A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (97 page)

Many of them, when they attacked, would not even be using their rifles, which would be slung behind them across their backs. They would be on the run, in the tiny groups that the new doctrine prescribed. They would make use of whatever cover they could find, scrambling to keep pace with the creeping barrage that was their shield. When they encountered enemy troops, they would hurl grenades or lay down a field of fire with the light machine guns that some of them carried—whatever it took to keep moving. They had colored flares with which to signal success or trouble, a need for artillery support or for the artillery to stop firing. They were to pay no attention to whether their flanks were exposed or enemy troops remained in place behind them. The pace was to be set by whoever could move fastest, and there was to be no such thing as a continuous line. When they had advanced so far that they could no longer be protected by friendly artillery, the junior and noncommissioned officers were to make their own decisions about what to do next. Everything would depend on initiative, boldness, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to whatever developed. The main rule was that the old rules no longer applied. “The objective of the first day must be at least the enemy’s artillery,” said a newly issued pamphlet. “The objective of the second day depends on what is achieved on the front; there must be no rigid adherence to plans made beforehand…The reserves must be put in where the attack is progressing, not where it is held up.”

Behind this assault force would follow a wave of “battle unit” divisions bringing forward heavier machine guns, flamethrowers, field artillery with ammunition, and engineering equipment. Their job was twofold: to reduce the strongpoints bypassed by the storm troops, and to throw together defensive works from which to hold off counterattacks. To their rear, manned by the third-best divisions, lay the Hindenburg Line, a home base to which everyone could withdraw in case of disaster. Farther back still were the reserves, ready to go wherever they were sent.

None of this could work, could produce more than another Verdun or Somme or Passchendaele, unless the storm troops got through the enemy’s front line with their fighting power intact. To ensure that they did, the Germans had something new to show the British. That something was a man: Georg Bruchmüller, the one true artillery genius of a war dominated by artillery, the same retirement-age lieutenant colonel (throughout the war he was never promoted) whom Hoffmann had nicknamed “Breakthroughmüller” for his dazzling accomplishments in the east. The Germans had never indulged in the weeks-long bombardments with which the British had so often tried and failed to annihilate their enemies before attacks, but Bruchmüller was the first on either side to fully grasp the futility of such tactics. Heavy barrages told defenders that an attack was coming and where. When they went on for days, they created opportunities for defenders to adapt either by digging in deeper or, as happened more and more commonly, by pulling back out of range. The damage they caused rarely proved to be enough to make a decisive difference.

The Bruchmüller answer was as complex and sophisticated as a twenty-first-century Fourth of July fireworks display. It lasted for hours instead of days, preserving the element of surprise, and involved a constant back-and-forth shifting between front-line and rear targets, high explosives and shrapnel and gas. When it was properly executed, the surprise was total, because there had been no preliminary registration of the guns on their targets. Instead, every gun was registered on firing ranges before being brought to the front. Then it was locked onto its targets silently, by mathematical calculations including adjustments for atmospheric conditions. Bruchmüller barrages concluded with an overwhelming concentration of high explosives on front-line positions, throwing any survivors into shock before the appearance of the storm troops. Beyond the first line, heavy reliance on gas avoided the cratering of the ground over which the infantry would have to advance. Bruchmüller had been with Hutier in the northeast, where his methods had made possible the rapid conquest of strong Russian defenses. A month later those same methods produced similar results at Caporetto. Ludendorff had brought Bruchmüller to the west. He was, in all likelihood, the most valuable individual in the entire German army during the great climax of 1918.

There was a way for the enemy to deal with a Bruchmüller bombardment, as the Germans themselves had demonstrated at Ypres in 1917. It required giving up the idea of a strong, solid front line, leaving only a screen of machine-gunners in forward positions and moving most of the troops far enough back to be out of reach of the guns. Pétain understood this, but he was not Ludendorff’s target. The British commanders who would be hit by Michael showed no understanding at all.

