The German soldiers have been in the trenches for years, and as we’ve seen, supplies from
home were drying up and shortages of everything but munitions were common.
So what happens when the Germans break through to villages behind the Allied lines?
Scenes of looting.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the British began an attack on Amman, but the main action was on the Western Front,
where Operation Michael, the first phase of the German spring offensives, had smashed
through the British and French, causing them to retreat all along the line, and taking
tens of thousands of prisoners.
The Allies were now sending all available troops to the vital rail junction Amiens which,
if it fell, would split the British and French and spell disaster.
The largest guns ever made - the Paris Guns - began shelling Paris from over 100km away,
and Ferdinand Foch was given overall command of the Allied forces.
Foch, after his promotion, complained that he was tasked with winning a battle that was
already lost, but kinda the opposite was true.
By this week, Operation Michael seemed to have lost its coherence.
(World Undone) “The character of the campaign was becoming almost farcical, with the British
retreating at an easy walk and the Germans following at the same pace.
When the British stopped to rest, the Germans would stop as well, keeping a safe distance.
They had left behind most of their artillery and were short of almost everything.”
And there were also many scenes of looting, which the German officers could not prevent.
One officer told of the infantry stopping one day near Albert, which surprised him,
since the airmen had told him there was no enemy near.
When he got to the town, he saw soldiers driving cattle, carrying hens or boxes of paper, or
carrying - and drinking - bottles of wine.
“Men with writing paper and colored notebooks.
Men dressed up in comic disguise.
Men with top hats on their heads.
Men staggering.
Men who could hardly walk... the streets were running with wine.
Out of a cellar came a Leutnant of the Second Marine Division...
I asked him, «What is going to happen?»...
He replied solemnly and emphatically, «I cannot get my men out of this cellar without
bloodshed.»”
Still, the Germans claim 70,000 prisoners from the offensive at beginning of week - 90,000
at the end.
The German attacks resumed the 30th but they generally stalled all along the line.
That day, British, Australian, and Canadian troops counter attack and take most of Moreuil
Wood, and this kind of signified the tide turning.
The Germans were 15km east of Amiens but just couldn’t take it, and allied reinforcements
kept pouring in.
But since the 21st, they had advanced in some places over 60km and retaken all of the allied
gains from the Battle of the Somme that had cost the Allies over 500,000 casualties to
take in 1916.
On the 31st, German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff pauses the offensive for
a few days rest and reinforcing.
April 1st was Easter Monday, and British troops advanced and captured Rifle Wood.
Poet Isaac Rosenberg died that day, he had written this from the trenches:
“Heaped stones and a charred signboard shows with grass between and dead folk under,
and some bird sings while the spirit takes wing,
and this is life in France.”
Operation Michael would resume the 4th south of the Somme toward Amiens - the right wing
of the German 18th army and left wing of 2nd.
On the 5th, the attack would be resumed north of the Somme - the right wing of second army
and left wing of 17th.
The objectives did not actually include Amiens, but if they got close enough then they could
shell the railway station and bridges there and disrupt everything.
They didn’t get close enough.
They attacked at Villers-Bretonneux on the 4th, in front of Amiens, but British and Australian
troops drove them back.
The attacks the 5th also failed and at the end of the week, Ludendorff calls off the
Somme offensive.
Noting in his memoirs about Amiens, “the enemy resistance is beyond our powers.”
He had sent 9 of General von Below’s divisions from further north to reinforce General Marwitz,
but the French 5th army, which was the third French army sent to help the British, came
and basically settled things.
The Germans could not advance and trenches were again being dug.
Michael was at an end April 5th.
(Gilbert) Lord Birkenhead wrote a decade after the war in Turning Points of History, “...after
the first terrible fortnight was passed, the front still stood and Ludendorff’s last
throw had patently failed.
Amiens was saved; so was Paris, so were the channel ports, so was France, so was England.”
Well, I suppose that’s easy to say in hindsight, but what were the tangible results of the
two weeks of Operation Michael?
Germany had taken 1200 square miles of territory, 90,000 prisoners, and mountains of supplies.
Caused 160,000 British casualties and 70,000 French as well, but they themselves had lost
160,000 of their best troops and all of that ground taken didn’t include one single place
of true strategic value.
They had left behind their brilliant defense infrastructure - the Hindenburg Line- and
in the process lengthened their lines by 80km into a new salient.
They kind of had to start building defenses from scratch now and were way more vulnerable.
And a big also - in allowing Oskar von Hutier’s breakthrough to run all the way up to Amiens,
Ludendorff had used up the reserves for the next phase of his attack after Operation Michael.
Some of the 90 divisions that had gone into battle now had only a few thousand men alive
and unwounded.
There were only 11 assault divisions ready for the coming attack in Flanders, which was
a third of that originally planned.
Still, already March 30th, orders had been issued to start sending the artillery north
for phase two of the offensives.
General Max Hoffman would write of the situation with the German army, (Undone), “...that
it could not take Amiens, in other words, that the breakthrough had not succeeded...
should also have realized that decisive victory on the Western Front was no longer within
reach... it was its bounden duty to tell the government that the time had come to begin
negotiations.”
But the war proceeded in plenty of places away from the western Front.
The Germans landed 30,000 troops in Finland this week, and the Finnish White Guard captured
Tampere.
The German troops are there at White invitation and say operations are confined to Finland
and they will not enter Russia.
But others were, in fact, entering Russia.
This week, the Japanese and British land at Vladivostok.
These men were the first of what would be a decent sized force sent in to help the White
Russians in Siberia.
The British were still attacking in the Middle East as well.
Trying to take Amman on the Palestine front.
They withdrew March 30th, though, after receiving misleading intelligence reports that 15,000
Ottoman troops were heading for the town.
In fact, the British abandoned their plans to even hold on to es Salt and they retreated
back across the River Jordan April 2nd, followed by 5,000 mostly Christian refugees, who were
worried about Ottoman reprisals.
The British took around 1,200 casualties in the failed action on Amman.
Remember, though, British General Edmunds Allenby had launched his offensive the same
day that all hell broke loose on the western front, so by now the British War Office had
told Allenby that its plans to send him troops from Mesopotamia were cancelled, and that
men and artillery were going to be taken from him instead and sent to France as soon as
possible.
He was to now adopt a policy of active defense.
But those troops in Mesopotamia were still active in the field.
This week, they entered Ana and then pursued the Ottomans, taking 5,000 prisoners and lots
of munitions.
And here is a note to end the week.
On April 1st, Britain formed the Royal Air Force from merging the Royal Flying Corps
and the Royal Naval Air Service.
It was the first independent air force - an air force independent of army or navy control.
And the week ends, and as it does so to does Operation Michael, that for all of its successes,
was still ultimately a failure.
The British had a failure of their own in Palestine, a success in Mesopotamia, and a
consolidation in the skies.
And there were scenes of looting in Northern France.
Now, I don’t know what goes through your mind when you hear of soldiers looting.
I have to admit, that when I hear it or read it, whichever army it is that’s doing the
looting, I first think, “that’s terrible, it’s so barbaric”, and then I remind myself,
millions of men are blowing each other up, gassing each other, and lighting each other
on fire, and I think stealing chickens is barbaric?
The cognitive dissonance is enormous because modern war is so damn impersonal.
If you want to learn more about Oskar von Hutier and the German Infantry tactics of
1918, you can click right here for our special about that.
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