It was one of the most unusual moves of this unusual war, and in some ways you could call
it the boldest.
It happened in early 1917 when the Germans on the Western Front turned their backs on
the ground they had soaked with their blood for over two years and established a new line
of defense, the Hindenburg Line.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the Hindenburg Line,
also known as the Siegfried Line.
On February 24th, 1917, something remarkable happened that was very strange to the British
troops who reported it.
The German lines opposite them were being shelled.
But by German artillery.
Scouting parties were sent out and they found something even weirder - the German trenches
were abandoned.
It was obvious that the shelling was meant to destroy what the Germans had left behind.
The Germans were pulling back.
It wasn’t really apparent to the Allies what the extent of this was, but over a period
of a few weeks the Germans withdrew 20 miles - 32 kilometers - on a front 70 miles wide-
116 kilometers - between Arras and St. Quentin.
This meant giving up 1,000 square miles of hard won French land.
This withdrawal was German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff’s idea, and it was very
risky.
If the British and French had attacked while the Germans were leaving their old positions
and before they settled into the new ones, disaster would have been the result.
It was also a task of enormous magnitude not just to move to new lines, but ones that were
far stronger than the old ones.
370,000 men worked for four months to build the new defenses.
They were German reserves and civilians and Russian prisoners of war, and they dug trenches
and underground chambers for hiding men and equipment, fortifications of concrete and
steel, and enormous wire barricades.
1,200 trains brought in materials put together by a further 170,000 workers.
And except for that artillery barrage at Arras, it was pretty much all done in secret.
Ludendorff had decided to build it after visiting the Western Front in the aftermath of Verdun
and the Somme.
He thought that too much of Germany’s diminishing manpower was being wasted in defensive doctrines
that needed to be scrapped.
He would later write (A World Undone), “The decision to retreat was not reached without
a painful struggle.
It implied a confession of weakness bound to raise the morale of the enemy and lower
our own... we had no choice.”
But if it could be pulled off there would be great benefits.
The current front ran from Arras to Soissons and the region called Chemin des Dames was
a huge 90 mile bulge - 150 kilometers.
The new line would be 25 miles - 40km - shorter and it would free 13 divisions and 50 artillery
batteries for other uses.
This was the big thing, because the German manpower situation had been serious for a
while now.
At the beginning of 1917, the Germans had two and a half million men on the Western
Front in 134 divisions.
But the Entente had nearly four million men facing them in 175 divisions, and that number
would only grow as the British army continued to expand, so every month seemed to bring
greater danger that Germany would become mathematically overwhelmed.
A new line would also allow Ludendorff to build from scratch his ideal defenses.
What he planned was not really a front line in any traditional sense.
It wouldn’t even be continuous, but would feature a series of mutually supporting camouflaged
steel and concrete blockhouses in a sort of checkered pattern manned by machine gun crews.
Where it was possible, these were positioned on the front slopes of hills to look down
on the enemy.
They were shielded by high rows of razor wire designed to funnel an advancing enemy into
lethal passages.
The men there were not supposed to stand their ground if the enemy arrived.
They were to fall back after slowing the advance as much as they could.
They new system was far more flexible than the old way of troops massed in the forward
trenches and would ideally be far less costly in lives.
The first actual defensive line in the new system was way to the rear, up to a mile from
the blockhouses and beyond the reach of enemy mortars and light artillery.
Another line was another mile further back, and the reserves were even further back than
that, out of the reach of most enemy artillery, but ready to quickly counterattack.
So this elastic defense network was designed to lead the enemy into a killing zone several
miles deep where the reserves were not really reserves anymore, but a strike force of their
own.
Thing is, this all looked great on paper but had that one enormous risk - that the Allies
would launch an offensive that would catch the Germans halfway between the old and the
new.
They were certain to launch such an offensive soon, possibly as soon as February, and the
risk seemed so great that Ludendorff wasn’t going through with the plan.
Until fate intervened.
As February began, the Germans intercepted and decoded a message from Rome to Petrograd.
The news wasn’t that surprising.
The British and French were planning an attack on the Western Front, another colossal offensive,
even bigger this time than the Battle of the Somme using up to 100 divisions.
There was also some really good news for the Germans, though - the attack would not begin
until April, two months or more in the future.
The Germans would have time to build the new lines.
They would have time to train the men in how the new system worked.
On February 4th, 1917, Erich Ludendorff ordered the work to begin.
The new system did actually begin with a trench, but one 3 meters deep and 4 meters across.
This was to be unoccupied and was a trap for tanks and a huge obstacle for men.
Behind that were at least five rows of barbed wire, 4 meters deep and twice a man’s height,
and 20 meters apart from each other.
Then came the blockhouses and then the first real line, a mostly underground anthill of
rooms and passages under up to 8 meters of earth, designed to be impregnable to artillery.
Two lines of big guns were further back, on reverse slopes wherever possible, to be out
of sight of enemy artillery.
This was to be invulnerable, and it was made possible by the fact that the Allies wouldn’t
attack in the west until April, and the Germans knew it.
French Commander Robert Nivelle had actually planned on a February attack.
British Commander Sir Douglas Haig wanted to wait until May, so they compromised and
set the date for April.
That raises a big what if, of course, since the new lines couldn’t have been built had
the Allies attacked sooner, but built they were and they took defensive warfare to a
new level, and they were the work of a single man of great vision, ambition, and energy,
Erich Ludendorff.
If you want to know more about the change of German offensive tactics, check out our
episode about Stormtroopers right here.
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