Introduction

The German offensive of March 1918 was the first of five major thrusts which were the brain-child of General der Infanterie Erich Ludendorff. Operation ‘Michael’ – or Kaiserschlacht as it is more commonly known – was followed by four further attempts to force the Allied forces on the Western Front into capitulation. Despite the sometimes breathtaking advances made in the opening days, ultimately all of these attempts failed; strategic flaws and logistical problems proving to be their undoing. Rather typically the British Nomenclature Committee saw the March offensive not as a single battle but as a series of battles beginning with the ‘First Battle of the Somme 1918’, a name that Randal Gray in his book Kaiserschlacht 1918 rightly feels invites confusion with the 1916 battles which are ‘forever seared into the national consciousness’. While the committee go on to add the Battle of St Quentin, Actions at the Somme Crossings, the Battle of Rosières and the British Battle of the Avre, the names themselves fail to lend any gravitas to what must be regarded as one of – if not the – most significant periods of fighting of the entire war.

The Official British History of the war refers to the March 1918 fighting as the Great German Offensive, and although it provides an accurate account of the fighting it lacks the tactical detail and personal accounts that allow the reader a much greater access to the battlefield. In writing about 1914–1918 I have always sought to expose the emotions of war through the accounts of those who were there – it was after all a human conflict fought by individuals no different from ourselves and whose experiences and accounts reflected the frailty of their existence. Fortunately many of these accounts still exist and bring to life the actions often described more clinically in regimental and divisional histories. These accounts shed light on long-forgotten or relatively insignificant engagements that have been either excluded from official accounts or have only briefly been referred to.

Readers may well ask why have I confined my story to the Fifth Army when the Kaiserschlacht offensive also involved the Third Army? There is one sound principle reason for this; the Fifth Army sector saw the greatest collapse of command and control and – arguably – some of most intense and bitter fighting of the twentieth century. However, I have referred to the Third Army where necessary particularly as it was its actions and the poor communication between the two armies that largely contributed to the gap which opened up between them and later enabled units of the German 1st Division to threaten the Rosières pocket; a situation that Sir Walter Congreve, commanding VII Corps, attributed solely to the Third Army’s stubborn retention of the Cambrai salient. Similarly the involvement of the French cannot be ignored or overlooked, but while the overall strategic picture has been furnished where necessary, the text is largely confined to the rearguard actions of the Fifth Army between the eleven days of 21 March and 1 April 1918.

Another area that has been omitted from this book is the often overlooked work of the Royal Flying Corps squadrons of V Brigade which was attached to the Fifth Army. This omission does not in any way denigrate the contribution of the men involved; it is simply that the lack of space – which does not allow the full story of their role in the battle to be told as fully as I might have liked – prompted me to concentrate on the ground battle. Their exploits in the air, together with those of III Brigade who flew over the Third Army sector, are worthy of a book in itself and may well be the subject of a future project. Needless to say, 15 Wing under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ivo Edwards with his five squadrons of aircraft, together with the seven squadrons of Lieutenant Colonel Felton Holt’s 22 Wing, were frustratingly only able to get off the ground when the visibility improved later in the morning of 21 March, circumstances that also affected the Imperial German Air Service. But as the retreat moved west both German and RFC pilots quickly adapted to the changing pattern of operations as bombing and ground attack became the order of the day.

As far as the ground war is concerned the difficulty has been not in deciding which actions to describe but in finding accounts that provide that all important individual perspective on events. To put it simply, if there is no story to tell, it can’t be told and as a consequence many of the rearguard encounters portrayed in the book have virtually chosen themselves. Some of course have been included because of the place they have already forged in history; the action at Manchester Hill is one of these as is that of Racecourse Redoubt. Two posthumous Victoria Crosses were won in these locations on 21 March being early contributions to the thirteen of Victoria Crosses awarded to individuals in the Fifth Army sector between 21 March and 1 April.

There were of course hundreds of individual and unit encounters during the March retreat that never found their way into any written format and sadly remain untold to this day. Typical of these is the story of the forward posts and redoubts in the British Forward Zone on 21 March. Many of these so-called strong-points were overcome extraordinarily quickly. If they had not been subdued by the preliminary artillery bombardment then the first waves of attacking German infantry quickly overwhelmed them, often surrounding them in the fog before they had any opportunity to retaliate. Where we do not have reliable personal accounts detailing what actually took place, we can only speculate as to the exactness of the fate of those outposts and their garrisons.

