1918 Read online

  Foch’s overall intention, outlined to Haig, Pershing, and Pétain at his headquarters on 24 July, was, as a first step, to clear the Germans away from important French rail networks and nodes, freeing up Allied transportation all along the front. The British Fourth Army, commanded by Sir Henry Rawlinson, was to begin by pushing the Germans back east, away from the junction and marshalling yards at Amiens. Meanwhile the French First Army would liberate Montdidier. Rawlinson detailed the Australian, Canadian, and British III Corps to launch a surprise assault after no preliminary bombardment. Some 3,500 British and French artillery pieces neutralized enemy guns, interdicted communications, targeted strongpoints and headquarters, and delivered a creeping barrage to cover the infantry advance. Nearly 2,000 Allied aircraft ensured air superiority and attacked ground targets, although attempts to isolate the battlefield by destroying the bridges over the Somme proved an expensive failure. Over 500 tanks supported the infantry advance. At Cambrai in November, the BEF had learned that the same troops could not be relied on to capture multiple objectives: they grew too tired and disorganized. This time, fresh troops leapfrogged through to maintain the momentum of the advance. The first day, 8 August, saw stunning success: Rawlinson’s men advanced seven miles, capturing almost all their objectives and at least 12,000 German prisoners. Altogether, the Germans lost 27,000 men. Ludendorff was so disgusted by the defenders’ performance that he famously dubbed it ‘the black day of the German Army’.10 Over the next few days Allied momentum slowed and results dribbled away as resistance solidified and the familiar World War I entropy set in. By 11 August only 38 tanks were still fit to take the field and the British infantry were exhausted. After minimal progress that day Haig accepted the recommendation of Rawlinson and his corps commanders to suspend the Amiens offensive. Instead, General Sir Julian Byng’s Third Army, next door to Rawlinson on the north bank of the Somme, was warned to begin preparations to capture Bapaume.

  The decision to call a halt at Amiens marked a significant shift of approach on the part of Haig and the BEF High Command and set a pattern for the rest of the war. From now on, the old bull-headed insistence on hammering away repeatedly at the same place with increasingly tired troops in the hope that the enemy might break was largely abandoned. Instead, each time diminishing returns set in, the offensive was closed down and a new attack begun elsewhere. In June– July 1917 seven weeks had elapsed between the battle of Messines and the launch of the Third Battle of Ypres, a lag largely driven by the need to build up transport capacity and other infrastructure, to relocate guns and to stockpile the munitions required for another major push. A little over a year later, with materiel more plentiful and logistics improved, Third Army was in action within only ten days of Rawlinson’s pause. On 23 August Fourth Army attacked once more, and three days later General Sir Henry Horne’s First Army also swung into action. Plentiful supplies and efficient transport made possible coordinated operations on a scale rarely attempted before. The fighting of late August was hard, casualties were heavy and progress slow: it took the New Zealand Division eight days to drive seven miles and liberate the ruins of Bapaume, for instance. By early September, however, with his defences on the Drocourt–Quéant Line and at Mont St Quentin both neutralized and his troops in danger of encirclement, the German army group commander Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern had no choice but to order a retreat into the Hindenburg Line, giving up all the ground gained since 21 March.

  It took the BEF three weeks to close up to the Hindenburg Line, clear its outworks, and prepare a set-piece assault as part of Foch’s plan for a series of coordinated offensives all the way from the Meuse River to the Channel. Between 26 and 29 September, no fewer than eight armies, from Belgium, France, Great Britain, and the United States of America, would seek to pose more problems than Ludendorff could ever solve, sucking in reserves here before striking there, breaking through the enemy defences and inflicting a victory that would win the war. British operations began on 27 September with an audacious combat crossing of the Canal du Nord by the Canadian Corps while Third Army cleared the main Hindenburg Line and drove on Cambrai. General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army, alongside Belgian and French troops, attacked at Ypres the next day. Within 48 hours Plumer rolled up the ridges which had cost the BEF more than three months of agony the previous year: only when the weather broke and his logistics collapsed did his advance stall. Finally, 29 September saw Fourth Army seize crossings over the St Quentin Canal and break into the Hindenburg Line in what has been described as ‘one of the greatest feats of British military history’.11 Notably, 46th (North Midland) Division captured the Riqueval Bridge and the village of Bellenglise, opening a way into the heart of the enemy defences and demonstrating what well-led British troops could achieve by 1918. We shall come back to 46th Division below.

  The Allied offensives, 1918

  Once again, German resistance proved ferocious in the second and third lines of the Hindenburg Position, but the British slowly chewed through it and, on 8 October, another set-piece attack carried them through the last prepared defences the Germans possessed: the so-called Beaurevoir Line. From now on, Rupprecht’s army group would have to rely on improvised positions hurriedly scratched behind the canals and small rivers which lay across the British axis of advance. This was just as well for the British, since the difficulty of rebuilding rails, roads, and bridges made it increasingly difficult to bring up the heavy guns and tanks needed for set-piece assaults on properly fortified positions.

  The most important consequence of the defeats on the Hindenburg Line was that, together with the actual, or obviously imminent, collapse of all Germany’s allies, they broke the spirit of the German High Command. On 28 September Hindenburg and Ludendorff agreed that they needed an immediate armistice. Otherwise the army might disintegrate and not be available if needed to oppose any Bolshevik agitation. The Kaiser appointed a new government which asked President Woodrow Wilson for peace talks on 5 October. While proper negotiations remained some time off, now for the first time an end to the war seemed at least a possibility. We shall examine the effect on the motivation of soldiers on both sides below, but the fighting, now in less open terrain, remained fierce and casualties heavy.

  By early November the British had fought their way across the Lys and Selle rivers, had liberated Lille, Ghent, and Valenciennes, and were preparing another deliberate attack on German positions behind the Sambre River. When they launched this on 4 November the result was resounding victory: the Germans began a headlong retreat, covered by skilful rearguards which delayed the British so well that by 8 November the two sides had completely lost touch. By the morning of 11 November, when news of the Armistice arrived, Canadian troops were famously in Mons, back where the BEF’s war had begun.

  The way military historians have tended to explain British success during the ‘Hundred Days’ displays interesting parallels with their analysis of German stormtroop tactics in March 1918. In both cases, the application of hindsight and a search for the roots of Blitzkrieg has tended to flatten out the history, smoothing out nuance and downplaying the importance of contingency. British and Commonwealth historians, keen to react against a long-running popular ‘lions led by donkeys’ myth, have highlighted how much the BEF learnt as the war went on. They suggest that in 1915 and 1916 the army had been forced to expand too fast on too narrow a base of experience and to adapt to new ways of war, all the time struggling against a ferocious and highly dangerous enemy as well as shortages of trained troops and materiel. By 1918, however, they argue, it had become the equal of, or even superior to, the best continental militaries. They have placed particular emphasis on the BEF’s tactical development, stressing the integration of new weapons such as the aeroplane, tank, and poison gas, together with the adoption of innovative ways of using traditional ones, such as artillery, trench mortars, and infantry, weaving the whole into a combined arms weapon system capable of overcoming any defence the Germans were capable of mounting. At the
operational level, not only had lessons been learnt about the importance of breaking off offensives before they reached culminating point and about exploiting laterally, using the width of the front, rather than vertically in depth, as we have seen, but British command had, we are told, been made considerably more flexible. In place of the unwieldy top-down ‘restrictive control’ management style of the war’s middle years, an approach closer to modern ideas of ‘mission command’ was adopted. Authority was delegated and more latitude was given to the man on the spot to exercise his initiative according to the situation as he interpreted it. This improved response times and led to better decision-making in the more freewheeling ‘semi-mobile’ warfare which characterized the ‘Hundred Days’.

  There is much truth to this picture. The British Army of 1918 was a much more capable instrument than it had been even a year earlier, never mind on the first day of the Somme, despite the inevitable heavy casualties consequent on more of the army being in action at once, and more mobile fighting taking the place of trench warfare. The BEF as a whole was 30,000 men stronger on 1 September than it had been at the beginning of March, but the aggregate figures conceal a continuing shortfall in trained infantrymen. The number of infantry other ranks in the field fell by 16 per cent between 1 March and 1 November, from 515,000 to just under 434,000. Infantry battalions with establishment ration strengths of 900 were only 700 strong, and frequently sent 400 or fewer men into action. When replacements could be found, they were often young: 36 per cent of soldiers were aged 21 or under, where the average for the war as a whole was 28 per cent. Not all were, though. Some reinforcements, men who had been combed out or medically re-graded, were green but others were experienced men returning from convalescence: about half of one draft reaching 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders in October 1918 had served in France before.12 Inevitably, some of the new men became good soldiers while others did not.

