Tommy (11 page)

When he got back to the gun-line he saw a sight as characteristic of the artillery battle as widespread lines of men were for the infantry.

But his spirits lifted as soon as his battery came out of the line.

A bath, clean clothes and a visit to the fleshpots of St-Omer proved remarkably restorative. He visited the infamous ‘No. 4', purely, he assures us, as a spectator. It was

One of Haig's motives for bringing Passchendaele to a conclusion was that Sir Julian Byng, who had taken over 3rd Army when Allenby was sent off to command in the Middle East after the failure of Arras, had produced a plan to attack the Hindenburg line at Cambrai. Brigadier General Hugh Elles, commanding the Tank Corps, and his energetic chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, wanted the chance to let their tanks loose on more favourable ground than Flanders. And Brigadier General Hugh ‘Owen' Tudor, commander Royal Artillery of 9th Division, had developed a technique of marking artillery targets without the need for pre-battle registration by fire which all too easily gave the game away. Gun positions were precisely surveyed, and the development of flash-spotting and sound-ranging meant that German batteries could also be plotted with accuracy. Although Tudor met with considerable opposition he was backed by Byng, whose plan for a large-scale tank ‘raid' embodied this ‘new artillery' which would make surprise possible.

Two of 3rd Army's corps, supported by 378 fighting tanks and more than 1,000 guns, achieved total surprise when they attacked west of Cambrai on the morning of 20 November 1917. They captured 7,500 men and 120 guns, and pushed more than three miles on a six mile front. In comparison with what had been going on at Ypres, it was indeed a famous victory, and the church bells in England were rung for the first time in the war. But yet again it proved impossible to sustain early promise. Over half the tanks were out of action after the first day, and the fighting focused on a long and bitter struggle for Bourlon Wood. When the Germans counterattacked on 30 November, diving in hard against the shoulders of the salient, they came close to enveloping many of the defenders, but an attack by the Guards Division recaptured Gouzeaucourt and stabilised the situation. In all both sides lost around 40,000 men at Cambrai, and if the British retained part of the Hindenburg line at Flesquières they had lost ground to the north and south. It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory end to a grim year.

There was never much doubt as to what would happen in early 1918. On 11 November 1917 Ludendorff met a select group of advisers at Mons to elaborate plans for the coming year. Their discussions were overshadowed by the knowledge that American entry into the war would eventually change the balance of forces on the Western Front. Although a peace treaty was not to be formally signed till March 1918, Germany could capitalise on Russia's effective departure from the war by shifting still more troops to the west. In the first months of 1918 the Germans would still enjoy quantitative superiority, and the development of ‘storm-troop' tactics for the rapid advance of lightly-equipped infantry supported by a swift and savage bombardment would give them a qualitative edge too. Ludendorff was not only convinced that Germany must attack, but that she must attack the British. Victory over the French might still leave Britain in the war, now with the might of the United States at her elbow and able to continue her naval blockade.

Ludendorff's staff developed several plans, many with suitably Wagnerian names. In the event he decided to use three variants of ‘Michael', attacking the British from Cambrai to the south of the Somme. The main weight of the blow, which comprised seventy-four divisions attacking on a front of fifty miles, would fall on 5th Army in the south, its front recently extended by taking over more line from the French, taking the British front down to the River Oise. The British army was overextended and short of men. On 1 March 1918 Haig's infantry was just over half a million men strong, constituting only 36 percent of his total strength instead of the 46 percent it had made up six months before. In January he warned the government that the next four months would be ‘the critical period of the war'. He was not wrong.

The Germans attacked on the foggy morning of 21 March 1918 behind a bombardment of unprecedented weight and ferocity: over 3 million shells were fired in three hours. Lance Corporal William Sharpe of 2/8th Lancashire Fusiliers recounted the effect of the shelling on the young soldiers under his command:

When the German infantry loped forward on the heels of the barrage they made good progress on 5th Army's front, moving like wraiths through the lightly-held forward zone and slipping between the strongpoints of the battle zone. As the front was penetrated, so sinews of command and control were cut and men were fighting blind. Gunner J. W. Gore, behind the line with the administrative echelon of a heavy trench-mortar battery, recorded:

The British lost 38,000 men that day, 21,000 of them taken prisoner. For the next week 5th Army was bundled backwards, and 3rd Army, to its north, gave ground too. On 26 March Haig saw most of his army commanders at Doullens, and was then summoned to a conference in the town hall where Lord Milner, a member of the British War Cabinet, and Sir Henry Wilson, who had replaced Robertson as chief of the imperial general staff, were to meet a French delegation. Pétain, commander in chief of the French army, was characteristically pessimistic, but Ferdinand Foch, a tough-fighting general now serving on the staff, burst out: ‘We must fight in front of Amiens, we must fight where we are now. As we have not been able to stop the Germans on the Somme, we must not now retire a single inch.'
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Haig at once took the cue, saying: ‘If General Foch will give me his advice, I will gladly follow it.' A paper was drafted giving Foch authority to co-ordinate the Allied armies on the Western Front. He was still something less than commander in chief, and although his powers were later extended he never enjoyed the authority of Eisenhower a generation later. But his strength and determination, rather than any notable tactical or strategic skill, made him the man of the moment, and the coalition braced up in its hour of greatest need.

