How the war was won Part I: the Generals
In summer 1918 Foch unleashed his carefully prepared counter-offensive – co-ordinated attacks to which the Germans could find no answer
In summer 1918 Foch launched the Allies’ massive, sustained counter-offensive
On 7 August 1918 Ferdinand Foch was made marshal of France, a deserved reward for checking the German Spring Offensive. The next day his systematic destruction of the German army, the so-called ‘Hundred Days’ Offensive, began. Starting off with the offensive at Amiens – that Foch’s opponent Ludendorff remembered in his memoirs as “the black day for the German army in the history of the war” – the Allied armies under Foch’s direction would drive the Germans out of France and much of Belgium with a co-ordinated and sustained series of large-scale offensives that culminated with the 11 November armistice.
Since the end of the inconclusive 1916 Somme Offensive, Foch had been preparing to take on the enemy in one huge and prolonged battle that would settle the war. He had judged that the Somme Offensive had been on too small a scale and too slow to destroy Germany’s manpower reserves, and that to win the war, offensives would have to be scaled up and sped up. This would require militarily efficient armies, but also much more modern war material – aircraft, tanks and above all guns and shells – which the allies would possess in abundance come 1918. The style of battle in which the armies under Foch’s direction would fight during this last phase of the war was faster, more mobile and more intensive than that of the slogging, attritional battles of the middle years of the war, and anticipated the methods of the next war. The Allies’ armies were no longer blunt instruments but well-equipped, experienced and supple fighting forces. With a soldier who understood warfare to direct them, they would achieve a series of victories that deserve far greater recognition than they have 100 years later.
After the war Foch was often criticised for his obsession with the offensive, but Foch knew that the only way to defeat Germany and to liberate France was to break the enemy’s army materially and morally, and that this could not be done with a defensive strategy, which risked France’s allies being picked off one by one.
Foch also knew that France could not win without the resources and cooperation of her allies, and that his own inspirational leadership was vital to harnessing those allies to achieve their common objective. In January, anticipating that the Allies would first have to meet and defeat a powerful German offensive, Foch had recommended that they “be in a position
to develop [separate] actions in the form of a combined decisive offensive if the attrition of the enemy or any favourable circumstance in the general situation allows us to anticipate success from doing so”. In high summer that moment finally arrived. After pushing the Germans back from the Marne salient in July, Foch had called Philippe Pétain, Douglas Haig and John Pershing, respectively commanders of the French, British and American armies in France, to a meeting at his headquarters in Bombon, where he explained his plan to beat the German army.
All three army commanders had reservations. Pétain’s forces were worn out after four years of fighting; Haig’s army had been fighting intensively since March and needed rest; Pershing’s divisions were raw and still being trained. Foch listened to his colleagues’ concerns: “I insisted that I had given due weight to the temporary weaknesses mentioned, and I urged the fact that a proper combination of our forces would make the contemplated programme practicable, especially as we could… hasten it or slow it up according to the success obtained as we went along.”
The commanders-in-chief went away to study the plan, and within 48 hours gave their approval. Although more ambitious than any hitherto presented, the plan made sense, and Foch had demonstrated that he could co-ordinate the
Allied forces that would execute it. That meeting took place on 24 July. A fortnight later the plan was engaged. Foch’s strategy had two stages. The first would push the Germans back to the positions they had advanced from in the spring, thereby freeing up Allied communications.
The second, if Foch judged the moment opportune, would drive the enemy from their prepared defences and complete their destruction. Inherent in Foch’s method was the intention not just to recapture lost ground, but to paralyse, degrade and ultimately destroy the fighting capacity of the German army once and for all. As Foch put it on 24 July, “It is apparent that, owing to the difficulty which the Germans find in keeping up the strength of their various units at the front, a new crisis is now asserting itself... actions must succeed each other at brief intervals, so as to embarrass the enemy in the utilisation of his reserves and not allow him sufficient time to fill up his units.”
“THE BATTLE WOULD BE A SURPRISE ATTACK DEVELOPING THE COMBINED-ARMS METHODS EMPLOYED SUCCESSFULLY IN THE BATTLE OF CAMBRAI THE PREVIOUS NOVEMBER”
The Battle of Amiens
On 8 August the Battle of Amiens, the first action in Foch’s overall scheme, which was designed to push the enemy out of artillery range of the vital railway junction at Amiens, commenced. Australian and Canadian forces of General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, supported by a British and French army corps on either flank, would spearhead the attack across the Santerre plateau south of the River Somme.
