The war was changing in nature over the winter of 1917–18. In France a new impetus towards victory was imparted by Georges Clemenceau, ‘the Tiger', when he became prime minister in November at the age of seventy-six. He took semi-dictatorial powers into the hands of government and made great efforts to combat defeatism among soldiers and civilians alike. He famously said that ‘war is too important to be left to the generals', although in practice he would do much to smooth the path for his military commanders. In particular he backed the claims of General Ferdinand Foch to become supreme commander on the Western Front, which would add a long overdue rationality to the chain of command during the dangerous days of March.
As for the British, they had suffered something like a quarter of a million casualties at Third Ypres, and a further 50,000 at Cambrai. The army was exhausted and oppressed. At home, Prime Minister Lloyd George was appalled on two counts. The first was the obvious dislike for heavy casualties that any humane person ought to feel, but the second was of considerably greater importance to him. This was his frustration that in political terms Haig was more powerful than he was himself. The army stood behind Haig, and so he could not be sacked at the height of such a major war. Haig's policy was to continue to concentrate maximum resources on the Western Front, the most important theatre facing the most important enemy. But this meant that Lloyd George had no choice but to agree. He had very little of the ‘wriggle room’ that is always so dear to politicians in general, and to this one in particular.
Throughout the war the civilian Lloyd George, along with Churchill, had made a habit of trying to outflank the professional military men. In 1915 both of them were already looking to campaigns in the Dardanelles, Salonika and Palestine as alternatives to a war of attrition on the Western Front. Then they accelerated the procurement of tanks as an alternative to sacrificial infantry attacks, while unreasonably blaming General Headquarters (GHQ) in France for dragging its feet. Lloyd George also accused the generals of failing to realize the importance of machine guns, just as he accused the admirals of failing to adopt the convoy system. By 1917 he seemed to reckon himself something of a military expert, while continuing to support the ‘eastern’ theatres against the Western Front. These now included sending troops from France to the Italian front, and exaggerating the achievements of the nascent Arab Revolt. Especially in 1919–20 the champions of eastern policies would make a point of lionizing T E Lawrence ‘of Arabia’, in his flowing white robes, as a totally alternative figure to any of the dour khaki-clad generals from GHQ who had actually won the war.
By the start of 1918 Lloyd George was thus already trying his best to find some wriggle room to undermine Haig's ‘western’ policy. He now went two steps further: first by getting some of Haig's top staff officers sacked, most notably his chief of intelligence, John Charteris. More important, he exacerbated the existing recruitment crisis by holding back many thousands of reinforcements in Britain, thereby forcing a radical reduction in the fighting strength of the BEF on the Western Front. This was doubly unfortunate because it came at a moment when the British had to take over a further twenty-five miles of front line from the French. In effect they were being told to reduce their manpower per mile of front by about half, and nowhere more so than at the southern end of their line, where Gough's Fifth Army was taking over the positions opposite St Quentin that the French were evacuating.
That in itself might have been acceptable if the British had been posted on a ‘quiet sector’. After the many massive blows they had landed on the Germans ever since 31 July 1917, they had some justification for thinking that the enemy opposite them should have been reduced to quiescence. Even if not, by this point in the war both Lloyd George and Haig had come to assume that the defence would always be far more powerful than any attack, at least after the attacker had been able to make a significant advance on his carefully prepared ‘first day'. There was a certain complacency that even at half strength, a defender could always hold out for long enough to allow reinforcements to arrive and plug any gaps in the line. Why, even the ferocious German counter-attack at Cambrai had eventually been held without any very seriously dramatic loss of territory, had it not?
Alas for these expectations, the whole German situation was changing over the winter of 1917–18. The Russians had finally been knocked out of the war with an armistice on 3 December, thereby releasing some forty-four divisions from the German armies in the East to be transferred to the West. Ludendorff massed them between Cambrai and St Quentin to launch a major offensive on 21 March, with nineteen divisions to attack Byng's fourteen divisions of Third Army (holding a 28-mile front), and no fewer than forty-three divisions to attack Gough's twelve divisions of Fifth Army (holding a 42-mile front). Also of great importance was the fact that they brought with them some new tactics from the East.
