The need to maintain order among the chaotic conditions of her vast new conquests still pinned down the great bulk of German forces in the east, but he was able to transfer some forty-four divisions to the west, bringing his total there by March 1918 to 199 divisions. Against these the French could field about 100, some of very doubtful quality, and the British fifty-eight, whose strength, as the military authorities later complained, was still further reduced by Lloyd George’s policy of keeping their first-line reserves in the United Kingdom so that Haig could not use them for any further offensives. As yet the Americans could provide none at all.
The first blow was struck against the British—first an initial thrust against the southern part of their line east of Amiens, to draw in their reserves from the north, where a second blow would break through, so it was hoped, to the Channel ports. Haig, judging his left wing to be the decisive front, had deliberately weakened his right; so when the Germans attacked there on 21 March, it was with a crushing numerical superiority, some fifty-two divisions against twenty-six. But it was not numbers alone that mattered. The Germans now employed techniques that finally put an end to the deadlock of trench warfare that had immobilized the Western Front for the past three years.
The techniques were not new. A brief but violent artillery bombardment in depth without previous registration, directed as much against communications and command centres as against front-line troops and making plentiful use of gas and smoke, had already been used both by the British at Cambrai and by the Germans themselves at Caporetto. But it had been perfected on the Eastern Front, especially in the assault on Riga, by General Oskar von Hutier and his artillery commander Colonel Georg Bruchmuller, who now led the German attack in the west. The weight of their bombardment was now unprecedented: 6,500 guns fired on a fortymile front, destroying all communications behind the lines and drenching the front line with gas and high explosive.
Then ‘storm troops’, specialized assault-units carrying their own firepower in the shape of sled-borne light guns, light machine guns, grenades, mortars and flame-throwers, spearheaded the main infantry attack, destroying enemy strong points wherever possible and masking them when it was not. The infantry units that followed poured into the gaps they had opened, reserves being fed in to exploit success in what a British commentator, Liddell Hart, was later to describe as an ‘expanding torrent’. The combination proved devastating against British troops who had barely begun to prepare the deep defences needed to counter it, or indeed to appreciate the need for them. A thick fog on the morning of 21 March assisted the German breakthrough. Within four days they had driven a wedge forty miles deep into the British positions and threatened to break the Allied lines altogether.
The attack was far more successful than Ludendorff himself had expected. It now threatened to separate the British from the French armies. If that happened, the British would have to fall back to the north along their lines of communication to the Channel ports, while the French would withdraw to the south to cover Paris, leaving the way clear for the Germans to advance to the coast—as indeed they did twenty-two years later. All now depended on the French and British armies maintaining contact. So far both Haig and Pétain had resisted the attempts of the Supreme War Council to impose an inter-allied command over their heads, and refused to place any reserves at the council’s disposal to enable it to influence the course of operations.
Mutual cooperation, they argued, would solve any problems that might arise. But it did not. When Haig appealed for help, Pétain refused to provide it, for fear of uncovering Paris. Haig swallowed his pride and appealed to his political superiors. An inter-allied conference met at Doullens, near Amiens, on 26 March. There the resolute stand taken by Foch, now the French Chief of Staff, impressed Haig sufficiently for him to accept Foch’s authority to ‘coordinate’ the Allied armies—an authority extended a week later to ‘the direction of operations’. For the rest of the war the Allies were to fight under a single overall command.
The Corfu Channel
