World War One: A Short History (16 page)

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On the ground, it looked very promising. Recent battles – Riga, Cambrai, Caporetto – had shown that the German army had found a method of restoring mobility to the battlefield, and the professional talent of generals such as Otto von Below, Georg von der Marwitz, Oskar von Hutier, the architects of these victories, was beyond compare. Besides, the Germans in the west now had superiority of numbers. There had been 147 German divisions in the west as against 178 Allied ones. There were now 191 German divisions, thanks to the Russian collapse: 137,000 officers, three and a half million men, with the horses to keep matters mobile. In other words, the German superiority could be concentrated, with crushing effect, at any single spot on the line (as had been achieved at Caporetto). A set of operations, with code-names, was planned, and the first, named after the Archangel, was ‘Michael’. Other code-names, for parts of the German line, came from Wagner’s
Ring
– ‘Siegfried’, ‘Kriemhild’, ‘Hunding-Brünnhild’, for example.

Common sense dictated that, if you were attacking two enemies, you attacked the join, where their armies met. Each enemy would look after himself, maybe retreating in different directions – in this case, the French to cover Paris and the British the Channel ports, from which they could get away to England. This had nearly happened back in 1914. Now, the British joined up with the French just beyond the old Somme battlefields, around St Quentin. Between there and Arras, to the north, stood the British Fifth Army, commanded by Gough, a gallant man with a history of bad luck. Only nine of some fifty British divisions had not undergone the miseries of Passchendaele, and morale was not brilliant. Officers noticed that the men no longer sang the (superb) songs that they had made up earlier. The mood in the British army was a characteristic, ‘we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’.

Besides, the new principles of this war were not so well understood on the British side as on the German. Otto von Below,
especially, understood how to combine infantry and artillery, as at Caporetto. He was now moved to northern France, for Ludendorff’s offensive. But if offensive techniques had now been vastly improved, so, too, had defensive ones. The new principle was ‘defence in depth’; Passchendaele had been a model of it. Gough and his staff had not absorbed the logic of it, for various reasons – partly because they did not have the numbers of men required, partly because they still reckoned that a strong front line was in itself a good thing, partly because they did not trust their men to make complicated manoeuvres under fire, partly because they underestimated the Germans (who were supposed to have been demoralized by Passchendaele), but mainly because of a very British notion that things would be all right on the night. Nearly 90 per cent of Gough’s battalions were within 3,000 yards of the front line, far too close to enemy artillery. But there was a deeper weakness. The British had suffered 800,000 casualties in 1917, and were again under a million in strength; after Passchendaele, the men were not inclined to trust the staff, and the general reserve, of eight divisions, was in the north, in Flanders. The Americans had begun to arrive, but they had not been trained and had only a single division ready for battle. Finally, Haig himself, surrounded by creepy young officers, helping him on and off with his coat – like Cadorna before Caporetto – showed no signs at all of worry. Why should the Germans, if they did attack, do any better than he himself had done?

Ludendorff performed prodigies of concentration, by stealth. He brought up 750,000 men – seventy-six divisions against twenty-six (300,000). He also brought up three quarters of the entire artillery of the western front – 6,600 guns – giving a superiority of three to one. The new weaponry was to hand – light machine-guns, portable by one or two soldiers, grenades that could be fired from a rifle rather than thrown by hand – and infantry tactics could therefore become much more flexible.
The German army’s greatest strength lay in the profusion of non-commissioned officers – sergeants and corporals (Hitler was one, and he got two Iron Crosses for bravery). These were men who, without being officers, knew how to command small bodies, whereas in other armies you had to have an officer (in the Russian case, even now, they man the telephones). There was a special school in Belgium to train infantry that would move forward, fast, dodging and weaving, giving each other cover fire. Such were the
Stosstrupps
. They were not to try and deal with enemy posts but to move forward and destroy communications. Enemy forces holding out would be covered by other troops, not similarly trained. But there were other advantages for the attackers. Aircraft had come into their own, and the Germans could photograph British gun positions and identify them from a map reference without registering through a gunnery observer. There were now 2,600 aircraft, made of metal and single-wing.