The battle would be a surprise attack developing the combined-arms methods employed successfully in the Battle of Cambrai the previous November. The Canadians would be moved into the area secretly: their presence in the line was seen by the Germans as an indication of an impending attack, so a clever deception plan gave the impression that the Canadians were deploying further north in Flanders.
There would be no preliminary bombardment: instead the guns pre-registered on enemy defensive strongpoints and artillery positions, ready to fire at zero-hour when the first waves of infantry – supported by over 2,000 guns, 800 aircraft and 500 tanks, including the new fast, light, machine gun-armed ‘Whippet’ tanks – left their trenches. A second wave of divisions would leapfrog through the first after the first objective was taken – the intention was to sustain the momentum of the attack to get to and beyond the enemy’s gun line – and mobile field guns, cyclists, cavalry and motorised machine guns were available to exploit opportunities that arose as the defence was overwhelmed.
The British and French guns began firing at 4.20am, one hour before dawn. The British and Dominion infantry left their trenches at the same time, following a rolling barrage that
advanced 91 metres (100 yards) every two minutes. The French infantry launched their main assault 45 minutes later, having seized the enemy’s front line trenches at zero-hour.
Under cover of an early morning fog, the attacking infantry, supported by medium tanks, swept forwards at a rapid pace through startled and disorganised German formations, whose men were still shaking off their sleep. There was a whole day of glorious sunshine ahead, during which the initial surprise could be exploited. Once they had taken the enemy’s front lines, the tanks supported a further advance. It was a grand spectacle, a modern army on the move. “We could not believe it at first,” wrote one French soldier, “a screen of patrolling cavalry was climbing out of the valley… A few hundred metres behind the horsemen came lots of narrow infantry columns climbing the slopes… Behind them columns of artillery and lorries were appearing from all sides, snaking across the countryside using every possible route. It gave a sense of order and power. It was like a flood tide… accompanied by the roar of aeroplanes.”
The second objective was largely taken by mid-morning by the second wave of divisions, after which cavalry, supported by Whippet tanks, pushed on to the final objective, which they would hold until the infantry came up. Inevitably progress slowed, as the enemy deployed reinforcements and the advancing troops tired and suffered casualties and disorganisation. Co-operation between the cavalry and Whippet tanks was an experiment that did not really work – the cavalry dashed forwards too quickly for the tanks to keep pace – although the supposedly obsolescent horsemen enjoyed their best day of the war. At one point a squadron operating well in advance captured a German leave train full of troops.
However, the battle was not a complete walkover: British III Corps, covering the northern flank of the advance, was held up on the
Chipilly Ridge north of the Somme valley, and the Australians advancing immediately south of the river took casualties from flanking machine gun fire as a consequence. The ridge did not fall until late the next day. Nevertheless, by the end of the day the Australians, Canadians and French had advanced up to 13 kilometres (eight miles), through and beyond the enemy’s gun line, inflicting 27,000 casualties and capturing 16,000 prisoners and 300 guns. Nine German divisions had been broken. British, Australian and Canadian casualties totalled 8,000.
It was part of Foch’s plan to exploit success laterally. On 8 and 9 August, General Fayolle, commanding the French Reserve Army Group, committed two further army corps from General Debeney’s First Army to expand the battle southwards. On 10 August General Humbert’s Third Army entered the battle, breaking the German defences on its front and advancing rapidly to seize Montdidier. By 11 August, when the Battle of Amiens-montdidier was closed down in the face of strengthening enemy resistance, the Allies had penetrated 19 kilometres (12 miles) at their deepest point on a 48-kilometre (30-mile) front, eliminating the threat to Amiens. As in the earlier German offensives, initial momentum had slowed over subsequent days. Foch and his subordinates
had learned not to push against strengthening resistance, but to dislocate another sector of the line once reserves had been committed to reinforce the main battle. Amiens-montdidier would be followed up by attacks by British Third and First and French Tenth Armies in midaugust, expanding the battle north and south.
