His infectious enthusiasm had done much to check the German advance at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. Since then his determination to attack under all circumstances had often been disastrous, but now the Allied armies had the numbers and, more important, the skills to make it effective. Pershing now had forty-two US divisions at his disposal, each twice the size of its European counterpart, and was able to regroup them in a single army—later divided into two—on the right of the Allied line.
By attacking northwards through the Argonne forest, he threatened the main lateral railway line, from Metz to Antwerp, that fed the German armies. On the left of the line the British were to launch a converging attack, while French armies, reinvigorated by two fighting generals Mangin and Gouraud, kept up the pressure in the centre. Since it would take some time for the Americans to redeploy and the French to recover from the great battles of June and July, it fell to the British to launch the first blow, to the east of Amiens, on 8 August.
Considering the half a million or so losses that it had suffered since the beginning of the year, the British army had made a remarkable recovery, and of no one was this more true than Haig himself. Haig’s offensive spirit, like that of Foch, had more often than not had disastrous consequences, but now, like that of Foch, its time had come. His frequent prophesies of the imminence of German collapse were at last coming true, and, unlike the majority of his colleagues who were planning a campaign for 1919, he believed that the war could be won by the end of the year. He cheerfully accepted Foch’s direction from above, and, guided by his renovated staff, listened and gave effect to the new tactical concepts being developed from below. His Australian and Canadian units had proved themselves the most formidable fighters on the Western Front, and, after much trial and error, the British army had learned how to use its tanks.
A successful smallscale action at Hamel on 4 July had proved a model of infantry–tank cooperation, and the same methods were now put to use on a very much larger scale. Combined with the infantry–artillery liaison techniques that the British had now mastered, and yet another innovation, the use of lowflying attack aircraft, these provided a winning combination unimaginable—and impracticable—two years earlier. Together with the French army on their right flank, the British penetrated seven miles on the first day of their attack and took 30,000 prisoners. It was the first outright and irreversible defeat that the Germans had suffered in four years of fighting, and Ludendorff himself was gloomily to describe it as ‘the Black Day’ of the German army.
The Ludendorff Offensive, March 1918
