Battle of Amiens ends

On 11 August 1918, the fourth day of the Battle of Amiens, the Allied offensive lost momentum. After the great breakthrough of 8 August the Canadians, Australians and British advanced more slowly each day. The Germans brought more divisions to the threatened sector, including the elite Alpine Corps, and the attack had entered the belt of old trenches from the 1916 Battle of the Somme, overgrown with weeds and criss-crossed with wire, in which machine guns had excellent positions. Of the several hundred tanks that had gone into the attack on the first day, only a small fraction were still fit for action.

On the last day of the battle there was still fierce fighting. In the morning Australians of the 1st Division took the village of Lihons on a hill from which the Germans covered the railway junction at Chaulnes, and beat off counter-attacks. During the night and morning the Canadian 4th Division repulsed three counter-attacks by the Alpine Corps on the village of Hallu, the furthest point reached by the Fourth Army, but then abandoned it, as there was no sense in holding such an exposed position. General Henry Rawlinson asked his commanders not to incur heavy losses, and General Arthur Currie advised breaking off the attack and preparing a new one, on a broad front, with full artillery support. At noon he cancelled a planned attack by his 4th Division. In the evening, after a conversation with Field Marshal Douglas Haig at Villers-Bretonneux, Rawlinson told his corps commanders that the offensive was being halted. At 10 p.m. Marshal Ferdinand Foch came to Haig’s train. He still hoped the British would reach the Somme, but agreed to limit the objectives and asked that the British Third Army attack north of the river as soon as possible.

The results of the battle were impressive. According to the British official history, the Allies took almost 30,000 prisoners, about 18,500 of them by the British and more than 11,000 by the French, as well as several hundred guns. At its deepest point the front moved a dozen or so kilometres east, and Amiens and the railway to Paris were out of range of the German artillery. In the south the French retook Montdidier on 10 August, and the German Eighteenth Army was withdrawing. The British Fourth Army lost about 20,000–22,000 men between 8 and 11 August; the French First and Third Armies, according to figures for 6–15 August, more than 24,000. Estimates of German losses vary; the British official historian James Edmonds put them at no fewer than 75,000 men.

The consequences on the German side were even greater. At the Supreme Army Command headquarters at Avesnes the highest commanders met with Emperor Wilhelm II. According to the British official history this was on 11 August; some works give the day before. Erich Ludendorff admitted that the army had suffered a heavy defeat and that the fighting spirit of some divisions left much to be desired: retreating soldiers shouted “blacklegs” and “war prolongers” at reinforcements going up to the front. When the emperor and the crown prince suggested that too much had been demanded of the troops, Ludendorff replied that the collapse of the Second Army could not be explained by fatigue. He offered his resignation, which was not accepted. The emperor is said to have remarked: “I see that we must strike a balance. We are nearly at the end of our resources. The war must be ended.” It was decided to call a conference at Spa and, until then, to defend a shortened front.

The Allies had no intention of giving the Germans a respite. On 12 August King George V, on the steps of the château at Bertangles, knighted General John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps. Foch pressed for the attack on Roye and Chaulnes to be resumed, but Haig, seeing the strength of the German defence, refused a few days later and shifted the weight of the offensive north of the Somme, where General Julian Byng’s Third Army attacked on 21 August.