  To some extent, shortfalls in infantry mattered less by 1918 than earlier in the war because firepower was taking the place of manpower and men were increasingly necessary only to support the machines. For example, battalions which had gone to war with two Vickers machine guns each in 1914, four years later had 36 Lewis guns on the establishment: it took 200 men, or half the unit’s combat strength, just to keep them firing. By 1917 and 1918 industry was geared up to provide those machines and everything else the soldiers needed to fight. Written-off aircraft were rapidly replaced: despite heavy losses, by 8 April 1918 the RAF had more aeroplanes in action than on 21 March. All the guns lost during the spring offensives had been replaced, and then some, by July. The weight of shells fired off by British artillery during the week of the attacks on the Hindenburg Line in 1918 was three times what had been possible on the Somme two years previously. Where the BEF had been living from hand to mouth in 1914–16, by the Armistice it had enough munitions immediately on hand to fight for another three weeks.

  Possessing all the weapons in the world was of limited value without knowing what to do with them. There is no question that, often via a process of trial and error, the British Army had ascended a range of individual learning curves and developed experience and new skills. By the summer of 1918, for instance, the RAF had discovered and was executing all the principal roles for aviation in war that have been used forever since.13 To fire an artillery shell with the increased accuracy possible by 1918 depended on improved techniques and new inventions in a range of fields including: survey, aerial photography, meteorology, metallurgy, fuse and propellant technology, communications, command, control, and intelligence. To then employ that shell to the best possible effect required a sophisticated grasp of tactics and operational art. And nothing was possible at all without mastery of the logistic skills necessary to transport the shell to the gun and ensure the gun was working, with the crew fed, clothed, and watered, and ready to fire.

  The army had learnt, not only how to fight but also how to learn. A process evolved to capture lessons learned, distil the most important and revise best practice through new doctrine. Sometimes, the new approaches were codified and published in documents such as the SS pamphlets and other instructions. The most famous of these were the Fourth Army Tactical Notes distributed by Rawlinson to the troops about to attack on the Somme in 1916: SS 135 The Division in the Attack, which covered combined arms warfare and operations and went through four editions between 1916 and 1918; and SS 143 The Infantry Platoon in the Attack, which concentrated on small-unit tactics. Other doctrine was disseminated through the many informal channels of communication which linked the army within and between theatres scattered all over the world.14 Consciously or by fortunate accident, the army managed to construct a highly flexible and effective system of learning systems, operating simultaneously down multiple different channels, each characterized by varying degrees of formality and central control, to spread the word and ensure innovation and adaptation was as effective and efficient as possible.

  To see how much more potent a weapon the British Army constituted by the end of 1918, all we need do is compare the BEF’s position at the beginning and end of the year. In January and February, as we saw, it squatted on the defensive, apparently paralysed by the high command reshuffle and swingeing reorganization of its ranks, awaiting a German offensive which it expected to be able to contain but had no thought of pre-empting. By the end of the year, in contrast, the BEF had launched multiple major offensives employing up to five armies at once in less time than it had taken to plan an attack by just one in 1916 and had defeated the German Army time and again, outfighting it in trench warfare and more mobile operations alike. All this had been achieved while continually advancing as Haig and Foch employed, with great success, a form of ‘rolling attrition’ designed to chew through German reserves of manpower while slowly but continually forcing them back. The logistic achievement was no less impressive than the fighting performance. The BEF played a leading role in defeating the most feared army in the world, the military which had set the standard worldwide since the 1860s.

  This central and important fact of British improvement should not blind us to two other realities, however. First, the German Army of late 1918 was a much weaker opponent than it had been earlier in the war, largely as a result of the attrition imposed by the British and French in 1916–17. Second, while the improvement in the British Army was considerable, it would be a mistake to regard the BEF as a paragon of military virtue which had unlocked the secret of success in modern warfare and applied the recipe consistently throughout the ‘Hundred Days’. Indeed, its victory was founded at least as much on mobilizing its traditional values and ethos as on new conceptual insights and ways of war. Let us take these two issues in turn.

