Battle of Arras, 1917: the British offensive of Easter Monday

Cyril Falls, who wrote the British Official History of 1917, called Easter Monday one of the great days of the war, the most formidable and most successful British offensive launched up to then. Five weeks later the same offensive had become a grinding slog, and by the end it had cost the British Empire more men per day than any other battle of the war.²

Background: a spring offensive for an ally

After the failure of the Somme to break the German line in 1916, the Allies planned a two-part offensive for the spring of 1917. The British would attack first around Arras; a week later the French, under General Robert Nivelle, would launch their great offensive on the Aisne, at the Chemin des Dames. The British attack was meant to draw German reserves north and away from the French.³ › The Somme, 1916

The Germans moved first. In March 1917 they pulled back from their exposed positions to the Hindenburg Line, a shorter and heavily fortified front prepared in their rear, and the British and Empire forces followed them up. The new line ran close to Arras. North of the town it joined the older German defenses on Vimy Ridge, a seven-kilometer spine of high ground that overlooked the plain for miles and had already cost the French and British over 150,000 casualties in earlier attacks.⁴

Armies and commanders

The main blow fell to General Sir Edmund Allenby's Third Army, astride the Scarpe east of Arras. On its left, General Henry Horne's First Army included the Canadian Corps, whose task was Vimy Ridge. Farther south, Australian and British divisions would attack Bullecourt, a village built into the Hindenburg Line. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, directed the whole.⁵

The British had learned from the Somme. They prepared the attack with care, trained their infantry hard in new tactics and gave even small units more information and responsibility. The artillery was stronger than ever: Britannica counts nearly 3,000 guns, many of them heavy. Improved, scientific methods of finding German batteries let the gunners silence much of the German artillery before the infantry went in, and a creeping barrage was to move just ahead of the attacking troops.⁶

An army underground

Arras had an unusual asset. Since the Middle Ages its builders had quarried chalk from under the town, and the old workings lay forgotten beneath its streets. The British set the New Zealand Tunnelling Company to link the quarries together and toward the front. The result was an underground barracks able to hide up to 24,000 soldiers, with tunnels that brought them unseen close to the German front line.⁷

The battle in phases

Easter Monday, 9 April

After days of bombardment, the attack began at 5:30 a.m. on 9 April, in cold and snow. Thousands of men came out of the tunnels and trenches, and the Germans were caught off guard. The British advanced farther in a day than in any attack of the war so far: about three kilometers by the Newfoundland account, up to three miles by Britannica's.⁸

North of Arras the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, attacking together for the first time, stormed Vimy Ridge. They took most of it on the first day and the rest by 12 April, at a cost of more than 10,600 killed and wounded by the Canadian War Museum's count, nearly 10,000 by Britannica's.⁹ › Battle of Vimy Ridge, 1917

The success was not followed up. The Western Front Association suggests that the unexpected gains, or the fog of war, meant the advance was not pressed on 10 April, when the German line was disjointed and in places broken, and that the main body of the cavalry was held too far back to exploit the gap. The Germans used the time well. Their command, Britannica notes, handled its reserves with its usual skill, and the fresh troops reached the front.¹⁰

Monchy-le-Preux

The key to the center was Monchy-le-Preux, a village on a conical hill east of Arras that gave observation over the battlefield for miles around. On 11 April infantry of the 37th Division and the horsemen of the 3rd Cavalry Division took it. It was one of the few mounted charges of the war on the Western Front, made through snow and shellfire.¹¹

On 14 April the Newfoundland Regiment and the 1st Essex attacked from Monchy toward Infantry Hill, beyond the village. They took their objectives, then walked into a heavy German counterattack from three sides and were cut off. The Newfoundlanders lost 460 men that morning, 166 of them killed and over 150 taken prisoner.¹²

Monchy itself was now almost empty of defenders. Lieutenant Colonel James Forbes-Robertson gathered the men of his battalion headquarters, about twenty, and led them to a hedge at the edge of the village; only ten got there, nine Newfoundlanders and one man of the Essex. With rapid fire, and by picking off the German scouts, they made the attackers believe they faced a strong force. The Official History, as the Canadian and Newfoundland accounts quote it, says that for four hours these ten men were all that stood between the Germans and Monchy, one of the most vital positions on the whole battlefield. The Vimy Foundation says they held out for eleven hours before they were relieved.¹³

Bullecourt

To the south, the 4th Australian and 62nd British Divisions attacked Bullecourt on 11 April. The attack was hastily planned. The supporting tanks arrived late, broke down or were quickly destroyed. The Australians broke into the German trenches anyway, without an artillery barrage, but they were cut off and forced back. The two Australian brigades lost over 3,300 men by the Australian War Memorial's count, and about 1,170 were taken prisoner (more than 1,100 by the Department of Veterans' Affairs), the most Australians captured in any single action of the war.¹⁴

A second attack began at 3:45 a.m. on 3 May, by the 2nd Australian and 62nd British Divisions. Once again the infantry got into the German line, and for two weeks the two sides fought for every trench in some of the most intense fighting of the war. After a last German counterattack failed on 15 May, the Germans abandoned the ruins. It cost 7,482 Australian casualties, the Australian War Memorial records, for a place of little strategic importance.¹⁵

Turning point: the slog

By the third day German reserves were arriving and the British advance was slowing. Further big attacks followed, along the Scarpe on 23 April and again on 3 May, both with tanks, and neither broke through. On 3 May alone more than 7,000 British soldiers were killed, one of the heaviest daily tolls of the war.¹⁶

The original plan had been to stop once serious resistance was met. But the French offensive on the Aisne was failing, and badly, and Haig kept the British attacks going to hold German troops in the north.¹⁷

Aftermath

The offensive ended in mid-May. The Western Front Association, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Tank Museum date the end to 16 May, Britannica to 17 May; the Long, Long Trail, following the official battle names, counts actions on the Hindenburg Line up to 16 June. British Empire losses were about 158,000 killed, wounded and missing by most counts, 150,000 by Artois 14-18. Britannica puts German losses at about 130,000; the Tank Museum says the Germans lost about as many as the British.¹⁸

No British offensive of the war lost men faster: measured by daily losses, Arras was the most costly of them all. The Tank Museum's verdict is that it showed the army could break into the German line but still could not turn that into a breakthrough. In the air, April 1917 became known as Bloody April for the heavy losses of British aircrews over the battlefield.¹⁹ › The Battle of Passchendaele, 1917

Legacy and memory

Arras is overshadowed by the battles around it, the Somme before and Passchendaele after; even the Tank Museum notes that it is largely unremembered today. For Canada, though, Vimy became a defining event, seen by many as a step on the road to full independence. Australia remembers Bullecourt, where more of its soldiers were captured than in any other action, and Newfoundland remembers Monchy with one of the five bronze caribou that mark its battlefields in France and Belgium.²⁰

Visiting the battlefield today

The Wellington Quarry in Arras is open to visitors, with guided tours through the tunnels where the soldiers waited for zero hour. On Vimy Ridge the great Canadian memorial stands above the plain. At the eastern edge of Monchy-le-Preux, a bronze caribou on the ruins of a German strongpoint looks toward Infantry Hill, the memorial of the Newfoundland Regiment.²¹

In Arras itself, the Faubourg d'Amiens cemetery holds the Arras Memorial to the missing, where the names of soldiers with no known grave are carved, many of them men who fell in the battle of 1917.²² › The Greatest Battles of the First World War