Often called ‘stormtroop tactics’ or ‘Hutier tactics’, these eastern methods consisted of a number of properly distinct elements. The first was an attempt to achieve operational surprise up to the moment when the bombardment started, by all possible methods of camouflage, deception and security. Second, there would be a hurricane bombardment carefully orchestrated by the rising star and showman of the German artillery, Colonel Georg Bruchmüller. He was pushing forward with the arts of ‘predicted fire’ that the British had already perfected, although for a long time he was better at getting a good line rather than good length with any given shell. He also encountered scepticism from his colleagues, so his preliminary bombardments would typically represent something of a compromise, starting more or less six hours before the infantry attack began, rather than simultaneously with it. During those six hours his guns would fire at the fastest rate, scouring backwards and forwards over all the enemy positions within range and particularly, in the absence of fully reliable ‘first round accuracy', firing gas shell as an area weapon to neutralize his gun pits. Bruchmiüller, whose nickname was ‘Durchbruchmüller’ (or ‘Breakthrough Müller'), had used this mixture at Riga in September 1917 to excellent effect.
When the infantry attacked they would be spearheaded by ‘storm- troops’ (originally specialist assault pioneers) trained to use all types of infantry assault weapons in the same way that Laffargue had understood in 1915, and the British had incorporated into their manual of February 1917. Within each company there would be portable machine guns, trench mortars, flamethrowers and light trench guns. These were not really innovative tactics, as has often been claimed, but Ludendorff broke with the earlier German practice of leaving them to specialists, by attempting to teach them to the majority of his army over the winter of 1917–18. Like Bruchmiüller's bombardments, they had been successfully tested in combat by General Oskar von Hutier at Riga, and he too was called to France to participate in the March offensives. In the event Riga turned out to have been the last battle fought against the Russians and, as such, the Germans were facing an already half-defeated enemy whose positions were rather widely dispersed. The leading spearheads of assaulting infantry were able to infiltrate between and behind them, often capturing them without serious fighting, in a way that would not have been possible against the dense fortifications of the Western Front in 1916–17. Unfortunately for the British, however, the conditions at Riga were exactly the same as would obtain in Gough's Fifth Army near St Quentin on 21 March 1918.
It was bad enough that Gough's men were battle-weary, understrength, overstretched on a frontage too long for their numbers, and badly outnumbered. It was much worse that they were badly deployed. For three months before the enemy attacked they had been under orders to imitate the German methods of depth defence, which meant a very lightly held front line backed by stronger positions in the second and third lines. In practice, however, the main bulk of the Fifth Army forces remained in the front line, on the reasoning that there were not enough men to occupy the two rearward lines, which in any case had not yet been built. This left them very vulnerable to the initial German bombardment and assault. Gough's personal reputation must stand or fall on the question of whether he could possibly have done anything to correct these arrangements, and there are indeed some extenuating circumstances. For example, he was unlucky that there was thick morning mist shrouding most of his battlefield at the moment the enemy attacked, and it was noted that the defence was much more successful at the points that were clear of mist. On the balance of probability, however, it seems likely that he must personally shoulder considerable blame.
The Germans encountered a properly consolidated defence on the front of Byng's Third Army, north of the Fifth Army, and they were duly beaten off in no uncertain manner, just as they would doubtless have been on most other sections of the old, settled and well organized Western Front. On Gough's front, by contrast, once they had shattered the front line, they were able to infiltrate through it in all directions. In the second and third British lines they encountered no continuous front, but only scattered strongpoints or improvised groupings of retreating troops who could usually be outflanked. When the German spearheads began to start such an outflanking movement, the defenders would have a choice between holding their ground and being surrounded, or retreating to the next defensible position in the hope that the attackers would finally run out of steam. Normally it was the second option that was preferred, which meant that the increasingly notional ‘British front line’ kept on moving to the rear, and the whole cycle would start over again.
The German spearheads kept on surging forward, hustling Gough's troops out of the way, for an astounding forty miles in the space of just a week. This was an advance that beat the British achievement at Cambrai some eight times over, even without the help of tanks, and it was surely the nearest thing to a ‘breakthrough’ that had yet been seen on the Western Front. However, the further they advanced, the more the German troops became exhausted and exposed to increasingly effective attacks from a once again dominant and increasingly sophisticated allied air force.1 Some British ground attack pilots reported ‘cricket match crowds’ marching down roads behind the front line, where they could be mown down in droves. Thus the high tactical training of the successful German front-line troops did not apparently extend to their whole army, whose overall losses mounted inexorably.
