guns. By 10 a.m. both A and C battery’s anti-tank guns had been captured by the enemy although their officers and gun crews had mostly managed to run away. The same could not be said of Gaspard and his Battery. The Germans were to the front and rear. The guns still in action were firing over open sights at close range when they were ordered to fall back. There was no chance of getting their precious guns out. They began wilfully destroying them in the knowledge that they would have to be abandoned. It was a horrific day for the 331st Brigade and B Battery was particularly badly hit. In all ninety-two men were missing, dead or wounded and of their officers ten were unaccounted for, injured or dead, including 19-year-old Gaspard Ridout1.

  At lunchtime the fog finally lifted and the men of the Royal Flying Corps ran for their aeroplanes. The RFC had been well versed in what to do when the attack came. Their priorities were protecting working machines, attacking troops detraining and ground strafing the German advance. Ian Napier and 40 Squadron belonged to First Army north of the River Scarpe but they were soon seized to help Byng’s force to their right. German airmen were out in force, firing machine guns on to the ground and directing artillery fire on to troops. British airmen began sending back details of masses of Germans moving forwards. Roads for 10 to 15 miles behind the lines were packed full of grey-clad men making their way up to the battle.

  Similar scenarios to that of 43rd Brigade were being played out all along the Fifth Army front. The Somersets and the King’s Royal Rifles had been scattered to the wind. Hubert Gough had been receiving reports since mid morning but they made little sense. He didn’t even find out that Byng’s army had been hit in force too until late afternoon. All that was certain was that his entire army was under attack and that the Forward Zone was already a write off. Those holding it on 21 March had been largely annihilated. To try to attempt to counter-attack with so few men was tantamount to suicide and the only thing for it, so far as he could see, was to try to hold up the tidal wave of grey German infantry long enough to keep the onslaught from swallowing his army whole. Falling back with a modicum of control beat hands down the idea of wasting lives trying to fight it out. Reserves were going to be scarce. If all went to plan he could expect to have five divisions trickle in over a five-day period. They would have to suffice for a 42-mile front being overrun by hundreds of thousands of enemy troops.

  Nearly 40,000 men had been wiped off the strength of the British Army in one day, with hordes of them taken prisoner. Although the Germans had made limited inroads into the Battle Zone and despite the fact that the Third Army was still holding the salient formed by the fighting at Cambrai the previous winter, the enemy advance would continue in force the next day. The situation for
Gough was critical. His men would have to fill gaps, guard new flanks as they appeared, attempt to keep in touch with those either side of them in the midst of a violent attack and scrape together any man they could find to do it as the command structure fell apart. To say that the situation looked bleak for the Etonian general and the Allies as a whole was an understatement. For the life of him, Gough could not imagine how they were going to hold it together. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that the only objective of any huge strategic significance was Amiens, which was some 40 miles to the rear. Surely the enemy couldn’t push them back that far?

  For all their determination and aggression, the Germans were not executing a definitive plan about how to proceed with their offensive. Seeing as they had enjoyed most of their success against the southern end of the Fifth Army and the likes of the 43rd Brigade, they made the fateful decision to press on here instead of rolling up the line towards Arras as originally envisaged. The nature of their offensive had been altered completely.

  On 23 March reinforcements finally began to arrive. At dawn, shrouded again in fog, Gough was wondering just how much longer his men could hold out in the face of incredible strain and hardship. His army now resembled a rabble more than a coherent military force as they retreated for dear life. Traffic congestion on the road was unimaginable and holding back the Germans had degenerated into localised, desperate scraps. The previous afternoon much of Gough’s force had managed to get across the Somme. Haig issued orders that the river should be held at all costs. It was never viable command. Orders had been given to begin blowing up bridges and any other crossings that would carry the enemy across behind them, but these were not as effective as the retreating British hoped. It was evident that the Rear Zone, never mind the Battle Zone, was not going to hold. To the north Byng had finally given up the gains of Cambrai and pulled his men out of their salient.

  The 7th King’s Royal Rifle Corps was attempting to pin back the Germans at Jussy across the Crozat Canal. The enemy was rampant. Reinforcements of cavalry had come up to join the battalion, who were also bolstered by stragglers from the Somersets and some non-combatants, but the Germans relentlessly pressed in an attempt to get across. At about 3 a.m. a small number managed to use one of the bridges just north of Jussy which had been half blown up. Morice St Aubyn was in front of them, surrounded by a unlikely band of men he had inherited, remnants from brigade and divisional works details, and he quickly rallied them and attempted to make a stand. This ramshackle group managed to hold off the German advance and push them back over the canal but just as they succeeded in throwing them across Morice was killed. He was 25 years old. Despite his hard work and the sacrifice of his own life the Germans soon began crossing in force. Heavy fighting developed as the enemy had now got across the river on either side of them and dwindling reserves were thrown in.

  With 40 Squadron, Ian Napier was engaged in constant aerial activity. On 24 March the situation was critical at the juncture between the Third and Fifth armies where their SE5as had been deployed. It was alien country for them, devoid of the familiar landmarks they had come to rely on to get them safely about the country. Any snobbery about being scout pilots was gone. They spent most of the day flying as low as they could, a high-risk occupation in itself, dropping bombs on the Germans and hammering them with machine guns. After three days of relentless work they were falling asleep in their cockpits. ‘One day I got so sleepy,’ said one of Ian’s fellow pilots, ‘I didn’t know what the Dickens to do. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could keep my eyes open at all.’