In four days the Allied armies had recaptured more ground than they had managed in four and a half months on the Somme in 1916. Above all, however, as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George recognised, “The effect of the victory was moral and not territorial.” The German soldiers had been shocked and overwhelmed, and despondency started to spread throughout the army. Ludendorff himself was on the verge of nervous collapse, and his decision-making became increasingly erratic as his armies were swept aside over the following weeks.
With his centre crumbling, Ludendorff had to order a withdrawal to a more defensible line: this was to be the old 1916 frontline on the Somme. But the momentum of the British advance drove the Germans from these improvised positions with little difficulty in late August. The next line of defence lay at the rear of the Somme battlefields, the optimistically named ‘Winter Line’ on which Ludendorff expected his men to hold until 1919.
This increasingly desperate belief that a solid, linear defensive position might still be resumed in the conditions of modern warfare drew criticism from his subordinates. Army group commander General von Gallwitz noted as the Winter Line was stormed, “I am at a complete loss to understand Ludendorff’s thinking in the wake of the complete turnaround in the situation. A step-by-step withdrawal from one position to another will not achieve anything. The enemy has the complete initiative.” But Ludendorff had little choice by this point. Although seriously understrength, reserve divisions had to be recommitted after limited rest to shore up the crumbling defence. There was no possibility of organising a mass of reserves for a large-scale counterattack.
The Germans retreat
Foch had already achieved his aim of ‘embarrassing’ his adversary and had no intention of giving the Germans time to rest and reconstitute their battered formations. British forces followed the retreating Germans across the old Somme battlefield closely and assaulted the Winter Line when they reached it. Third Army troops broke the line opposite Bapaume, which fell back into Allied hands on 29 August, while to the south Fourth Army advanced towards the river line.
The dominant high ground of Mont Saintquentin, commanding the bend in the River Somme at Péronne, had been occupied by the Prussian Guard. They were determined to hold it, but the Australians had other ideas. Finding themselves advancing into the bottleneck of the Somme bend, on 30 August they carried out an audacious flanking march northwards across the river to assault Mont Saint-quentin from the north. After vicious hand-to-hand fighting, the elite German soldiers were driven from Mont Saint-quentin and Péronne by the veterans of the 2nd Australian Division, whose divisional memorial now stands on the road from Mont Saint-quentin to Péronne. The Australians won seven Victoria Crosses in the
“FOCH HAD ALREADY ACHIEVED HIS AIM OF ‘EMBARRASSING’ HIS ADVERSARY AND HAD NO INTENTION OF GIVING THE GERMANS TIME TO REST AND RECONSTITUTE THEIR BATTERED FORMATIONS”
action. Further north, British First Army joined in the assault, seizing the northern extension of the Winter Line, the Drocourt-quéant Line, on 2 September, bringing them into contact with the Hindenburg Line. Once again, the Canadians were to the fore, having been redeployed to the north as the advancing Allied line shortened.
It was a new type of fighting – fluid and exhilarating. One Australian private remembered, “The Germans were now well on the run. They left machine gunners, in strong positions, to give us trouble as their infantry retires… we started to advance without any barrage and the German machine gunners gave us a hot time but there were not many troops in front of us to impede our progress.” The Germans he faced were “very dejected and downhearted. They knew they were losing the war”. In part, this explains the large numbers who surrendered as the Allied forces advanced, although this was also a consequence of the new tactics, which trapped defenders before they could retreat. But the spectacular forward progress seen at Amiens was never repeated. Tanks remained mechanically unreliable so could not be used in prolonged offensive operations – by the end of the Battle of Amiens less than a dozen machines were still in working order – and once the attack spread along the whole British front the available tanks had to be parcelled out to the individual armies rather than concentrated en masse.
British commanders largely reverted to the tried and tested tactics of pulverising artillery bombardments followed by infantry assaults, with tanks and cavalry employed if the ground was suitable: by this point in the war they were experienced enough to arrange largescale battles at short notice. Although artillery remained the mainstay of their offensive tactics, the French, who now possessed thousands of aircraft to support ground operations and fast-moving Renault FT17 light tanks in large numbers, could operate more dynamically. Some 600 FT17 light tanks were brought up on lorries in the 48 hours before the attack on Montdidier.