Those commanders were Henry Horne, whose First Army defended Arras at the northern end of the attack zone, Julian Byng and his Third Army immediately to Horne’s south, and Gough with the Fifth Army on the right, centered on St. Quentin. Among them the three had almost fifty divisions, with the strongest concentration in the north and Gough’s line the longest and thinnest, much of it recently inherited from the French. Byng and Gough had fully a third of their troops in forward positions, and most of the remainder were no more than two or three miles in the rear. Haig’s main reserve was fifteen miles behind the front, too far back to be able to go into action quickly.

As March unfolded, Haig remained certain that the BEF would be the target. But he thought the attack would come in Flanders, where he was strongest—which gave him confidence. “I was only afraid,” he wrote in his diary after an inspection of his northern line, “that the enemy would find our front so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his Army to the attack with the almost certainty of losing very heavily.” In fairness to Haig, the reports he received from his intelligence staff were sometimes woefully wrong and cumulatively confusing. “There are strong indications,” one such report stated on March 2, “that the enemy intends to attack on the Third and Fifth Army fronts, with the object of cutting off the Cambrai salient [also known, in its abbreviated 1918 form, as the Flesquières salient] and drawing in our reserves.” This was a virtually letter-perfect account not only of what Ludendorff was planning but why, and it was confirmed by another report a week later. Nothing was done in response, perhaps because other intelligence pointed in other directions. On March 16 Haig was assured that there was no evidence of a German buildup south of the line running from Cambrai to Bapaume, the sector that included the Flesquières salient. This report, though correct in its facts, was dangerously wrong in its conclusion that there was no reason to fear an attack south of Cambrai-Bapaume. The German attack force had indeed not yet arrived in the area by March 16, but forty-seven of its divisions were moving in that direction and were only a few nights’ march from the front.

Every new day brought fresh indications that
something
big was coming—and soon. On March 11 the Germans changed their codes, always a sure sign of impending action.

By March 20 the fourteen divisions and twenty-two hundred guns of the German Seventeenth Army were in position on nine and a half miles of front opposite Horne and Byng. This army was to be the cutting edge of the offensive. Commanded by Otto von Below, the victor of Caporetto, it was to break through Horne’s line, push westward past Arras, and then swing to the right. By threatening to circle around behind the British, it was supposed to force Haig to shift his reserves to block Below’s path, weaken his forces in Flanders, and so accomplish Michael’s primary objective.

On Below’s left was the German Second Army under Georg von der Marwitz, who had directed the 1917 counteroffensive at Cambrai and earlier was chief of staff of the army that cleared the Russians out of Galicia. He was to advance in step with Below, broadening the penetration of the British line. Immediately to the south of Marwitz, on his left, was the Eighteenth Army, commanded by Hutier himself, freshly arrived from the east. Little was expected of Hutier in this campaign. His army was to provide an anchor for Below and Marwitz as they swept forward. It included twenty-one divisions and more than twenty-six hundred guns; that was expected to be enough to block any French forces coming up from the south. Hutier’s artillery was directed personally by Bruchmüller. Together, Below, Marwitz, and Hutier had a million men—an avalanche of infantry.

At about two
A.M.
on March 21 the kind of thick fog that is common in Picardy at that time of day and year came up out of the ground and reduced visibility to a few yards. Shortly before five, after some hesitation about whether the wind would blow the gas in the right direction, the bombardment began. Along a line of more than forty miles between the Sensée and Oise Rivers, 6,473 pieces of artillery began pouring out fire and steel and gas. Heavy and light cannon and howitzers alternated ammunition and angles of fire according to Bruchmüller’s symphonically intricate schedule. At eight-fifteen all the guns came together in a final convulsion of maximum-rate fire concentrated on the defenders’ front line. This went on and on, the explosions coming too rapidly to be distinguished, until after eighty minutes it climaxed in a five-minute crescendo surpassing everything that had come before. Then, with shocking abruptness, there came five minutes of silence during which the guns were adjusted for their next task: a creeping barrage that drew the storm troops out of their trenches and led them toward the west. The fog had not lifted. This was a problem for the Germans, who could barely see where they were going and easily lost their sense of direction. But it created far worse problems for the British who had survived the barrage. They were able to see and fire only at whichever attackers happened to stumble directly onto them as they advanced through the murk.