  Gough would have been fully aware that he was on a hiding to nothing in trying to hold the Somme. The previous day the remnant of his army had fallen back up to 6 miles in places and the Germans were swarming around Ham. He had practically no reserves, his men were exhausted, starving and were suffering the soul destroying ignominy of retreating back across the Somme battlefields of 1916. All those months of attrition were wiped out in a few hours.

  The French were putting men in to the south but as dusk fell on 24 March, what was left of Gough’s Fifth Army was still imperilled and being forced back by the German onslaught, whilst Byng’s army was being pulled back with them. In his sector Albert had now fallen too. All that the British had fought and died for on the Somme in 1916 was in German hands. The enemy might have been getting further and further from their own supply lines, but as exhausted as they too were, Amiens was now properly under threat.

  The following day, the weight of the RFC was thrown at trying to attack the Germans on the ground like never before as the enemy advanced on the junction between the Third and Fifth Armies. Ten squadrons from the First Army were sent down to drop everything they could carry on the enemy. They fired 313,000 machine-gun rounds into the German ranks and dropped 50 tons of bombs.

  No. 40 Squadron had gone from having two squadrons at their aerodrome to having five crammed on to it. ‘It would make you roar with laughter,’ said one of their pilots. ‘We only had about three machines which would go the other day and we all three sallied forth on a squadron patrol! All the pilots seem to be new and what aren’t new are on leave, so there you are.’

  Ian Napier’s squadron had come apart since the beginning of the year. He himself had been wounded and as well as the death of his fellow OE, Leonard Tilney, another pilot had had a bullet through the abdomen and more were missing. An unfortunate boy had also gone down in flames in sight of one of his fellow officers, although thankfully he got away with a miraculous slight burning to the face. Ian’s flight had become ‘a sort of training show of half a dozen new pilots’ who had been thrown in to try to rebuild the squadron. They were beginning to feel as if they lived in the air.

  Something had to give. On 26 March a conference took place at Doullens at which Douglas Haig, in no position to assume power himself, advocated Foch taking over overall command on the Western Front. By this point the British commander-in-chief’s priority was ensuring that the Allies did not fall apart. Back at Fifth Army headquarters, Hubert Gough was not even aware that the meeting had taken place. He had been earmarked as a scapegoat for the tragedy that had befallen his army. The following evening he returned from visiting his commanders to find Douglas Haig’s military secretary waiting for him. He asked to see him alone. ‘He … told me as nicely as he could that the Chief thought that I and my staff must be very tired, so he had decided to put Rawlinson … [in] to take command.’ Beyond saying ‘All right;’ the only other question that Gough had was when his fellow OE would arrive to assume command. On 28 March Hubert Gough’s career as a soldier was effectively over. His fellow Etonian arrived in the early evening. Gough filled Rawlinson in as much as he could, and then made himself scarce to avoid embarrassment for either of them. His command of the now unrecognisable, shrunken Fifth Army was at an end and soon he would be bound for home. ‘I left … not at all sure where I was to get a bed or dinner that night.’

  One of Gough’s last acts as commander of the Fifth Army was to establish a line to try to hold on to Amiens. Fifteen miles in front of this crucial town, and loosely based on some old French lines from 1915, anyone they could find was thrown into manning it, including non-combatants. They clung on doggedly.

  Whilst their push on the Somme was petering out in the face of British and French resistance, the Germans were still intent on ending the war. Operation Mars commenced on 28 March to push the British out of their stronghold at Arras. Having lent their services to the chaos above Byng’s army, 40 Squadron’s own was being dragged into the fray. The enemy launched a series of attacks but no fog aided them. Ian Napier and his fellow pilots flew over the town and the surrounding area, again engaged on ground targets. At 1.30 p.m. they were up to patrol the main road between Arras and Cambrai and found that it and all the smaller surrounding roads were choked with troops and transports. It was the same around Douai. Going down as low as 300ft they showered them with bullets and bombs in an attempt to slow the German advan
ce and sent the enemy troops stampeding about the countryside.

  Ludendorff’s latest operation was to be unsuccessful. The impetus of the German offensives was failing across the board by 30 March. British resistance had been stubborn, Amiens had held and the exhausted Germans were getting further and further from their supply lines. The enemy had not finished though. Before the offensive on the Somme had fully petered out there were ominous rumblings to the north in the area around La Bassée. As part of their last ditch, kitchen-sink policy the Kaiser’s men were about to make an assault around the River Lys and the high ground near Arras: Operation Georgette.

  The RFC was well aware of what was going on. On 31 March, scout planes spotted large concentrations of German troops on the move. One observer counted fifty-five trains moving about Armentières and roads to the German rear were full of men and supplies.

  The Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April 1918 by merging the RFC with the Royal Naval Air Service, but for Ian Napier it was the least of his concerns. Number 40 Squadron was back within its own allotted area. They had flown from their hard work on the Somme back up to Flanders for what was to be yet another nightmare. Another of the squadron’s number was almost delirious. ‘The war was being slowly lost down south, but we had given up watching the show, so what did we care?’ All they could do was concentrate on their own fight and they were none too impressed when their own sector came under threat. ‘The [blank] Germans started disturbing the peace north of the canal! In no way could this have annoyed us more. We couldn’t have the Huns playing any silly little monkey tricks on our little patch.’ The powers that be within the Royal Air Force appeared to agree. In addition to returning their borrowed strength to the correct area they had also diverted extra squadrons from Dunkirk towards the Lys.