The advancing Germans also became separated not only from their artillery, but especially from their rations. They took to looting, and were amazed to find that the lavish scale of food and wine enjoyed by their opponents was greatly superior to their own. By this stage in the war the allied blockade of Germany was cutting deep, and it was still too early to expect grain from Russia and the Ukraine to arrive to alleviate the situation. The contrast between the nutritional provision of the two sides was striking, and it was not lost on Ludendorff's legions. The seeds of depression, war weariness and even combat refusal began to germinate within their ranks.
The offensive was finally halted on 5 April, two weeks after the ‘first day', at Villers-Bretonneux, some ten miles short of Amiens. This was the apex of the new German salient, whose southern flank ran all the way back to Noyon. During the two weeks of the battle each side had suffered around a quarter of a million casualties, which rather mocked Lloyd George's notion that he could reduce losses if he forced Haig onto the defensive by giving him inadequate numbers. And apart from the physical losses, there had understandably been something approaching panic at every level in the allied ranks. The troops of Gough's army normally walked to the rear in good order, and rarely ran. Nevertheless, their daily marches were often long and bewildering. There was vast confusion and administrative chaos, as HQs had to move unexpectedly from one location to another, and phone lines were constantly cut. Units became detached or lost, and had to be reunited with their parent formations. In the long run all this provided HQ staffs with some splendid training in mobile warfare that would serve them in good stead during the autumn offensives. In the short term, however, it merely added to their problems.
At the highest echelons of command the generals had all been taken by surprise by the rapidity and extent of German success. At first Haig's instinct was to call in French and American reinforcements from the south towards the BEF; conversely, Pétain was anxious to consolidate his own positions, especially to cover Paris, and was reluctant to release any more reserves than had previously been promised. General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, commander of the ever growing American Expeditionary Force (AEF), had been insisting for the previous nine months that he would not allow his forces to join the battle piecemeal, but only after they had been built up to full strength and formed into a consolidated all-American army. It caused the three allied powers considerable heartache to get their act together, but at a conference on 26 March at Doullens, north of Amiens, they finally reached an agreement. General Ferdinand Foch was appointed as ‘Generalissimo’ (later given the formal title of Commander-in-Chief) of all the allied armies in France (later extended to other theatres as well) – a single authority who could impose some sort of higher operational coherence upon the competing allied contingents. Lloyd George was delighted that this at long last brought Haig under a higher command; Haig himself, though, was equally delighted that at last there was someone who could prod the pessimistic Petain into a greater show of inter-allied solidarity. As for Pershing, by this time he had already agreed to release some of his troops to help out, although his combat-ready total was still scarcely more than six divisions. The first American attack would be mounted by 1st Division at Cantigny, at the tip of the German salient on the Somme, on 28 May.
Thus it was that a long-overdue allied unity emerged out of the shock of 21 March, and major French reserves were moved north to the area of Amiens, rather than retreating southwards towards Paris. By the time they arrived in position, however, the German offensive had fizzled out at Villers-Bretonneux, where a variety of allied second- echelon troops, including some US and British engineers, were able to hold the line against the final German push.2 Villers-Bretonneux itself would continue to be the scene of some technically advanced fighting, notably the very first tank versus tank combat on 24 April, when three of the very few German tanks were defeated by three British tanks. Then on 4 July the village of Hamel, just to the east, was captured in a model surprise attack by Australian troops with some US support. Finally, this whole area would be the scene of the great ‘battle of Amiens’ on 8 August, in which the lessons of Hamel were reapplied on a much greater scale and with much greater results.
