The Black Day
Der 8. August ist der schwarze Tag des deutschen Heeres in der Geschichte dieses Krieges.[1]
From his perspective in 1919, with Germany defeated on the battlefield, its monarchy overthrown by revolution and replaced by a struggling, new democracy (the Weimar Republic), the German general Ludendorff was clear that the events of 8 August 1918 were pivotal in the outcome of the Great War, the ‘black day’ of the German army. As the map shows, the German position on the Western Front in mid-July 1918 had them still in possession of swathes of French territory, and of almost all of Belgium:
Yet, there can be no doubt – in retrospect – that the fighting on the first day of what we now call the Battle of Amiens (8-11 August 1918), achieved a new level of military success for the Allies: British, Australian, Canadian, French soldiers, with tanks and aircraft as well as the devastatingly accurate artillery, gained more ground and took more prisoners than might have been imagined possible when compared with the earlier battles even in that tumultuous year. Surprise over the German forces was almost total. Ludendorff’s judgement, however, was more affected by the scale on which German soldiers surrendered or ran.
The British Fourth Army took 13,000 prisoners while the French captured a further 3,000. Total German losses were estimated to be 30,000 on 8 August. The Fourth Army’s casualties, British, Australian and Canadian infantry, were approximately 8,800, exclusive of tank and air losses and those of their French allies.[2]
But this was a war in which the ebb and flow of the titanic battles on the Western Front had already brought so many ‘false dawns’ of victory. When the French held Verdun during 1916, when the British achieved early advances at Cambrai in November 1917, when the Germans advanced so far and fast in the first days of Operation ‘Michael’ (March 1918), when the French and Americans struck back at the Germans in what became the Second Battle of the Marne (July 1918): whatever the feelings of the soldiers who were fighting and dying, their generals and politicians derived – however briefly – renewed optimism about their objectives and war aims. Yet, still the fighting and bloody murder of the trenches with gas, artillery, tanks and aerial attacks, all continued. No-one could confidently say on 8 August that the ‘end was in sight’.
Truly a World War
Elsewhere, even on the Western Front, 8 August saw further intense and costly fighting, for example between Americans and Germans along the Vesle and Aisne rivers, the latest defensive positions established by the Germans in the desperate aftermath of the last of their five Spring Offensives.[3] In the course of this phase of the struggle on the Marne, eventually eight American divisions (nominally, 216,000 men) were committed and had already suffered 30,000 casualties. The French sector commander, General Charles Mangin, praised the courage and determination of his American allies,[4] but the German lines were still holding. In any case, Paris was still being shelled with 106 kg/234 lb high-explosive projectiles from the Krupp-made ‘supergun’, located 75 miles away.[5]
On 5 August, an attack by four Zeppelin airships had tried to bomb targets in England’s North and Midlands. Although on this occasion unsuccessful, German plans were already well advanced to launch large-scale air raids with incendiaries, intended to overwhelm the fire brigades of London and Paris with firestorms and force the Allies to sue for peace. On 3 August, the Australian troop ship Warilda, carrying wounded from Le Havre to Southampton and clearly marked by red crosses, was sunk by the German submarine UC-49. Unrestricted U-boat warfare clearly meant precisely that and in July 1918, U-boats had attacked 158 ships, in the Channel, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, sinking 130 vessels amounting to nearly 300,000 tons. This intensity of attacks (and degree of success) did not diminish during August. Compulsory food rationing had been introduced in Britain over the winter of 1917/18, and in July 1918, ration books were introduced for butter, margarine, lard, meat, and sugar. The U-boat threat had been reduced from its most destructive phase, but it was not defeated.
