First World War: How the ‘crisis of the war’ put the Allies in sight of victory

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/first-world-war-how-the-crisisof-the-war-put-the-allies-in-sight-of-victory-0x6crrq00

Operations Michael and Georgette were to be a triumph for German infiltration tactics, but the enemy didn’t count on the superior materials of the Allied armies

German propaganda imagery shows German soldiers in Bailleul, north France, during Operation Georgette

The massive attack on General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army front on March 21, 1918 was potentially as shattering for the cohesion of the Allied line as the Austro-German attack the previous October had been on the Italian front at Caporetto. So ferocious was the initial artillery assault and so innovative the German infiltration tactics that by March 25 three British divisions — the 16th (Irish), 36th (Ulster) and 66th (2nd East Lancashire) — each with losses of more than 7,000, had practically ceased to exist.
Unlike at Caporetto, however, the Germans on the Fifth Army’s front, while able to infiltrate and bypass locally, were unable to make the big, bold, fast outflanking moves that had destroyed the unity of the Italian line in the Alps and astride the Isonzo. Lacking cavalry, for a great many of Ludendorff’s regiments had been de-horsed to provide draft animals for the artillery and transport, and without tanks, when Fifth Army began to withdraw — even at times precipitately — the Germans could move no faster than they. One of the reasons was that a year earlier, in their own withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, they had devastated the ground over which they now advanced.

General Sir Hubert Gough in 1940. In March 1918 his Fifth Army front met with a devastating attackKEMSLEY NEWSPAPERS

It was the very problem that Ludendorff’s strategic adviser, Lieutenant-Colonel Georg von Wetzell, the head of the operations section of the Oberste Heeresleitung (Supreme Army Command), had appreciated during the planning of der Kaiserschlacht: crossing what he called the “shot-to-pieces battle area”. He had concluded that there would have to be “operational pauses” during the offensive so that the supporting arms and services could catch up with the leading troops. These, however, would give the Allies time to reorganise, aided by “the excellent railway communications behind the front”. He had warned against expectations of rapid breakthrough, therefore, and Ludendorff had consequently set no precise objectives. Instead, he intended to “punch a hole into [their line]. For the rest, we shall see.”
After all, it had worked for him, and Hindenburg, in Russia in 1914.
Nevertheless, the men of Gough’s Fifth Army, and increasingly those to the north, on the right wing of Byng’s Third Army, who were on the receiving end of Ludendorff’s massive punch, struggled to stem the German advance. Lieutenant Ulrich Burke of the 2nd Devons — which, though a regular battalion, was by 1918 made up largely of conscripts, and whose officers in the main had joined since 1914: Kitchener’s “New Army” men — described the disorientating experience of those days of constant retreat:

“Then we halted, stayed where we were. We did as much defence work as possible and waited for them to come. Then they’d come on and we’d get the order — after we’d shot and killed quite a few — to retire. Well, we were retiring and retiring and we were never still. You never knew where you were going to pick up any food, where you were going to pick up ammunition, and some of the men got windy and really would have run. Now if an officer or a sergeant had behaved like that, the whole lot would have panicked. The only thing that kept them there was respect for your bravery and your attitude; you know what you were doing and you were saving them all you could. And that kept them steady.”
It was dispiriting, too, to be abandoning ground taken the year before. Sergeant-Major Richard Tobin of the 7th (Hood) Battalion, 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, in Byng’s Third Army, remembered how in late March they “dropped into a trench . . . we knew of old. We had started to retreat on March 21, and here we were back in the trench we had started to attack from on November 13, 1916.”
For this was the old Somme battlefield.

A propaganda image showing German infantry cannon positions on the Western Front near Armentières in April 1918, during Operation GeorgetteNEUMANN ARCHIVE/ALAMY

Here and there the speed of the Fifth Army’s retreat actually became a problem for the Germans, for much of Gough’s ordnance stores, with their abundant food and quantities of rum, brandy and whisky, had to be abandoned. For troops on increasingly short and unattractive rations, even the elite Sturmtruppen, it was sometimes too much to resist. As more than one historian has been unable to resist saying, the advance was slowed not for lack of German fighting spirit, but on account of the abundance of Scottish drinking spirit.
Something close to panic began taking hold in Paris, with General Philippe Pétain, the French commander-in-chief, saying that the war was as good as lost. The civilian population was already unnerved by bombing (on March 8 Gothas had dropped a hundred bombs on the city, precipitating the flight of 200,000 Parisians to the country), and the Germans were shelling the suburbs, their specially made Krupp railway guns now within range (70 miles).
The crisis, however, at last galvanised the Allied leadership. On March 26 General Ferdinand Foch, the French representative at Versailles, had been instructed, in the words of the memorandum signed by Georges Clémenceau and the Allied plenipotentiaries, “to co-ordinate the action of the Allied armies on the Western Front”. Specifically, he was to form a common reserve and to use it to guard the junction of the French and British armies and to plug the potentially fatal gap that would have followed a German breakthrough.
A fortnight later, with Paris looking as if it might fall, Foch was formally appointed Generalissimo, supreme commander. He now had strategic direction of all the Allied armies on the Western Front, including the Americans, and in June his remit would be extended to cover the Italian front. This appointment meant that Ludendorff could not now divide the French and British armies, because Foch saw their cohesion as the greater priority than Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s of covering the Channel ports. If it became necessary — and Foch told Haig and the Supreme War Council that he didn’t believe it would — the armies would retire as one towards the Somme.