By the end of March Ludendorff had already begun to redirect his reserves, and Bruchmuller's artillery train, further to the north. On 9 April, the first anniversary of the battle of Arras, he launched a new offensive in the area of the Lys, following a thirty-six-hour bombardment. His first offensive from St Quentin had carried the Germans back over the old battlefields of the Somme, but now the tide of war flowed again over the old British battlefields of 1915 between Neuve Chapelle and Armentières, and over the 1917 killing grounds at Passchendaele itself, as well as Messines and Kemmel just south of Ypres. On this occasion, however, the shock was less than in March and the defence better organized. The two Portuguese divisions exposed in the front line were quickly crushed, but German progress was slow. French and other allied reinforcements eventually arrived to support an orderly British withdrawal. At around ten miles, the total depth of the German penetration was still impressive by the normal standards of 1915–17, but it soon became clear that this would not be the runaway drive to the Channel ports that Haig had most feared. It was finally halted some five miles short of the intended target, the rail junction at Hazebrouck, and degenerated into positional warfare that finally petered out at the end of the month. The German casualties were almost 100,000 – unusually, nearly twice those of the allies. Ludendorff had missed his chance to make a rapid exploitation of his victory on the Somme in March. He was also demonstrating a certain randomness in his ideas, thrashing around from one direction of attack to another, instead of concentrating upon a single Schwerpunkt.
There was a pause following the end of the battle of the Lys, but on 27 May Ludendorff lunged again in a completely different direction. He hit the French just north of the Chemin des Dames, where they had come to rest after the Nivelle Offensive of spring 1917. This time Bruchmüller's preliminary bombardment lasted only three hours, and surprise was achieved by an assault of seventeen German divisions against an allied front line manned by only four French and three British divisions. The stubbornly outdated tactics of the French Sixth Army commander, General Denis Auguste Duchêne, dictated that the defences were all bunched too far to the front, and they had two rivers too close behind them. All intelligence of the impending offensive had also been brushed aside, sealing the doom of the defenders. The British were particularly unfortunate, since they had been moved to this ‘quiet sector’ after being battered first in the March offensive and then again in April. Now, although they were very well aware of what was about to happen, they were powerless to change General Duchene's dispositions and were battered once again. The Germans advanced twelve miles in the first day, crossing not only the steep ridge of the Chemin des Dames, but also the river Aisne itself. The French reserves were bundled away to the rear, and the next day the Germans crossed the river Vesle as well. In his original plan Ludendorff had intended to halt at that, and redirect his reserves back to Flanders, but the heady scent of victory persuaded him to press on instead to Paris, which now seemed to be within reach. In three days the Germans reached the north bank of the Marne at Chateau Thierry, some thirty-five miles beyond their starting line. The apex of their new salient was in Belleau Wood, about four miles to the west of Château Thierry, while its north-easternmost point was at Noyon.
The Five German Offensives of 1918: (1) St Quentin, 21 March; (2) Lys, 9 April (3) Aisne, 27 May; (4) Noyon-Montdidier, 9 June; and (5) Reims, 15 July.
At that point the whirlwind advance was finally halted in early June, partly by the arrival of two American divisions who beat off all attacks on both sides of the river, and partly by Pétain's careful organization of other reinforcements. In part, however, the German spearheads were slowed down not only by superior allied air power, but also by just the same type of looting as had hindered them on the Somme two months earlier. This was, after all, the Champagne region!
German problems were increased when the US 2nd Division counter-attacked Belleau Wood on 6 June. At first their tactical methods were naive and costly, but they gradually learned better ways and the wood was finally cleared almost a month later. The capture of the village of Vaux on 1 July was a particularly slick and well-planned success. Overall the Aisne offensive had cost both sides about 125,000 casualties. The allies had received a rude shock and General Duchêne, just like Gough before him, was justly dismissed from his post. Yet on the German side Ludendorff found that by failing to halt his advance on the Vesle, he had bitten off more than he could chew. His front line in the new salient was too far forward, and its length was about twice as long as he had planned. He now abandoned his aim of switching his effort back to Flanders, and instead opted to site his next offensive between the salient achieved in March and the new one of May. If he could straighten the line between the two, he would have an excellent baseline for a concerted attack on Paris.
The Noyon-Montdidier offensive, the fourth in quick succession, was launched southwards from the area won in March. It began on 9 June, once again led by the team of Hutier and Bruchmüller. On this occasion, however, they achieved no operational surprise because the French high command could read the map just as well as Ludendorff, and they had correctly predicted where his next thrust would come. French artillery was already putting down fire on the German front lines before Bruchmuller revealed his hand. Even so the assault gained seven miles on the fist day, and crossed the river Matz on the second. Yet Pétain had shrewdly positioned his reserves so that even when the front line of divisions had been overwhelmed, the second line was not. Indeed, General Mangin actually counterattacked on the third day with some three French and two American divisions, including tanks. All this stopped the Germans dead in their tracks, and Ludendorff abandoned his offensive on the fifth day, 13 June. If he had been wise he would have gone back to the defensive at once, to husband his reserves. But because he was a gambler by nature, he chose to roll the dice yet again.