  The German Army of 1918 was, without a doubt, a weaker force than it had been earlier in the war. It lagged behind the Allies in increasingly important materiel, for instance: by summer 1918 it was outnumbered nearly two to one in aircraft, six to one in tanks, and ten to one in lorries, although it managed to preserve rough parity in artillery strength. The manpower situation was also a concern. Three and a half years of war had already seen the deaths of around 1,750,000 soldiers. Nonetheless, the Germans began 1918 with as many men as the Allies on the Western Front. The ranks were only kept relatively full, however, by drafting in young men who often proved less resilient. Fewer than one in 12 German combat soldiers in 1914 was under 21 years old; by August 1918 more than one in five was, although that proportion remained lower than in the British Army, as we have seen. During 1918 German wastage occurred faster than at Verdun, the Somme or Third Ypres: casualties exceeded a million. Replacements could not keep up, so the ration strength of the average infantry battalion fell from 807 men in February to 630 in August and 463 by the Armistice. Training became increasingly rushed and difficult, not least due to high loss rates of NCOs and officers. The strength of many divisions fell by nearly 80 per cent and 32 had to be disbanded altogether. By November, the German Army had only two fresh divisions in reserv
e, down from 43 at the end of June and 74 on 20 March. Discipline began to fall away, however, especially from the summer of 1918 onwards, with insubordination, desertion, and surrenders to the enemy all on the rise. Hope of victory was a key determinant of morale until the evident failure of the spring offensives. Thereafter, the prospect of a quick end to the war (and survival) became more important, with significant consequences for motivation.15

  The most serious problems confronting the Germans in 1918, however, did not concern materiel, manpower, or morale, but the army’s very ability to think. It lost its ability to adapt to the changing situations in which it found itself. An organization which had always prided itself on its flexibility of command became increasingly arthritic. As the problems confronting it multiplied and intensified, ideas of delegated command, with the subordinate on the spot encouraged to exercise his initiative within the framework of his superior’s intent, evaporated. Ludendorff set the tone with his micromanagement. He was quick to blame and slow to praise, treating his subordinates with increasing disdain and aggression. The insecurity Ludendorff felt about his position, dependent as it was on the goodwill of an unpredictable Kaiser, transmitted itself down through the ranks of command and spread fear through a structure of already inherent instability. The consequence, inevitably, was that too often after-action reports told the boss what he wanted, not what he needed, to hear. In particular, the staff officers were unwilling to admit the weakness of the German Army to Ludendorff.16 As a result, inconvenient truths remained untold, objectivity fell away, and decisions became made on the basis of increasingly flawed information.

  A good example of the BEF’s tactical improvement was in the realm of combined arms. The way it integrated armour, artillery, aviation, infantry, and even on occasion cavalry, could be devastating, as, for instance, the first day of the battle of Amiens demonstrated. Rarely, however, were the British able so effectively to draw on their whole panoply at once in this way. Amiens was an exception, not a rule, for three main reasons. First, key assets, such as tanks, were in short supply. Even in August there were not enough to go around and by October heavy casualties and poor transportation facilities reduced armour support considerably. On 21 August, 183 tanks supported the attack of Third Army; by 4 November, only 25 could. The problem of shipping forward shells, especially for heavy guns, along extending supply lines reduced the level of artillery support possible. Second, nature intervened: terrain was sometimes unsuitable for combined arms, particularly once fighting moved into more built-up areas from October onwards; and as the autumn went on, fog and longer hours of darkness inhibited inter-arm communications and, increasingly frequently, weather kept aircraft grounded. Third, inter-arm coordination remained problematic at times, especially when carefully thought out set-piece attacks gave way to more improvised fighting. The level of comfort of different units and formations with the latest tactics varied widely. Fundamental techniques such as ‘fire and movement’ were misunderstood or misapplied almost as often as they were properly employed. GHQ-led attempts to standardize doctrine had only limited success and practice remained highly diverse. Indeed, in 1918 there was a move away from standard formations and one-size-fits-all solutions and back towards a more flexible approach dictated primarily by the specific situation faced. The attack of 10th Canadian Brigade on Mont Houy on 1 November was atypical in the weight of fire support made available at this stage of the campaign: seven tonnes of high explosive fell every minute on a front less than two miles wide. But, it did reflect the best of a British tactical method primarily based, not on all arms, but on a highly refined form of close infantry–artillery cooperation that not all units of the BEF could manage.17