Many of these small garrisons may well have surrendered rather than continue the struggle in the face of what they saw as a futile resistance; others, we know, chose to fight on to the last round or until most or all of their officers and senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) had been killed or wounded. Still more were rendered incapable of fighting by the intensity and ferocity of the initial German artillery bombardment as recounted by Gefreiter Wilhelm Reinhard of IR 227 at Fayet. In attempting to identify particular units which did not fight as well as others, some historians have analysed casualty and prisoner of war figures and used them as a yardstick by which to measure the effectiveness of the fight they put up – the higher the casualties the greater the resistance. Using such data has to be regarded as an unfair and imprecise measurement of overall success or failure; as every soldier is aware, casualty figures can be an unreliable indicator of the true nature of an engagement.

One such division was the 14th (Light) Division which has long been tarred with this brush. However, there are at least two accounts from commanding officers of King’s Royal Rifle Corps battalions in the Forward Zone which suggest this was not the case across the whole of the divisional front. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard-Bury commanding the 9th King’s Royal Rifle Corps held out in his headquarters redoubt until 4.00pm – as did the 8th King’s Royal Rifle Corps – before both battalions were finally overwhelmed. In the sector of the Battle Zone held by the 14th Division, Lieutenant Colonel Julias Birch was still fighting hard until midnight with the remnants of the 7th Battalion King’s Royal Rifle Corps, having lost 75 per cent of his strength in the opening bombardment that morning. While a number of regimental and divisional histories have achieved notoriety for embellishing the truth I find it difficult to believe men such as Julias Birch and Charles Howard-Bury would do the same. Their conduct, and that of the much maligned 8th Battalion KRRC, goes some way in vindicating the performance of Major General Victor Couper’s 14th Division.

What has become clear is that the Fifth Army Forward Zone was over-manned in a number of divisional sectors and the German opening bombardment was very skilfully zeroed in on many of the forward posts and redoubts. Guilty in this respect was Couper himself who was amongst a number of divisional and corps commanders who simply did not understand the concept of defence in depth, a number that unfortunately included the Fifth Army commander, Hubert Gough.

Any student of the March offensive will before long come across the question of whether or not the thick early morning fog that was evident on the 21 March aided the German infantry attack. German opinion is divided on this. In the IR 31 account of the attack across the Oise valley at Travecy, their historian complains bitterly about the difficulties they had in overpowering the British strong-points in the fog, a task they felt was by no means going to be easy even in good visibility:

‘The dense fog hanging all over the Oise valley does its best to split up all advancing units into fragments. It is impossible to cling to written plans; everybody is on his own. German troops turn out to be English and vice-versa, rattling machine guns can’t be localised, let alone identified. When a village seems to have been taken, it either turns out to be full of English or it is pounded by their own artillery. Very lights and dispatch runners disappear in the dense fog.’¹

Two days later – when the early morning fog was just as thick – Gefreiter Georg Maier who was serving with one of the Bavarian units attacking Jussy, felt the fog assisted their attack. ‘Thanks to the fog’, he wrote, [the enemy] ‘was not able to hit us hard, and our infantry stormed the position where the firing was coming from.’

Although Maier’s experience on the Crozat Canal was a relatively positive one there are numerous accounts of German infantry forced to advance using compass bearings while others reported becoming detached from their units and stumbling into British-held positions. German artillery too found it all but impossible to put down counter-battery fire on British gunners who were still able to return fire and with the inability of any aerial reconnaissance to get off the ground, could make no corrections and only fire along previously-established fixed lines.

British military opinion – expressed in the accounts of officers who were present on the front line on 21 March – strongly supports the argument that the fog aided the German attack significantly. Brigadier General Frederick Dawson commanding the South African Brigade reported, ‘an exceptionally thick fog, it being impossible to see more than 30 or 40 yards and in consequence every arm of the defence, namely artillery, machine guns and infantry, was at a great disadvantage’. Captain Geoffrey Peirson, a staff officer at Épehy, was a little more specific, he maintained that the initial attacks were carried out by what he termed as the ‘advanced guards’ allowing the main German attacking force to move in columns up the valleys and roads before they deployed using machine guns and trench mortars at close range. ‘Had it not been for the fog this method of attack would have ended in disaster, as all those natural approaches were covered by machine guns and field guns.’² His is a view supported by another officer in the 21st Division who maintained that across the entire divisional Forward Zone, ‘direct shooting was rendered impossible’, adding that in his opinion this was not an isolated case.