The Doullens agreement did not win the battle, which still rolled westwards across the Santerre Plateau towards Amiens. On 11 April Haig issued a general order warning that his men had their ‘backs to the wall', and ‘each one of us must fight on to the end'. High-sounding prose does not always strike the intended chord, and thousands of humorists at once inquired where the wall might be, for they would be glad to see one. On 24/25 April the German advance was checked on the long ridge of Villers-Bretonneux with the spires of Amiens, the crucial railway link between the British and French sectors, in sight on the horizon. In all the Germans had taken more than 90,000 prisoners and 1,000 guns, and had snuffed out all the gains so hard won on the Somme. They had inflicted a very serious defeat on the British army, and recent research suggests that had Ludendorff clearly identified that the offensive's most valuable objectives were railheads (Amiens in the south and Hazebrouck in the north), the Germans might indeed have broken the Allies on the Western Front, with the French withdrawing cover to Paris and the British falling back to the coast. But Ludendorff was no master of what modern military theorists call the ‘operational level' of war that links battles together to produce a worthwhile strategic outcome, and opportunism rarely wins wars.

Ludendorff tried again in April, mounting Operation Georgette in the Neuve Chapelle sector, breaking an overextended Portuguese division and knocking another deep dent into British lines. Foch sent French divisions north to replace some exhausted British divisions, and the latter were placed with the French 6th Army on the Chemin des Dames, quiet for a year. It became very unquiet when Ludendorff attacked again in late May, creating yet another large salient. But a pattern was now establishing itself. Each offensive showed less promise than its predecessor, and although the Allies were bent they were not broken. General John J. Pershing, commander in chief of American forces in France, was determined that his men would fight only as a unified force, not scattered under British or French command. But he was prepared to allow them to check the German advance in early June and then to mount a counterattack of their own at Belleau Wood, near Château-Thierry. Ludendorff knew that his time was up: two last attacks, in mid-June and mid-July – the last portentously nicknamed
Friedensturm,
the Peace Offensive – fizzled out.

The failure of the offensives which had begun with such promise on 21 March was not merely a tactical setback. Ludendorff had correctly recognised that American entry into the war would inexorably swing the balance of numbers against Germany, and his attacks had done nothing to alter that balance. Indeed, if the British had lost heavily in prisoners, the Germans had lost scarcely less heavily in killed and wounded, and Ludendorff's policy of putting the bravest and the best into assault divisions meant that his losses – over half a million for the first half of the year – fell precisely where he could least afford them.

And in the background, the Allied blockade, obdurate and unseen, was slowly throttling Germany. There were food riots across the land in 1916, and widespread misery during the ‘turnip winter' of 1916–17. A shortage of horses saw six-gun teams reduced to four, and lack of good leather was emphasised by the frequent removal of boots from British dead. The blockade no more broke German civilian morale in the First World War than did strategic bombing in the Second, though this has not stopped some historians from suggesting, in an argument pressed with fierce passion though wholly unencumbered by evidence, that ‘the Royal Navy … played the most decisive part in winning the war'.
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It did not. It contributed to a growing sense of desperation, made it harder (though never impossible) to obtain essential strategic raw materials, and by the summer of 1918 it combined with the disappointment of empty victories to erode morale at the front. Nor was life comfortable in England. The depredations of German submarines had seen the introduction of rationing in 1915, and by 1918 many soldiers who went home on leave were shocked at the shortages they found there.

The first major Allied counterattack was delivered by the French in mid-July. The British had already launched a smaller-scale venture, when the Australian Corps carried out a slick assault on the village of Hamel, near Amiens, using tanks and a lightning bombardment in a plan that presaged later, larger ventures. Gough had been replaced as a consequence of his army's ‘failure' in March, and a restructured chain of command saw 5th Army disappear, to be replaced by a restructured 4th Army under Rawlinson. He conceived of a much larger attack, using principles proved at Hamel, and although both Foch and Haig tinkered with the scheme it retained features which mark it out sharply from what had gone before. There were sufficient aircraft to ensure Allied air superiority over the battlefield and even (though the experiment was not wholly successful) to drop ammunition to advancing units. Rawlinson had almost 350 new heavy Mark V tanks, and enough guns (2,000 to perhaps 500 German) to give him a density of one per 22 yards of front attacked. And this front was not well dug and wired, like the old Somme front or the Hindenburg line: it was the high-water mark of a tired army running short of men.