The Battle of Arras
The British and Canadians at Arras introduced advanced tactics winning all their objectives, but the decisive breakthrough remained elusive, as Graham Caldwell reveals
The British and Canadians at Arras in WWI introduced advanced tactics, winning all their objectives, but the decisive breakthrough remained elusive, as Graham Caldwell reveals.
After the slaughter on the Somme and the stalemate at Verdun, by the end of 1916 Field Marshal Haig had survived, but General Joffe was sidelined and replaced on the 12 December by General Robert Georges Neville, a man of a completely different stamp. After Verdun the French were ready to be seduced by a prophet promising a guaranteed quick victory to end the war. Neville’s plan was to be a purely French effort in a decisive breakthrough of the German defences on the Aisne front in the Chemin des Dames sector, 90 miles south of Arras. Neville’s theory was that if a breakthrough using maximum power at a single point of the line was quick enough then, within 48 hours, the enemy’s artillery gun-line, positioned 3,000yd behind, would be captured before causing any significant damage, thus minimising casualties to less that 10,000 Frenchmen. However, Neville required Haig to make a diversionary attack on the Arras front a week before the Neville Offensive. Of Haig’s five field armies, the brunt of the British diversionary effort would fall on General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army. Known as The Bull for his sudden outbursts of temper, Allenby was nobody’s fool, with a reputation for meticulous planning and respect for the wellbeing of his men.
New tactics, above and below ground
The First Battle of Arras took place over four days in October 1914, when the French and German Armies attempted to outflank each other during what became known as the Race to the Sea, only to result in static trench warfare along the whole front. The main worry for the planners in 1917 was how to concentrate
large numbers of troops near the front line without arousing the suspicions of the enemy. Anxious to avoid a repeat of the devastating losses during the Battles of the Somme the previous year (see The Armourer March 2021) a new innovation, to create a vast underground network of tunnels (called subways) was put into effect, through which the soldiers could pass and come up directly in front of the German first line of defence without having to face the deadly machine gun fire in no man’s land. It took workers four months in 18-hour shifts, 24-hours per day to complete 13 miles of electrically-lit tunnels. These included light rail, galley kitchens, wells, latrines and hospitals to house 24,000 soldiers living underground the night before the battle.
Another development was the creeping barrage, first experimented on the
Somme, but now perfected to a fine art. By advancing perilously close behind their own artillery fire, which gradually moved ahead on a set schedule, the tactic forced enemy snipers and machine gunners to stay under cover, thus minimising casualties when crossing no man’s land. Another problem was how to overcome the inaccuracy of counter-battery fire when endeavouring to silence the enemy’s artillery. This was solved using an oscillograph to recorded vibration readings from where the enemy guns were firing from, by placing a system of microphones at different locations to record the sound of enemy guns firing, followed by the sound of the resultant shell explosions. The British gunnery hierarchy spurned it and the Germans had nothing like it, leaving it to the Canadian’s to prove its worth before Vimy Ridge.
Finally, upgraded Mk.II tanks were coming off the production line, but the tactic of using them en-masse was still in the future. 48 tanks were employed at Arras, but spread out in small numbers to support the infantry. Gas was a standard weapon used by both sides, but at Arras the British employed the new Livens Projector, a mortar that could throw large
drums filled with flammable or toxic chemicals, soon to become the standard means of delivering gas attacks by the British Army. Neville and Haig’s forces were ready to open the offensive in late March when something extraordinary happened. Seemingly overnight, 70 miles of German defences between Arras and the Aisne River had vanished!
Retreat to the Hindenburg Line
By relinquishing 1,200 square miles of territory in front of three British and one French armies, a whole German Army Group methodically withdrew each night during March in complete secret 20 miles back to the specially built Hindenburg Line (which the Germans called the Siegfried Position). Its construction took five months to build employing 50,000 Russian prisoners and 15,000 German Pioneers. In one bound the enemy had shortened their front line by 30 miles and saved 14 divisions into a new strategic reserve! In one of the worst Allied intelligence debacles of the war, the German High Command had outwitted and totally disrupted Neville’s super-plan, together with its British diversionary offensive, under the cover of various deceptive measures, a press blackout and German air superiority, the latter restricting British air reconnaissance no further than the enemy front line.