Without the cover of a thick fog the battle may have had a different outcome for the Fifth Army, certainly the unsuccessful ‘Mars’ assault on the Third Army on 28 March did not have the benefit of the cloaking effect of fog but it is highly unlikely this was a significant factor in its failure. The Mars offensive floundered in the face of strongly-held positions and a more flexible understanding of the three zones of defence. However, a hint of what might have been on the Fifth Army Front is provided by the IR 31 account of their attack in the Oise valley. While drawing attention to the confusion it also makes reference to the difficult nature of the task they might have been faced with had the weather been more favourable to the British. We hear the same complaint from IR 227 in Gauche Wood where the fog made their task doubly difficult, ‘neither man nor trunk is distinguishable from each other’ wrote their historian. Certainly the fog made life difficult for both sides but in the opinion of the author, the presence of fog on 21 March – and on succeeding days – was only part of the reason why the Fifth Army collapsed so dramatically.

There is a body of evidence to support the view that the collapse was due to the combination of fog and the failure of the British to fully understand and exploit the new concept of defence in depth. There appeared to be a worrying difference in opinion between corps and divisional commanders as to the role the Forward and Battle Zones were to play in delaying any enemy attack, exacerbated no doubt in some sectors by incomplete defences. It has to be said that in many sectors the Forward Zone simply failed to slow the enemy advance and its collapse precipitated what became a general retirement. Fog certainly allowed the enemy to pass unobserved between redoubts, but even without that covering blanket, reports that some redoubts were handicapped by the ground on which they were sited and the distance that existed between them is disquieting. What is perhaps even more disturbing is the apparent British inability to recognise a German attack may in fact approach from an angle – as it did on the 14th and 16th Divisional sectors and completely cut out the Forward Zone.

Yet even without the fog factor I feel the Fifth Army Forward Zone defences would probably have suffered the same fate, a notion which begs the question of whether the Germans would – in those circumstances – have been held on the Somme. Martin Middlebrook in his analysis of the first day of the offensive believes that had there been no fog on the morning of March 21 many of the German attacks would have faltered against the weight of British machine-gun and artillery fire. If he is right then the enormous casualties that would have been inflicted on German infantry by the British positions in the Forward Zone may well have taken the sting out of the advance and held the attack in the Battle Zone or at worst along the line of the Somme.

However, what is certain is that as the retreat gathered pace more and more emphasis was placed on the ability of regimental officers to provide leadership and command in the absence of the wider brigade and divisional structure that had been largely devastated by the speed and intensity of the enemy offensive. In the 1914 Retreat from Mons it was the regimental officers and NCOs which took on the mantle of responsibility for maintaining the integrity of their units; four years later the same demands were being placed on a new generation of officers and NCOs many of whom only had experience of the confines of trench warfare. It may have been this factor that escalated into a general retreat as the Forward Zone was overwhelmed and the hapless British soldier was forced out of his hole in the ground and thrown into a war of movement that was almost as foreign to him as it was to many of his commanders.

With the evident inability to adapt quickly to a war of movement becoming increasingly apparent it wasn’t until the Fifth Army was on the line of the River Somme that units began to respond more effectively to the swiftly moving German assault. It was almost as if the basic tools of the trade had been forgotten and had to be learned over again. These ‘on the hoof ’ learning curves were aggravated by the failure to co-ordinate the destruction of vital bridges and the Somme causeways into the work of the Royal Engineers. All too often we hear the despair in the voices of fighting units as they realize vital bridging points had not been destroyed and their defences – so often held at a huge human cost – were compromised by enemy infantry outflanking them.

Further censure for the Fifth Army collapse is frequently placed on the lack of manpower and the resulting emphasis on completing the construction of dugouts and redoubts above all else. In this respect the Fifth Army commander was between a rock and a hard place. He had little choice but to build the three-zone defensive line without which there would be no defence against a German offensive, yet at the same time it appears that he did not respond – or have the time in which to respond – to the opinions of his senior advisers, all of which was not helped by Gough himself giving out mixed messages as to the state of the Fifth Army defences. We know, for example, he had boasted to Douglas Haig on 13 February that a further month would see his front able to resist an attack, yet at the beginning of March he was complaining he had no resources to work on his defences.³

Enmeshed in the politics of the manpower question is the reduction of the number of infantry battalions in each brigade and how this might have affected the performance of the soldier on the ground. The political manoeuvring on the Home Front, orchestrated by David Lloyd George, was aimed at reducing the influence and control exercised by the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. One catastrophic result of this was to drastically reduce the flow of men to the Western Front and in so doing reduce each brigade of infantry from four to three battalions. Not only did this have an immediate effect on the rotation of battalions to and from the front line but, perhaps more importantly, it disturbed the cohesiveness that units had built up over a period of time just days before the German offensive began. Exactly what effect this had on the fighting ability of the British soldier and his officers is impossible to gauge, but it was a reorganisation that took place at an inopportune moment.