The Spring Offensives

By Michael Seymour

Far from being ‘over by Christmas’ in 1914, and far from being thereafter conducted against a backdrop of ‘business as usual’, the human catastrophe that was the 1914-18 global conflict became a terrifying war of attrition in almost all respects, also affecting civilians far away from the battlefields.[1]

Stalemate on The Western Front

Particularly on the Western Front on France’s eastern marches barbed wire, machine guns and complex networks of trenches long held the advantage over soldiers’ heroic charges or even the rapidly-developing technologies of air power, chemical weapons, or armoured vehicles. Stalemate was the enduring characteristic of the war on the Western Front, but always at a huge cost in human lives. The battles for Verdun (1916) were perhaps only the most monstrous attempts to ‘bleed the enemy white’.[2] Elsewhere – in the Near and Middle East, in the Italian Alps, in eastern Europe, the Balkans and perhaps most importantly, at sea – efforts to unlock the stalemate of the Western Front by opening new theatres of war, failed: until the spring of 1918.

The Drivers of the Spring Offensives

Between 21 March and 17 July 1918, in five major offensives the imperial German armies achieved their greatest advances on the Western Front since the autumn of 1914. With 48 divisions – perhaps 720,000 men[3] – released with the ending of the war on the Eastern Front, the attacks on the French, British and their allied forces in northern France created salients of perhaps 3,000 square miles and ultimately brought the leading German forces to within 55 miles/90 km of Paris. The Spring Offensives[4] were driven by two vastly significant developments that had occurred elsewhere, during 1917: the USA’s declaration of war on Germany (6 April)[5] and Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia (November) leading to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk.[6]

Within imperial Germany, the entry of the USA led some to conclude that the war could not be won, and tentative peace ‘feelers’ were tried in the autumn of 1917. Their failure was inevitably followed by reconsideration of the military options. In an irony beloved of historians, the first major planning meeting for the German spring offensives was convened on 11 November 1917, at Mons. During the following weeks, plans were drawn up for possible operations at points almost anywhere along the Western Front, but these progressively focused on preparing to assault in the area in which the British and French armies abutted, in Picardy. Very late in the planning, leading German general Ludendorff decided that the British should bear the brunt. He reasoned that the British were, as he saw it, less capable than the French, that a comprehensive defeat of Britain’s forces in France[7] would lead Britain to sue for peace, and that France would not continue the war without her principal ally. But timing was essential – Britain had to be ‘knocked out’ before any significant help could arrive from the USA and the area of potentially greatest strategic value to Ludendorff, around the River Lys, was judged likely to be too wet in March. Thus, the first offensive was aimed further south: along the Somme.

The British were not (entirely) unaware or unprepared.

As early as December 1917, [Field-Marshal Sir Douglas] Haig had begun the long process of converting the BEF from an offensive to a defensive force when his headquarters issued a memorandum to guide his armies in the correct application of the new defensive techniques. This introduced the radical concept for the British Army of defence in depth, which had been largely gleaned from a study of German methods over the last year.[8]

What British and allied field intelligence initially failed to discover was where the Germans were building up the enormous stockpiles of munitions and supplies for their offensives, which preparations must precede the concentrating of the thousands of troops who were to make the assaults. In this work, the role of the contending air forces was vital.

The Role of Aviation

Military aviation developed from the simple notion that, by seeing what the enemy was preparing to do on the battlefield, their opponents would have time for countermoves. Aerial reconnaissance, by direct observation and photography, worked in close co-operation with the targeting of artillery fire. Knowing this, both sides sought to ‘sweep the skies clean’ of the enemies’ observation flights, which led to the development of ‘fighter’, ‘Jagd’, ‘chasseur’ and ‘pursuit’ aircraft, and their pilot ‘heroes’.[9] Tactical support, whether by ‘light’ bombing or strafing of the enemies’ ground forces, were almost incidental developments, although they would play a more significant part as the war dragged on.[10] The mainstay and great majority of the operations of all air forces, and particularly of the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force, were battlefield observation and reconnaissance. And aerial photography did eventually help pinpoint small dumps of munitions that signalled likely positions of German batteries.

German Tactics

German preparations, meanwhile, were substantively different from those of their earlier battles with the British. For much of the period after 1914, German forces on the Western Front were outnumbered and, in this dreadful war of attrition, numbers of soldiers were believed to be determinative. Long-standing military convention had it that a local superiority of numbers of soldiers was a vital pre-requisite for victory, and certainly this was a major part of the German plans. What the Germans had learned from the slaughter on the Western Front, however, was that techniques – tactics – would also make a difference. On the Somme in 1916 they had learned the power of ‘defence in depth’ and of ‘non-contiguous’ lines of defence. For the spring of 1918, however, they had learned how to attack across the trenches and wire.