Further afield, in early August, Allied forces were securing their occupation of Arkhangelsk in Russia’s far north, and of Vladivostok in the furthest east, as they tried to overthrow the new Bolshevik régime in what would be called, not ‘war’, but ‘the Intervention’. In the north, the occupation was driven as much by fears that valuable matériel, originally stockpiled for the Tsarist war effort, might now fall into German hands, or into those of a newly-belligerent Finnish nationalist-independence movement. In the east, the Czech Legions – PoWs from the Austrian imperial forces released by the Russians after the Bolsheviks’ withdrawal from the Great War – were seeking to exit via Vladivostok to return to Europe and fight for Czech independence. On 2 August, the government of Japan decided to deploy its forces to the Vladivostok region, to secure for itself a share in the prospective dismemberment of the former Tsarist empire. The turmoil amongst polities and of frontiers in the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power, continued to cast a dark shadow over their other war plans, for both the Allies and the Central Powers. Might a viable Bolshevik state prompt and sustain workers’ revolutions, world-wide? Ludendorff, for one, feared it might do so.
On 4 August, following the overthrow of the local Soviet, British forces reached Baku, as British, Ottoman, Bolshevik, White Russian and indigenous forces competed to assert control over the Caucasus and its oil resources which were already vital: “If oil is a kingdom, then Baku is its crown,” was the judgement of a British periodical of the time. Further to the south, Iraq had already largely fallen to the British and their imperial forces, and Gertrude Bell had begun her work to try to craft a political settlement for the region that would reconcile Arab nationalism and self-rule, with British and Allied ‘interests’. All the while, Ottoman armies fought on.
The Shadow of Influenza
Meanwhile,
In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France; in Freetown, Sierra Leone; and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts.[6]
Influenza had been killing soldiers in the USA since January 1918, and the disease was spreading quickly amongst the military and civilian populations, eventually to all corners of the globe. As if the murderous effects of twentieth-century weaponry were not enough, the contagion was disproportionately fatal to young adults aged about 25-34. Fearful of the damage to morale, all sides in the Great War suppressed news of the pandemic and its casualties, leaving the (relatively) uncensored press of neutral Spain to report on the disaster and gain for it the nickname, ‘Spanish flu’. [7]
What were the chances of surviving this war, of getting home alive? From 8 August, the bullets, bombs, shells and gas were not less deadly. In the air, more movement on the ground meant more need of artillery co-operation and reconnaissance, more missions over the areas to the rear of the enemy’s frontlines. Whenever the war were to come to an end, then each of the contending powers would be desperate to secure the strongest possible positions from which to influence the peace settlement. Thus, the signs were that the tempo of the fighting would now increase. And even if the ‘shooting war’ did not ‘get you’, could not infection be just as fatal?
Further reading
Gregory Blaxland Amiens 1918 (London, 1981) is a full account of the battle, particularly from British sources, which has been re-published this year (2018) by Pen & Sword Books Limited. As a former career British Army officer who served throughout WW2, the author’s insights are particularly to be valued.
Peter Hart 1918. A Very British Victory (London, 2008) is richly illustrated with quotations from participants, generally on the Allied side, gathered together in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.
Nick Lloyd Hundred Days. The end of the Great War (London, 2013) gives a strong narrative account, illustrated with quotations from (for the most part) British participants.
David Stevenson 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004, 2nd edn 2012) provides a readable, thorough, scholarly account of the war as a whole, with useful overviews of the situation in 1918. He has also written more particularly about the events of 1918, ‘With our backs to the Wall’ Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London, 2011).
References
[1] Erich Ludendorff Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1919) p.547, quoted at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzer_Tag_des_deutschen_Heeres
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Amiens_(1918)
[3] Code-named Friedensturm – ‘peace assault’.
[4] Meanwhile, on 19 July, two Italian divisions (perhaps 24,000 men) suffered nearly 10,000 casualties in the Allied cause at the Marne.
[5] The shelling began on 21 March 1918.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
[7] Greg was bedridden with the first, mild wave of ‘Spanish Flu’, which was known in 42 Squadron as ‘Merville Fever’, for two days in June 1918. See these posts for more on the epidemiology, aetiology and virology of the disease: