The mighty men of Wearside–
HEROES IN BATTLE ... AS 3,000 STORMTROOPERS CAME AT THEM, THEY HELD THE LINE WHEN OTHERS FELL THEY
A brigade of men from Wearside may well have saved Britain’s blushes in the First World War – on their own. We are indebted to historian and author Philip Adams for a piece of nostalgia which is truly inspiring. It’s all about the day – 100 years ago this month – that the 160th (Wearside) Brigade held the line against 3,000 stormtroopers. If they hadn’t managed it, the German Army would have had a free passage to Arras. The British and French armies would have been split in two, and the war could have been lost. Today, Philip tells the tale of the Wearside men who changed the course of history.
It was March 21, 1918, when it happened. But imagine what might have happened if it had not gone well. The 160th halted the advance of the enemy, and stopped them breaking through and advancing ultimately onto the channel ports. It has gone down in history as the costliest defeat in British military history. But the story that is barely known is one full of heroes. Philip said: “It is often overlooked as we tend to focus on The First Day of the Somme in 1916 and Dunkirk in 1940. “It is one the darkest days in our history and as such the heroism displayed by the Wearside Brigade is almost completely forgotten – if we were American; every schoolchild in the land would know their story!” To illustrate how bleak it was, the British lines faced 10,000 cannons and they launched 1.1 million shells during a five hour bombardment. “That is the same number the British artillery fired in the 2 weeks before The Somme,” said Philip. Such was the intensity, many men were incapable of mounting a defence against the attack that followed – not so, the 160th (Wearside) Brigade. They wheeled their own cannons out of their gun pits and fired them across open-sights. Or to put it another way, they used their cannons as giant shotguns against the massed ranks of advancing stormtroopers. The enemy advance was so fast that 100 square miles was taken on that one day alone and the Wearside Brigade (who as Artillery men would normally have been two miles behind the front) were now the new Front Line. Philip added: “Early in the