8 August in military history: the Battle of Amiens, 1918

8 August 1918 · 108 years ago

Planned in secret

On 28 July General Foch issued the formal order for the Amiens operations, to be carried out by the British Fourth Army under General Rawlinson and the French First Army under General Debeney. In the English text printed by Edmonds, it begins: "The object of the operations is to disengage Amiens and the Paris-Amiens railway, also to defeat and drive back the enemy established between the Somme and the Avre".¹

The Australian War Memorial writes that the battle was planned "in the strictest secrecy", and the Canadian War Museum that it was prepared in secret with a major counter-intelligence operation. Under the Fourth Army's instructions, from 1 August all forward movement of troops and transport was to take place by night, and newly arriving corps were not to open wireless stations until after zero. To mislead the Germans, two Canadian battalions with signal and medical units were sent to Flanders, where, Nicholson adds, the signallers began a flow of dummy wireless traffic.²

From right to left the line ran from the French First Army through the Canadian and Australian Corps to the British III Corps, which stood between the Somme and the Ancre. Nicholson counts twenty-one Allied divisions, in line and in immediate reserve, against the fourteen of General von der Marwitz's Second Army. The tank figures differ by scope. Edmonds lists 342 heavy tanks, 72 whippets and 120 supply tanks with the Fourth Army; Nicholson gives 604 tanks of all types, of which the Fourth Army would employ 324 heavy fighting tanks and 96 Whippets; and the Canadian War Museum gives 420 tanks used on 8 August. Ludendorff later wrote that the attack came "with strong squadrons of tanks, but otherwise in no great superiority".³

Zero hour

The Fourth Army's assault went in at 4.20 in the morning. On the British front there was no preliminary bombardment, for the sake of surprise. The French First Army, short of tanks, relied on its guns instead: Edmonds writes that its advance was timed to begin forty minutes, later altered to forty-five, after the British, and Nicholson that its 45-minute bombardment opened with the Fourth Army's barrage and its assault went in at 5:05. In a footnote Edmonds adds that, according to Grasset, the French 42nd Division advanced at zero, 4.20 a.m., and the 37th Division at zero plus 45 minutes.⁴

Bean writes that at 3 a.m. a morning mist began to dim the air and that by 3.30 it was difficult to see more than twenty yards. Ludendorff remembered "a dense fog, rendered still thicker by artificial means". At 7 a.m. Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash of the Australian Corps telegraphed the Fourth Army: "Everything going well at 6.45 a.m. Heavy ground mist facilitating our advance, but delaying information. Infantry and Tanks got away punctually. Our attack was a complete surprise".⁵

Eight miles in a day

By Nicholson's count the German line was thrown back as much as eight miles in the Canadian sector and up to seven on the Australian front, while on the flanks the French advanced at most five miles and the British two. The Australian War Memorial gives 11 km for the Australians and nearly 13 km for the Canadians; the Canadian War Museum gives 13 km for the Canadians. Ludendorff wrote that "Six or seven divisions which could certainly be described as battle-worthy had been completely broken".⁶

Edmonds records that 281 officers and 12,134 other ranks passed through the corps cages on 8 August, that the French captured 150 officers and 3,200 other ranks, and that nearly three hundred guns had been taken. Nicholson writes that the Canadian Corps was credited with 5033 prisoners and 161 guns. For the Australian Corps, Monash gives more than 8,000 prisoners counted by nightfall and Bean an eventual count of 7,925, both with 173 guns.⁷

The black day

Ludendorff, the First Quartermaster General, opened his chapter on the last phase of the war with the words: "AUGUST 8th was the black day of the German Army in the history of this war". That is the wording of the 1919 London edition of his memoirs. The Australian War Memorial quotes it as "in the history of the war", and Bean as "in the Great War".⁸

He blamed the soldiers' morale. Divisional commanders and officers he summoned to Avesnes told him of "whole bodies of our men" who "had surrendered to single troopers, or isolated squadrons", and of retiring troops who shouted "Blackleg" and "You're prolonging the war" at a fresh division going into action. He concluded that "Our war machine was no longer efficient" and that "The war must be ended". He also wrote that the Emperor later told him that after the failure of the July offensive and after 8 August he knew the war could no longer be won.⁹

Historians weighed this differently. Edmonds wrote that "On the face of it, the 8th August hardly seems to have deserved the fatal label", then cited an anonymous German critique to explain that Ludendorff had in mind the reports of men surrendering. Bean wrote that three factors helped the attack on 8 August, surprise far the foremost, then the tanks, then the mist, yet judged Ludendorff right to ascribe the defeat largely to the failure of the German garrison but wrong to cast the blame on it. Bean quotes in English the history of the German 119th Infantry Regiment: "A true tank-panic had seized on everything, and, where any dark shapes moved, men saw the black monster".¹⁰

Counting the cost

Edmonds writes that the Fourth Army's losses on 8 August were not recorded separately but were, as the corps reports said, very small, as near as can be computed under nine thousand; his footnote breaks this down as Cavalry Corps 600, Canadian Corps 3,500, Australian Corps 3,000 and III Corps 1,700, total 8,800. Nicholson gives about 8800, exclusive of tank and air losses, and 3868 Canadian casualties: 1036 killed, 2803 wounded and 29 taken prisoner. The Canadian War Museum gives nearly 4,000 Canadian casualties on 8 August. For the Australians, Bean estimates that probably 1,000 men were hit reaching the first objective and another 1,000 gaining the second and third.¹¹

On the German side, Edmonds cites Lossberg's account that General von der Marwitz told him the Second Army had lost on 8 August "about 700 officers and 27,000 men, over 400 guns"; Nicholson quotes official German figures of "650 to 700 officers and 26,000 to 27,000 other ranks", more than two-thirds of them prisoners. For the whole battle Edmonds estimates German casualties at about 75,000, probably under the mark.¹²

The Canadian War Museum writes that by the night of 11 August most offensive operations had ground to a halt. Nicholson puts Canadian casualties at 11,822 for the period 8 to 20 August, 9074 of them on the four opening days; the Canadian War Museum gives more than 11,800 in total. The Australian War Memorial writes that the day marked the beginning of the great Allied offensive that would ultimately lead to the end of the war. Nicholson writes that "in these last hundred days of the war" each major offensive followed its predecessor so rapidly that the Canadians were denied rest. The whole campaign is told in our article on the Hundred Days Offensive.¹³