Germany took a lot of Western Front territory in their spring offensives, but since July
the Allies have been pushing back bit by bit, and now Germany is forced to do something
German High Command had deemed unthinkable - this week Germany retreats.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Allies launched the Battle of the Ailette and the Battle of Bapaume on the
Western Front, part of their new strategy of launching smaller attacks all along the
western front that the Germans would be unable to predict.
In Palestine, the Imperial Camel Corps played a ruse on the Ottomans, in preparation for
a coming attack that they would be unable to predict.
In Baku, the small British force wondered how they would defend the city against an
attack that was totally predictable.
One such attack came this week.
On the 26th, two Ottoman battalions supported by artillery attacked a British company on
Mud Volcano near Baku.
The British lost all their officers and 80 men.
Two more British companies were thrown in as reinforcements and the defense held, but
the Armenian battalions supposed to be there failed to turn up.
It was looking very shaky for the British there.
It was anything but that for them on the Western Front, though.
On the 26th, they began the Battle of the Scarpe, east of Arras.
Two years ago, this Somme battlefield had halted the Allies, but not now - the Canadians
fought their way right through it.
For example, in 1916, Delville Wood had stopped the Allies for weeks, now it fell in days.
British Commander Sir Douglas Haig was really using his armies very well at this point.
The Battle of Albert ended the 29th, but you can see the Germans got no rest.
The 1st, 3rd, and 4th armies were just going to keep hammering and hammering.
On the 30th, Charles Mangin and the French attacked east of Soissons, pushing the Germans
back across the River Aisne.
That same day 5 miles to the north the Americans captured Juvigny.
So this week the Germans withdraw 16km on a 100km front.
German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff rejected an appeal from his commanders to
fall back further.
This was because he feared a total collapse.
Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foch would say of Ludendorff on the 28th (Meyer), “The
man could escape now if he would make up his mind to leave behind his baggage”.
At the end of the week, the Germans also begin evacuating the La Lys sector in Flanders in
the north, giving up all the ground they’d taken four months earlier.
Actually, on the 25th Foch wrote to Haig and congratulated him for widening British operations.
Haig wrote back saying that what he wanted to do was push to St. Quentin and Cambrai
while the Americans pushed north toward Mezieres.
The plan was to beat the Germans along a whole 130 km front and threaten their single lateral
railway from Valenciennes and Cambrai to Metz and Thionville.
Haig won Foch over to this, but this plan would mess with American Commander John Pershing’s
plans.
Pershing, in command of the only weeks old American First Army, had been gearing up for
its first independent offensive against St. Mihiel, but that would now be downgraded so
that when it went off, and if it was a success, the Americans would have to stop advancing
at the base of the St. Mihiel salient, since they would be pushing northeast and that wouldn’t
fit with Haig’s big plan, and then quickly change sectors so the next push in Haig’s
plan toward Mezieres could go off west of the Meuse river.
Pershing was actually on board with the change as long as his army was still autonomous.
Here’s some other bits of Foch’s overall plans: with the Germans pulling back from
the La Lys salient, they were exposing their railways up there that ran to the sea.
So now King Albert of Belgium, who’d been holding back his army since 1914, wanted to
put it into the game.
Foch suggested a Flanders attack to Haig and Belgian army Chief of Staff Cyriaque Gillain.
This would ideally take the heights east of Ypres and from there they could hit the Roulers
railway line.
So, to sum up... near the end of September the British would attack eastward against
the center of the Hindenburg Line, the French and Americans northward along the River Meuse,
and the Belgians and British up in Flanders.
Thing is, the Americans would have to open that offensive and would have the toughest
job.
First of all, whether or not the St. Mihiel attack was successful, Pershing was going
to have to pull his men out of there and into the new sector to go up west of the Meuse,
and that’ll be fun logistics.
But see, the Germans had two main railway lines connecting their army with Germany itself,
and the southern one could handle differing capacities at different spots.
From Metz toward Verdun it could handle (Stevenson) like 200 trains a day, but the parts of that
line that crossed the Ardennes could only handle 80 or so, and in the section between
Mezieres, Carignan, and Sedan there was no other east-west route.