Plan Alberich began in early February, stripping everything valuable from the region before turning it into a wasteland of destroyed villages, towns and farms, plus mined roads, poisoned wells and demolished bridges and rail lines. As
April began, so did the intensity of fighting in the air. The well led and audaciously flown Luftstreitkräfte of 1917 took a terrible toll on the larger numbers, but inferior technology and tactics, of the Royal Flying Corps. Flying a red Albatros D.III, Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthoften claimed 21 kills that month.
A typical Hindenburg Line position was on a reverse slope 2,000yd deep, but deliberately thinly manned, with concrete dugouts and acres of thick-dense entwined barbed wire. A network of underground passages and shelters, stretching for miles, provided sleeping accommodation for frontline divisions. The underground chambers had multiple exit points into a Battle Zone Line festooned with concrete mini-fortresses housing machine-guns
which provided mutual supporting fire. 1,500yd behind the Battle Zone Line an Artillery Protective Line protected the tactical reserve of newly-designated counter-attack divisions, because each army headquarters would now possess a strong local reserve waiting 10,000yd further back in a Rear Zone, ready to suddenly appear in formidable strength to eliminate or drive back any enemy forces that had made it thus far.
This new defence-in-depth strategy was the brainchild of General der Infantry Erich Ludendorff, Deputy Chief of the German General Staff. Ludendorff wrote: ‘In future our defensive lines would no longer be on a rigid and continuous front, but consist of a complex system of strongpoints, layered in deep zones in breadth and depth, ensuring that defenders would remain mobile, voluntarily abandoning front line areas, which points essential to the maintenance of the whole position would be recovered by specially heldback counter-attack divisions.’
The German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line totally disrupted British plans due to the abandoned territory needing essential restoration, plus the British infantry and artillery formations now found themselves in the wrong locations and needing a completely new artillery plan. As the British gingerly inspected the deserted enemy trenches and dugouts they found them festooned with booby-traps, a situation eerily depicted in the movie 1917 by LanceCorporal’s Chapman and Schofield. Because the German retreat affected the French plans less, Neville saw no reason to change the French, nor for that matter, the British start dates.
First Battle of the Scarpe
The main thrust to break through the Hindenburg Line by Third Army took place astride the Scarpe River between 9 and 14 April 1917. Following a massive five-day artillery bombardment, using 2,800 guns, Allenby’s main offensive commenced on Easter Monday on a 20 mile front. Six front-line divisions of Generaloberst Ludwig von Falkenhausen’s Sixth Army faced the 11 attack divisions of Third Army. The 1st Tank Brigade allocated its 40-odd tanks (from north to south) to XVII, VI and VII Corps. XVIII Corps, comprising a further four divisions, was retained in reserve with the Cavalry Corps. Haig’s faith in cavalry to consolidate any breakthrough yet again it proved to be impractical. The underground subways, allowing soldiers to emerge a few dozen yards from the German front line, created a surprise effect permitting a rapid advance of three and a half miles on the first day, the biggest gain from static trenches since trench warfare began in 1914. Allenby and his staff were dumfounded why the enemy had not committed their reserves in response, but Ludendorff’s new tactical orders to Sixth Army, which was to draw the assaulting forces through and behind their frontline into the Battle Zone and then release five formidable counterattack divisions to win the day, failed utterly. Falkenhausen miscalculated, believing the defensive battle would be a long drawn out affair and held his reserve between 12 to 20 miles away, a decision that had disastrous consequences.
The British also missed an opportunity within the first 48 hours to exploit a gap of 10,000yd in front of XVII Corps, when the unexpected withdrawal of the 14th Bavarian Division occurred, an opening that remained undefended for seven hours in what could have been the decisive breakthrough on the Western Front. This was when the exhausted infantry of the 9th (Scottish) Division, which included the South African Brigade, were held up