The British Fifth Army was to face this extraordinary machinery. It then had a final piece of bad luck – Gough’s fate. Dawn on 21 March occurred at 4.40 a.m. and it was a very foggy morning. The British gunners could not see what they were doing. The German bombardment, in seven phases, went on until 9.40, over a million shells being fired off, firstly against the artillery and finally on the front lines, against which 2,500 trench mortars were fired. An especially irritating gas was used, which caused some of the defenders to tear off their gas masks to scratch the itch, whereupon one or other of the poison gases took effect. The British rear areas were shattered, communications breaking down, and Gough, commanding the Fifth Army, lost control, as Capello had done at Caporetto, though his northern neighbour, Byng of the Third Army, held the bastion at Arras, to finally decisive effect. On the southern side, at La Fère and St Quentin, there was an exceptionally rapid advance: in a week, the Germans advanced forty miles on a
fifty-mile front. They inflicted 300,000 casualties, and the tactics of fast-moving infiltration meant that one third of these were prisoners. The British lost 1,300 guns.

They retreated back over the old Somme battlefield, and fell back on Amiens, the essential railway junction, distinguished by a cathedral that is the most accomplished, in terms of mathematics, of all the great French cathedrals. It was an extraordinary success for Germany, because mobility had been restored to the western front, such as had not been seen since 1914, when it had still been possible for cavalry to canter grandly over open fields. Now, the twentieth century had happened: there were immense advances in technology of all sorts, and Germany was leading the field. The success was such that Ludendorff himself lost any sense of perspective, forgot the lessons of Caporetto, and took his foot off the brake – a German weakness. He forgot that, however victorious an army, it would lose steam as it advanced. He sent troops in, first to the left, to reinforce the success, on the St Quentin–La Fère side – and then thought that he should perhaps try to take Arras on the other wing. But the troops were only able to carry light weaponry and the guns could not be easily dragged over the mud of the old Somme. The German offensive ended up with a ridge just short of the railway junction at Amiens, from which, with very careful firing, the heaviest German guns could reach the station, but only just. And then the rules of this war re-asserted themselves: the importance of reserves, in this case brought up by a British classic, the red, double-decker London bus. Besides, German troops, falling upon masses of British stores, gorged themselves in a way unthinkable behind their own lines.

There were two great differences from Caporetto, other than mountainous terrain. In the first place, as mentioned, German guns could not be easily hauled over the slough of despond of the old Somme battlefields, whatever Porsche’s engineering
genius; quite apart from the shortage of petrol, there was a near-absence of rubber, such that wooden or iron tyres were used for lorries, and these churned up the roads. Secondly, the Cadorna factor – preposterous obstinacy in error, and preposterous blaming of everyone else – did not come into play. The British infantry were at last well-served by their commander, who now did what he should have done before, and accepted a French commander, who would have charge of the reserves. On 26 March, at Doullens, he put himself under Foch, who, unlike so many other generals, learned instead of just repeating himself. He had in reality learned vastly since his days on the Marne, and he had a genius for making himself trusted by all parties. He controlled the reserves and thereby could dictate the strategy, which, with tact, he now did. By London bus, by lorry, by railway, twelve French divisions and some of the British reserve from Flanders came to the Amiens lines. There was no muddled retreat in different directions (as had happened at Gorlice in 1915 and at Caporetto), and by 4 April the German offensive was called off.

