fight on to the end’. High-sounding prose does not always strike the intended chord, and thousands of humorists at once inquired where the wall might be, for they would be glad to see one. On 24/25 April the German advance was checked on the long ridge of Villers-Bretonneux with the spires of Amiens, the crucial railway link between the British and French sectors, in sight on the horizon. In all the Germans had taken more than 90,000 prisoners and 1,000 guns, and had snuffed out all the gains so hard won on the Somme. They had inflicted a very serious defeat on the British army, and recent research suggests that had Ludendorff clearly identified that the offensive’s most valuable objectives were railheads (Amiens in the south and Hazebrouck in the north), the Germans might indeed have broken the Allies on the Western Front, with the French withdrawing cover to Paris and the British falling back to the coast. But Ludendorff was no master of what modern military theorists call the ‘operational level’ of war that links battles together to produce a worthwhile strategic outcome, and opportunism rarely wins wars.
Ludendorff tried again in April, mounting Operation Georgette in the Neuve Chapelle sector, breaking an overextended Portuguese division and knocking another deep dent into British lines. Foch sent French divisions north to replace some exhausted British divisions, and the latter were placed with the French 6th Army on the Chemin des Dames, quiet for a year. It became very unquiet when Ludendorff attacked again in late May, creating yet another large salient. But a pattern was now establishing itself. Each offensive showed less promise than its predecessor, and although the Allies were bent they were not broken. General John J. Pershing, commander in chief of American forces in France, was determined that his men would fight only as a unified force, not scattered under British or French command. But he was prepared to allow them to check the German advance in early June and then to mount a counterattack of their own at Belleau Wood, near Château-Thierry. Ludendorff knew that his time was up: two last attacks, in mid-June and mid-July – the last portentously nicknamed Friedensturm, the Peace Offensive – fizzled out.
The failure of the offensives which had begun with such promise on 21 March was not merely a tactical setback. Ludendorff had correctly recognised that American entry into the war would inexorably swing the balance of numbers against Germany, and his attacks had done nothing to alter that balance. Indeed, if the British had lost heavily in prisoners, the Germans had lost scarcely less heavily in killed and wounded, and Ludendorff’s policy of putting the bravest and the best into assault divisions meant that his losses – over half a million for the first half of the year – fell precisely where he could least afford them.
And in the background, the Allied blockade, obdurate and unseen, was slowly throttling Germany. There were food riots across the land in 1916, and widespread misery during the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17. A shortage of horses saw six-gun teams reduced to four, and lack of good leather was emphasised by the frequent removal of boots from British dead. The blockade no more broke German civilian morale in the First World War than did strategic bombing in the Second, though this has not stopped some historians from suggesting, in an argument pressed with fierce passion though wholly unencumbered by evidence, that ‘the Royal Navy … played the most decisive part in winning the war’.110 It did not. It contributed to a growing sense of desperation, made it harder (though never impossible) to obtain essential strategic raw materials, and by the summer of 1918 it combined with the disappointment of empty victories to erode morale at the front. Nor was life comfortable in England. The depredations of German submarines had seen the introduction of rationing in 1915, and by 1918 many soldiers who went home on leave were shocked at the shortages they found there.
The first major Allied counterattack was delivered by the French in mid-July. The British had already launched a smaller-scale venture, when the Australian Corps carried out a slick assault on the village of Hamel, near Amiens, using tanks and a lightning bombardment in a plan that presaged later, larger ventures. Gough had been replaced as a consequence of his army’s ‘failure’ in March, and a restructured chain of command saw 5th Army disappear, to be replaced by a restructured 4th Army under Rawlinson. He conceived of a much larger attack, using principles proved at Hamel, and although both Foch and Haig tinkered with the scheme it retained features which mark it out sharply from what had gone before. There were sufficient aircraft to ensure Allied air superiority over the battlefield and even (though the experiment was not wholly successful) to drop ammunition to advancing units. Rawlinson had almost 350 new heavy Mark V tanks, and enough guns (2,000 to perhaps 500 German) to give him a density of one per 22 yards of front attacked. And this front was not well dug and wired, like the old Somme front or the Hindenburg line: it was the high-water mark of a tired army running short of men.
At 4.20 on the morning of 8 August 1918 the attack began, and by nightfall the Australians and Canadians attacking south of the Somme had penetrated 8 miles and inflicted 27,000 casualties. There were moments when the battle seemed to be opening right up, and the activities of some British tank crews have a very modern ring to them. Lieutenant C. B. Arnold took his light ‘whippet’ tank ‘Musical Box’ deep into the German rear, mangling gun-lines as he did so.
I turned hard left and ran diagonally across the front of the battery at a distance of about 800 yds. Both my guns were able to fire on the battery, in spite of which they got off about eight rounds at me without damage, but sufficiently close to be audible in the cab and I could see the flash of each gun as it fired. By this time I had passed behind a belt of trees running alongside a roadside. I ran down along this belt until nearly level with the battery, when I turned full right and engaged the battery in rear. On observing our appearance from the belt of trees the Germans, some 30 in number, abandoned their guns and tried to get away. Gunner Ribbans and I accounted for the whole lot. I continued forward, making a detour to the east and shot a number of the enemy who appeared to be demoralised, and were running about in our direction.111
Rawlinson thought that ‘we have given the Boche a pretty good bump this time’, and he was quite right. The German Official History was to acknowledge ‘the greatest defeat which the German army had suffered since the beginning of the war’. Ludendorff himself admitted that: ‘August 8th was the black day of the German army in the war’.112 It is a telling reflection on the way the war is remembered in Britain that 1 July 1916 is reverently commemorated: I always find myself blinking hard as the pipes shriek out, at 7.30 in the morning, year on year, at Lochnager Crater on Pozières ridge. But 8 August is not: yet it was not simply an important victory in its own right, it was, in the most profound way, the shape of things to come.
Over the next three months the British elbowed the Germans back across northern France. Theirs was not an isolated effort. The French and the Americans attacked further south and south-east, called on by Foch’s ringing ‘Tout le monde à la bataille’. The Americans pinched out the St-Mihiel salient in mid-September, and then swung northwards to slog through difficult country against a stout defence in the battle they call Meuse-Argonne. Yet it is no reflection on Allied valour to observe that, during the war’s last three months, the British took twice as many prisoners, and almost twice as many German guns, as the Americans, French and Belgians put together. And lest it be thought that the British were simply snapping up exhausted Germans who were now too tired to fight, let Private Stephen Graham of the Scots Guards assure us otherwise.
The brave [German] machine-gunners, with resolute look in shoulders and face, lay relaxed beside their oiled machines … and beside piles of littered brass, the empty cartridge cases which they had fired before being bayoneted at their posts … On the other hand … one saw how our men, rushing forward in extended formation, each man a good distance from his neighbour, had fallen, one here, another there, one directly he had started forward to the attack, and then the others, one, two, three, four, five all in a sort of sequence, here, here, here, here, here; one poor wretch had got far, but got tangled in the wire had pulled and pulled and at last been shot to rags; another had got near enough to strike the foe and been shot with a revolver.113