General Ferdinand Foch c 1918. He had strategic direction of all the Allied armies on the frontHULTON ARCHIVE/ GETTY IMAGES

In this, Foch would be proved right. Ludendorff had indeed punched a hole into the Allied line, but his offensive, “Michael”, had run out of steam. Despite attacks on the French line to fix their reserves in place, Pétain had moved, if somewhat belatedly, significant reinforcements to ease the pressure on Amiens, key to the continued cohesion of the Allied line. Determined Allied counter-attacks, including a magnificent mounted charge by a squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Canadian Cavalry Brigade) at Moreuil Wood, together with the strengthening of a new line of defence, and handy reserves, halted the Kaiserschlacht just short of the city. After a fortnight’s advances, in some places over 40 miles, on April 5 Ludendorff brought Operation Michael to a close.
Total British losses, including Dominion troops, were 178,000, with more than 75,000 taken prisoner, plus 1,300 guns and 200 tanks, while the French lost 77,000 and the Germans 240,000. But Amiens and Arras stood firm. Ludendorff would now turn his attention instead to the north, French Flanders, with the aim of pushing the First Army (Horne) and Second Army (Plumer) back against the Channel ports.
The northern sector of the British line had been thinned out to reinforce the Somme, and the weakest link in this weakened sector was the Portuguese Corps, which held the front in the plain of the River Lys. Their morale was probably the poorest of any corps of the entire Allied line, not least for the fact that home leave arrangements had largely broken down with the problem of shipping created by the need to bring US troops to Europe, and the submarine menace.
On April 9, therefore, Ludendorff’s 53rd birthday (for which the Kaiser came to lunch at the Oberste Heeresleitung at Avesnes-sur-Helpe and presented him with a bronze figure of himself), Operation Georgette began. After a short, sharp Feuerwalze bombardment — high explosive, poison gas and smoke — 14 divisions of Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s Army Group (General Ferdinand von Quast’s Sixth Army) attacked along a ten-mile front towards the Lys at Armentières. Four divisions of well-rested stormtroopers assailed the Portuguese sector. Apart from a few isolated positions, so ferocious had been the bombardment, and so skilled the assault troops’ attack, that within an hour the Portuguese front line was taken, along with 6,000 prisoners.
The British troops on either side of the three-and-a-half-mile hole in the Allied line were also soon on the retreat, to avoid being outflanked — just as had happened at Caporetto. The Germans had released 2,000 tonnes of mustard and phosgene gas, incapacitating more than 8,000, of whom many were blinded. The next day Armentières fell (and despite a stout defence, Bailleul, across the Lys to the northwest, on the road to Dunkirk, would fall on the 15th). On the same day General Herbert Plumer’s men were driven from Messines, whose capture he had masterminded ten months earlier, and would soon give up Passchendaele Ridge too, which had been won at such debilitating cost in November. The Germans now began to commit their reserves, and the situation became critical.

The Special Order of the Day issued by Field Marshal Douglas Haig on April 11, 1918IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM/ ALAMY

So alarmed was Haig that on April 11 he issued a “Special Order of the Day”:
“Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army.
“In spite of throwing already 106 divisions into the battle and enduring the most reckless sacrifice of human life, he has as yet made little progress towards his goals.
“We owe this to the determined fighting and self-sacrifice of our troops. Words fail me to express the admiration which I feel for the splendid resistance offered by all ranks of our Army under the most trying circumstances.
“Many amongst us now are tired. To those I would say that Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest. The French Army is moving rapidly and in great force to our support.
“There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.”
In fact, Foch remained firm in his conviction that the offensive was nothing more than a huge diversion in preparation for something more substantial elsewhere, and gave Haig only limited support. Indeed, although the First and Second armies were forced to give ground, they were making the Germans pay dearly for it. Hauptmann Stefan Westmann, a medical officer with an assault battalion in Quast’s Sixth Army, described the sheer weight of machinegun fire they faced, “which was so terrific that the losses were staggering. We got orders to lie down and seek shelter. Nobody dared lift his head because they would machinegun us for any movement. The British artillery opened up and the corpses, the heads and the arms and legs flew about and we were cut to pieces.”
He also recalled his astonishment when his battalion overran a British field hospital near Merville: it was “completely intact and there I saw for the first time since years the abundance of material, of equipment which we didn’t know any more about. Amongst other things I found cases full of surgical gloves. The German doctors had to operate with their bare fingers. They had to go into the purulent and contaminated wounds with their bare hands and the only thing to wash our hands with was a kind of sand soap. Two parts of sand, one part of soap. And here I found actually thousands of pairs of rubber gloves.”
The war of material was beginning to show in every way. Despite the initial success of Georgette, the Germans managed to advance only about eight miles. Ludendorff closed down the offensive on April 29 and began to think of a new line of attack — as Foch predicted, against the French sector.
Casualties on both sides in April had been huge. In five weeks the BEF — technically, the “British Armies in France” — had lost about 236,000 men: 20,000 dead and 120,000 taken prisoner, the French about 90,000; but the Germans had lost an irreplaceable 348,000.
Although it was not yet apparent, the “crisis of the war”, which Haig had foretold in his discussion with General “Black Jack” Pershing in December, and which he believed had come at the Lys, was past. The Germans had exhausted themselves and were continuing to do so. They had also taken ground they could not possibly hold against a significant counter-offensive by such abundantly equipped and well-supplied troops as the Allies.
The appeal had gone out to the Americans, however, to do all they could to hasten into the field. The chief of the army staff in Washington, General Peyton C March, at once stepped up mobilisation and declared: “I am going to get the men to France if they have to swim.”