The fog, the soul-shattering power of the artillery, and the speed with which the storm troops followed the creeping barrage—all of it combined to produce a rout. The first lines of defense were quickly overrun, the troops in them killed or captured or put to flight. In the center, units of Byng’s army hung on stubbornly in the Flesquières salient, the little bulge that was all that remained to the British of the ground they had won in the Battle of Cambrai the previous fall. But with Gough’s troops falling back on their right, the men in the salient were in danger of being cut off. Gough’s army, driven not only out of its first line but out of its second as well, could find no place to make a stand. “It was flamethrowers forward,” a young storm trooper later wrote home. “The English dugouts were smoked out and we took our first prisoners. They were trembling all over. Now we went forward without resistance. The next dugouts were passed, and we came to the railway. There the English had dug a field post in a declivity, and before it were corrugated iron huts. Here they had their kitchen, canteen, etc. The kitchen was naturally stormed immediately. I was astonished at what the English still had. The stove was still lit, bacon was sizzling, a side of beef lay on the table…We stuffed our knapsacks. Each man took an English iron ration. In the next hut, a canteen, we found English cigarettes in great supply. Each man lit up…On the entrance to the village we found a machine gun nest. We made an effort to take it, but there was much barbed wire in front, and it would have cost many lives. It was very hazy still, and our artillery could not help us. We let it go and went on.”

To the extent that Gough’s army could maintain the semblance of a continuous line, the retreat was making that line longer by the hour; by day’s end it would be stretched a harrowing five miles. By then Hutier’s troops had taken possession of Gough’s entire battle zone, including its artillery line. After dark, to save his army, Gough ordered a ten-mile withdrawal to the only natural defense available to him, the River Somme at a point where its meandering course runs north-south and connects to the Crozat Canal.

The Germans had captured hundreds of Gough’s guns and achieved something almost never before seen on the Western Front: a breakthrough into open territory beyond the enemy’s lines. But that breakthrough had been achieved only in the south—the one place where Ludendorff neither expected nor particularly wanted any such thing. That night, in considering his next steps, Ludendorff found himself confronted with something more complicated than clear-cut success or failure. Though some things had gone brilliantly, nothing had gone according to plan. On the German right, where the deepest penetration had been expected and Below’s army was supposed to punch through toward Arras, nothing of the kind had happened. The fog had been lightest on the right and had burned off more quickly than elsewhere, the bombardment had been less effective there than where Bruchmüller was in charge, and the advance had been fought to a standstill at the British second line. Marwitz in the center had done better but not dramatically so. All the drama was on the left, where Hutier and Bruchmüller had been on the scene to implement the tactics bearing their names and had done so with impressive efficiency.

Ludendorff had limited numbers of storm troops in reserve. One of the questions facing him was how to use them to best effect. Staying with his original plan would have required reinforcing Below and trying again to break through on the right. That would have been a Haig-like or Falkenhayn-like decision, another in the long series of attempts to turn failure into success by increasing the amount of force being applied. Ludendorff decided to do otherwise. He sent six of his best divisions to Hutier and none to Below. This was consistent with the Germans’ new doctrine, a reinforcement of success rather than of failure, but it also reflected Ludendorff’s worsening lack of focus. If Hutier continued to advance, his troops would be moving into territory that had been turned into a barren obstacle course by the Battle of the Somme and by the Germans’ own scorched-earth withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. It would be a difficult advance at best, exhausting the men who undertook it. It was precisely what Ludendorff’s operations chief had urged him to avoid.