Now, this section of the railway is only 50 km from where the Americans would begin the
attack, and from the rear German defense lines, if they could be reached, it was only 18 km.
So theoretically the Americans would have a thinner belt of defense to fight their way
through, and were closer than any of the other allies anyhow.
However (Stevenson), “...precisely for these reasons the Germans knew they could not retreat,
and both the terrain and their defenses were forbidding.
On the eastern flank of the attack lay the unfordable River Meuse with wooded heights
above it.
On the western flank lay further wooded heights, the dense and tangled Argonne Forest.”
And in between?
The high ground from Montfaucon back to Romagne.
We visited there in 2017 and I can tell you from personal experience that Montfaucon is
a serious commanding position.
So the Americans would have to advance uphill on positions covered by German artillery,
would have to pass four defensive lines, all with excellent machine gun lookouts, including
line three - the Kriemhilde Stellung, at the Romagne Heights, which was the local section
of the Hindenburg Line.
So that would be the Americans’ job a few weeks from now, when that offensive kicked
off.
They were hoping that they would have the element of surprise with them, so that they
could at least overrun Kriemhilde Stellung before it could be reinforced.
You might wonder how that could happen - it would be by the breaking off of the St. Mihiel
attack and moving hundreds of thousands of men to where they were not expected to suddenly
turn up.
There was plenty of unexpected news at the moment though.
The New York Times blared that General Dmitri Horvath, hailed by the London Daily Mail last
month as “the man to save Siberia”, declared the 25th that he was assuming control of all
Russian military forces in the Far East by coup d’état.
He had already set up a provisional government and proclaimed himself dictator.
Thing is, there were a bunch of independent military forces out there, Russian and otherwise,
more or less friendly to the allies but divided amongst themselves.
Horvath’s rule would last only an hour or two, however, when Allied diplomats made it
clear that their forces would not support him.
The Allies weren’t just in Siberia.
They had landed in force in Murmansk.
German General Max von Hoffman wrote of that, “if the Entente set up a Tsar in Russia,
then Russia will be closed to us” (Gilbert).
This week the Russian Bolshevik leadership signs a supplementary peace treaty with the
Germans in which the Russians promise to fight against the Allies in the north.
And also under treaty from this week, Germany has full control of all Red Navy ships and
facilities on the Black Sea, so that if Baku can be put in Bolshevik hands, Germany will
get a third of that city’s oil production.
In return, Germany will prevent Finland from attacking Russia.
Lenin and the Kaiser were making common cause.
But you know, Lenin would have to survive for that to work.
And he was shot and badly wounded the 30th, to the point where it was unclear if he would
survive.
More on that next week.
Here’s a note to end THIS week.
An As Salam newspaper on the 28th and the French paper “Le Temps” the 29th both
reported that the sheik of the Senussi, the Ottoman backed North African tribesmen who
harassed the Entente on the Libyan front before being defeated two years ago, arrived at Vienna
before heading for Constantinople.
He made the crossing from Tripoli to Pola in a German submarine, the first Arab leader
to do so, as far as I’m aware.
I found that quite interesting - thanks Rabih Rac for that tidbit.
So the week ends.
With more Allied advances in the West, as the Germans pull back to consolidate; a deteriorating
situation for the British in Baku, a brief coup in Siberia, and an attempt on Lenin’s
life.
And Doug Haig’s plans for a big new offensive soon to come, bigger than the local attacks
we’ve seen recently, bringing in the Belgians and kicking off with the Americans.
Now, the Americans had surprised many by fighting pretty well so far the past couple of months
now that they had joined the war in force, but this was gonna be some seriously tough
fighting.
I can’t say what the tactical results will be, but I can say this - the Americans will
finally join the war in another respect; they will have tens of thousands of dead soldiers.
If you want to learn more about the German positions at the Meuse-Argonnes offensive,
you can click right here for our special episode that we filmed there with our local battlefield
guide Jean-Paul.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Zhengchao Liu.
Thank you for your ongoing support on Patreon, we could not do this show without you.
Don’t forget to subscribe, see you next time.