Why don’t we celebrate Amiens?
The battle is widely forgotten today because it doesn’t adhere to the stereotype of Great War failures, argues Nick Lloyd
British popular memory of the First World War has been dominated by the grim, attritional struggles of 1916–17, with the Somme and Passchendaele epitomising the terrible carnage and ultimate futility of the war.
By contrast Amiens has been largely forgotten. It was a battle of much shorter duration and with many fewer casualties than the Somme and Passchendaele. It was also only one part of a series of major offensives (known as the Hundred Days) that brought the war on the western front to an end. These are perhaps some reasons why it has attracted much less attention from historians than other battles.
Crucially, however, Amiens did not fit in with the dire image of the war that many influential critics of British High Command – from David Lloyd George and the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart to Joan Littlewood (creator of Oh,
What a Lovely War!) – wanted to portray. For them, the First World War was an unrelieved disaster, and the role that British commanders played in failing to learn lessons was a fundamental aspect of the war. They saw no reason to analyse Amiens in any detail.
Amiens was, in many respects, a model battle of positional warfare. It showed that the stalemate of trench warfare was now over and also illustrated the degree to which a combination of infantry and artillery, plus armoured vehicles and air power, had reshaped the nature of warfare and brought about the return of manoeuvre to the battlefield. It devastated German morale and revealed to the German High Command that they had no answer to the kinds of tactics and the awe-inspiring mass that Allied armies could now deploy on the western front. It showed, all too clearly, that the war had to be ended. Amiens, therefore, was not just a forgotten battle; it was an inconvenient one too.