In his Aisne offensive in May Ludendorff had hoped to draw the allied reserves to the south, so that he could then return quickly to Flanders and finally throw the British into the sea. But the runaway success of the Aisne attack had distracted him with the prospect of capturing Paris, and this chimera continued to motivate him in the Noyon-Montdidier attack. However, the relative failure of the latter operation led him to think again about Flanders. He reverted to his late May logic, whereby threatening Paris, from anywhere around the Aisne or the Marne, would necessarily bring the allied reserves scurrying to the south, leaving the British in Flanders vulnerable to a final decisive hammer blow that would knock them out of the war.
There was an unfortunate month's delay before the fifth German offensive was launched, to east and west of Reims, on 15 July. It was heralded as the ‘peace offensive’ (Friedensturm), or the final battle that would simultaneously win and end the war in a single blow. This represented precisely the same psychological mistake that Nivelle had made in his offensive of April 1917: it raised the hopes of the troops far too high before the battle, only to dash them down into despair later, once it had become obvious that the war had not actually ended. In this case the disillusionment came for Ludendorff's armies even faster than it had for Nivelle's. The offensive was also heralded to the allies, who were able to see through the German preparations far more accurately on this occasion than they had in the previous four assaults.
The heady successes of 21 March and 27 May would not be repeated on the Marne in July, and it was soon clear that Ludendorff's forward impetus was faltering. To the east of Reims General Henri Gouraud applied an even more effective defence in depth than had been used to resist the Noyon-Montdidier offensive, let alone by the scornful Duchêne on the Chemin des Dames, or by Gough at St Quentin. On Gouraud's front the Germans attacked with storm- troops and twenty tanks, but they were brought to a halt as early as the morning of the first day. Bruchmiüller was decisively defeated for the first time in his life, and the French art of defence finally came of age, about a year after their post-Nivelle art of attack had done so.
To the south-west of Reims the Germans made rather better progress and succeeded in making a textbook assault river crossing over the Marne to the east of Château Thierry. They carved out a bridgehead four miles deep on a frontage of nine miles, but by 17 July they had been halted there as completely as they had been by Gouraud to the east. Ludendorff was anxious not to let his men advance too far, and in any case he had already sent off Bruchmüller's guns to Flanders. But worse was to come. The following day the French mounted a large-scale counter-offensive into the whole Chateau Thierry salient from the south and east, thereby threatening the latest Marne crossings in the rear. Surprise was achieved by marching the assault troops into position only at the very last moment, and excellent initial progress was made against sparse enemy defences.
There had been a variety of small or relatively small counterattacks against some of the earlier German thrusts, but none had been as big or as significant as this one. It included some seventeen French and US divisions, 346 Renault light tanks and some horsed cavalry. Although few of the tanks remained in running order at the end of the first day, and the cavalry was cut down in a matter of minutes, the infantry continued to make good progress into the salient until the Germans managed to consolidate their defences. Ludendorff eventually organized an orderly withdrawal from the southern tip of his salient, but he lost some 30,000 prisoners, and could not resist the incessant pressure from south and west. The key rail junction at Soissons was liberated on 2 August, although by then the offensive was running to a standstill along the line of the Vesle. It was finally called off altogether on 6 August, after regaining much of the ground lost since 27 May. This was the same day that Foch was promoted to be a marshal of France.3
The German attack and the Franco-American counter-attack are collectively known as the second battle of the Marne. Overall it cost some 130,000 allied and 200,000 German casualties, which at least showed a certain actuarial advantage to the allies. It also brought the German total of casualties since 21 March to a staggering total of one million (of whom 124,000 were killed, as against 67,000 killed from Britain and 220,000 from France). Of greater significance, however, was the fact that the French had launched the first major counterattack in what would quickly become an ever-expanding hail of similar blows, along the whole length of the Western Front. It also marked the end of Ludendorff's offensives. His long-planned attack in Flanders was cancelled and his forces reverted to the defensive for the remainder of the war. After four months of desperate fighting, the tide had finally turned.