But Ludendorff’s main idea was to clear the British from Flanders and capture the Channel ports – expelling the British from the Europe that Brest-Litovsk implied. The March offensive had drawn in forty-eight of the fifty-six British divisions, together with forty French ones, and Haig had only a single division in reserve. At Ypres, the British were in a very vulnerable position, and could be fired upon from three sides – a position that they had worsened for themselves by taking Passchendaele, part of a ridge at the tip of their salient. The German trains rolled again, and those thousands of guns were transferred. The aircraft identified British gun positions, and the guns fired against map references, without giving any indication beforehand that they even existed on the ground. At least the British had had the sense to abandon their thin salient at Passchendaele, but, even so, they were stretched too thinly
on ground that reasons of prestige and propaganda forbade them to give up. On 9 April, two German armies attacked, again with the methods of 21 March, and again with the luck of very favourable weather. On the southern side, they struck at two divisions of Portuguese. They, like the Italians, were being made to run so as to learn to walk, or even to toddle. Their men were therefore used as cannon-fodder to get British support for the maintenance of the Portuguese empire in Africa. They were not enthusiastic. They broke. In the Ypres salient, defence in depth could not be organized in any event, given that the whole thing bulged out into German-held territory. There was another notable German victory. On 12 April the Germans not only took back the Messines ridge but, later, went on to seize a continuation of it, Mount Kemmel, the highest point all around. This was the moment at which the British were threatened by collapse, and Haig responded: he told his men the truth – ‘backs to the wall’ – and from then on displayed qualities (not least, an ability to learn) that come as a surprise. But he was helped by Ludendorff, success having gone to his head. He repeated his mistake of 21 March, and kept on. Then he ran into reserves brought up by red bus and rail – in this case, twelve French divisions. The railway lines at Hazebrouck and Bethune remained in British hands, the Germans arriving over shattered countryside on foot, and exhausted in attacks over what was now marshy country on the river Lys (which gave its name to the battle). The Allies had lost 150,000, the Germans 110,000 (to which the quarter-million of the March offensive should be added) and these were losses that the Allies could afford, the Germans not.

There followed a long pause. The last conscription-year of Germany was being called up early, as the schoolboys took their final exams. There were also prisoners of war, returning from Russia, and Austria-Hungary was prevailed upon to send
some men (they arrived without boots at Metz). The ranks were refilled, and the munitions production of the Hindenburg programme was still considerable, although there were signs of overheating. Ludendorff’s idea was still to take the Channel ports and disrupt the arrival of Anglo-American troops, but he needed to drain off the reserves that had been built up in that region since the Lys battle. He opted for a stroke against the French front north-east of Paris, on the Aisne, at the Chemin des Dames, and was again lucky. The French commander was one Duchêne, a man of singular inability to learn. He placed most of his men in the front positions, where they were most vulnerable to bombardment, and there were also five British divisions that had been withdrawn because they had had a very bad time in the March offensive and needed to rest in what was supposed to be a quiet area. The noise of German movements was concealed by, of all things, the croaking of frogs in the Aisne, and the surprise was almost complete. On 27 May, 5,300 guns opened up, against 1,400, and two million shells were fired off in four hours, with the usual favourable weather.

The German Seventh Army (Hans von Böhn) then performed a near-miracle of advance, scaling almost vertical ridges, crossing the river Aisne to capture bridges intact, and even struggling across marsh. They reached the river Marne, from where a heavy gun, ‘Big Bertha’ (named after the wife of the arms-manufacturer, Krupp), sent shells to Paris, forty miles away. Then Ludendorff once again repeated his mistake of 21 March and 9 April. He went on, and on. German troops with light weaponry were taking on Allied reserves arriving, with heavy weaponry, by rail – thirty French reserve divisions. There were also now the Americans, who at Château Thierry and Belleau Wood had their first experience of European war, and acquitted themselves well. On 2 June a Franco-American counter-attack by twenty-seven divisions held the Marne line, and a German attack at Montdidier on 9 June, on the northern side of this
battlefield and adjoining the old British Somme lines, failed. It was a sign of what was to come. Ludendorff’s attacks had created three very large salients – extended lines, some of them sketchy, in open country, and open to attack – and the active front had been extended from 390 to 510 kilometres, while the German troops, buoyed up for all-out victory, were necessarily cast down by the failure of the Allies to collapse. And 200,000 Americans were arriving every month – a fact of which Allied propaganda made much.