The German army was soon showing the strains of this intensive and fast-paced combat. Frontline units were depleted not only by losses and captures (and the influenza epidemic that was ravaging both sides by this point), but by a crisis of morale, which led to large numbers of men shirking in the rear rather than going up the line. Ludendorff on the other hand was
“BRITISH COMMANDERS LARGELY REVERTED TO THE TRIED AND TESTED TACTICS OF PULVERISING ARTILLERY BOMBARDMENTS FOLLOWED BY INFANTRY ASSAULTS”
obsessing too much about small tactical details and had lost sight of the bigger picture. “If only Ludendorff would not ring up every single corps direct, as well as the army group and army chiefs of staff!” army group commander Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria opined. In the later stages of the defence his subordinates would be on their own, however, as Ludendorff no longer had any reserves to give them.
The storming of the Winter Line left Ludendorff no option but to order a fighting retreat to the Hindenburg Line, the defensive position his troops had advanced from in March 1918. The French First, Third and Fourth Armies in the Oise and Aisne sectors joined the pursuit in the early days of September. Allied forces were established within striking distance of the next defensive obstacle by mid-september. Before it could be assaulted, there would have to be a pause to bring up heavy guns and ammunition for another set-piece attack. In the meantime, local actions improved the positions from which to launch the attack.
Foch would make good use of the pause to switch the battle to another previously quiet sector of the front. Pershing had been pressing him for an attack on the Saint-mihiel salient, to the east of Verdun, in the US sector, with a view to striking at the German railway hub at Metz behind it. Although this attack was tangential to his main line of advance, Foch saw a good opportunity to give the newly formed American First Army battle experience, although he vetoed any attempt to reach Metz.
Supported by French guns, tanks, aircraft and infantry from French Second Army, the attack was launched on 12 September. It was a success, with the salient being cleared by 15 September, although the Americans were pushing against a semi-open door since the Germans had anticipated the attack and had already started withdrawing their forces from the vulnerable salient.
American forces striking from the west joined up with those advancing from the south, while French troops attacked the apex of the salient to pin the defenders in place. The pincer movement trapped over 13,000 prisoners and 450 guns, although more than half the German defenders escaped the trap. One Austrian unit, called to fight on the Western Front, apparently surrendered as one. The fact that 752 machine guns were also captured indicates the nature of the defence that the Allies confronted.
Many of the USA’S future senior leaders learned their trade in the battle. George S. Patton was the first officer assigned to the newly formed US Tank Corps, using his Renault FT17 tanks with a cavalryman’s dash; William ‘Billy’ Mitchell directed the close air support for the advancing US infantry, and future Chief of Staff George Marshall ran First Army’s logistics. A drive on Metz was over-ambitious, however, as the relatively inexperienced American forces were in chaos by the end of the battle.
Consolidating the victories
Between early August and late September, the Allies had reversed the position on the Western Front. Now the Germans were facing a dynamic offensive, and they seemed far less able to contain it than the Allies in the first half of the year. Although no battle ever goes completely to plan, all Foch’s attacks contributed to his objective – degrading the enemy’s manpower, morale and material and dislocating his defensive operations. The fact that they also broke the will of his opposite number Ludendorff was an added bonus. The initial phase of Foch’s counter-offensive – conceived, in Lloyd George’s phrase, as a “series of hammer strokes designed to smash up the German army” – had pushed Ludendorff’s forces back to their start line of March 1918 and inflicted further heavy casualties to add to those of the spring offensives.
The German army was not, however, broken, and Foch had to decide whether he could launch the second phase of his plan before winter and finish the war. To date only the six British and French armies holding the central section of the Western Front had done intensive fighting, although others had advanced when the opportunity arose. These hardened but weary British and French armies now faced the formidable obstacle of the Hindenburg
Line, designed in 1916 to be impregnable. But warfare had changed much since then.
Foch was not one to shy away, or to improvise, when faced with such a challenge. He was ready, and his forces were able and willing. His method depended on rapid, relentless and intensive combat. To that end, in late September he would engage the rest of the armies he directed in their biggest battle yet, to spread the pressure all along the Western Front, smash the Hindenburg Line and to finally sweep the Germans from France and Belgium.
“THESE HARDENED BUT WEARY BRITISH AND FRENCH ARMIES NOW FACED THE FORMIDABLE OBSTACLE OF THE HINDENBURG LINE, DESIGNED IN 1916 TO BE IMPREGNABLE”