…[T]he German offensive tactics were a potent mix: a devastating bombardment, ruthless elite stormtroopers marauding across the battlefield, low-flying aircraft harrying defenders from the skies and massed infantry to complete the job by utterly overwhelming any remaining resistance.[11]

As was by now conventional on the Western Front, artillery bombardment preceded attacks, as a means to cut or flatten the barbed wire, to demoralise the defenders, and perhaps destroy defensive strongpoints or trenches. In the Spring Offensives, the Germans introduced shorter, much more intensive shelling of their opponents. Thereafter, ‘creeping barrages’ were laid down immediately behind which advanced the first assault troops. These assault troops – Sturmtruppen or Stoßtruppen – were specially selected as the younger, fitter men drawn from across the army, who were then fed better than their comrades[12] and trained to move fast across the battlefield, avoiding the delays of dealing with outposts of resistance, in favour of pushing their frontline forwards. These men were equipped with several types of hand grenades, portable flame-throwers and, for the first time in significant numbers, sub-machine guns.[13] These fearsome weapons were more ‘practical’ than rifles, bayonets or pistols, and replaced the gruesome clubs and axes, often previously used in the hand-to-hand fighting in the confined spaces of trenches and dug-outs. Overhead, specially armoured aircraft provided covering fire with machine guns, and light bombing of designated targets. Behind the assault troops, the ‘regular’ infantry advanced to overcome the remaining, isolated enemy strongpoints and to hold the ground won in the attack.

Operation Michael

On 21 March 1918,[14] at around 4.30am, the German offensive code-named ‘Michael’ began in the direction of Amiens and its rail junctions, with a five-hour artillery bombardment that preceded the assault troops’ attacks. By the end of that first day,

By a remarkable coincidence Ludendorff had made the exact territorial gains in area and villages that Haig and (French Sixth Army commander at the Somme) Fayolle had needed 140 days to wrest from the German Army in 1916.[15]

Despite, however, the dramatic advances and the destruction of the British Fifth Army, ‘Michael’ reached the limits of its progress near Villers-Bretonneux by early April, as the exhaustion of German soldiers and their supplies took their toll, and the British and their allies stiffened their resistance. Although neighbouring French forces were attacked, Ludendorff kept to his plan of attacking the British sectors. With the ground drying out, Ludendorff now turned his attention to the real strategic ‘prize’ of the whole plan, the rail junction at Hazebrouck. This town and its railyards was the lynchpin of the transport and supply lines of the British and their allies who were holding the front between the French, and the Channel ports. Driving the British into the sea would undoubtedly have changed the strategic balance between the Entente and Central Powers.

Operation Georgette

On 9 April, the Germans opened their second phase of the offensive, code-named ‘Georgette’. From the vicinity of Passchendaele (with its higher ground) in the north of the sector, to Neuve-Chapelle in the south, the attacks replicated the experiences of ‘Michael’ – almost.

At the end of the first day both sides could claim some success. The Germans had broken through and pushed forward up to, and in some places over, the Lys River Line – a gain of up to 5½ miles in an area where there wasn’t a mile to spare. …[T]hey had also captured another 100 or so British guns. On the other hand, the British had managed to maintain a continuous line extending all the way round the German incursion, aided greatly by the heroic resistance of the 55^th Division. Many felt that but for the dissolution of the Portuguese the front would have held firm and they would have repeated the triumph of the Third Army twelve days before at Arras.[16]

That the Portuguese army were present at all may seem, to the modern reader, strange: it was equally strange to many Portuguese, whether on the Western Front or at home. After a winter in miserable trench conditions and in any case inexperienced and due to be relieved, the Portuguese 2^nd Division were overwhelmed by the German assaults,[17] thus intensifying the pressure on the British in this sector.

German advances continued such that, with the rapidly diminishing distance between the Front and the Channel Ports, Haig issued an Order of the Day on 11 April stating, “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.”[18] On that day, the Germans took Merville, and Bailleul fell on 15 April. By 29 April, the German front line was only about 4 miles/6.5 km from Hazebrouck. Only in retrospect might this have been seen as a turning point, for major German offensives continued: 27 May – 4 June along the Aisne, 8 – 12 June in the Noyon – Montdidier sector, and 15 – 17 July in the Champagne – Marne sector. Not until 15 July did the French and Americans begin their counter-attack at the Marne, with the British, Canadians and Australians – using massed artillery, tanks and aircraft – beginning theirs at Amiens on 8 August. This would be the start of the ‘Hundred Days’ that led to the collapse of the German field armies and the armistice with the Central Powers.

For those facing the German forces in the Lys sector, as anywhere else in – or in the skies above – the trenches, the dangers remained very real: it was anything but ‘all quiet on the western front’.