Battle of Arras (1917) begins

On 9 April 1917, Easter Monday, at 5.30 a.m., thousands of guns opened fire on a front more than twenty kilometres long around Arras in northern France, and the British and Canadian infantry went over the top. So began the great British spring offensive, which was meant to draw in the German reserves ahead of the French attack on the Aisne. The first day was one of the British Army’s best days of the whole war. The British official history writes that Easter Monday 1917 “must be counted among the great days of the war”: it was the most powerful and at the same time the most successful British attack yet carried out. North of the Scarpe river British troops advanced more than five kilometres, the furthest in a single day since the start of trench warfare, and the Canadians took almost the whole of Vimy Ridge.

Before dawn

Preparations had lasted for months. Nearly 2,800 guns and howitzers were brought up to the front of General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army and the Canadian Corps of the First Army, almost three times as many as the Germans had on the whole battle front. The bombardment began on 4 April. The attack was planned for Easter Sunday, 8 April, but Field Marshal Douglas Haig postponed it by a day at the request of the French. The extra day of bombardment proved useful, because the sunny Sunday was the first day of good visibility for a long time. During the night the artillery drenched the German batteries, headquarters and dugouts with gas shells.

According to the British official history, in the Third Army’s forward zone alone, a strip about 10 miles (16 km) long and two miles deep, some 200,000 men of ten first-line divisions stood that night, and most of the infantry was crowded into the trenches right by the front. Many waited for the signal underground: in the huge cellars beneath the squares of Arras and in the medieval chalk quarries under the suburbs, linked by tunnels to the front line. The commanders’ greatest fear was that the Germans would shell these crowds at the last moment. They did not. Many of their batteries had been destroyed or neutralised, British fire kept their observers’ heads down, and the command of the German 6th Army was convinced that the attack would come only a week later.

Every infantryman carried a rifle with bayonet, an entrenching tool, a water bottle, a haversack with two days’ rations, 170 rounds, two grenades, a signal flare and three sandbags, and many also a pick or shovel and wire cutters. The official history estimates that a smaller soldier carried half his own weight. Allenby ordered greatcoats to be left behind, so that when wet they would not weigh the men down even more. There were strikingly many Scots among the attackers: in three Scottish divisions and in other units, 44 of the 120 first-line battalions came from Scotland.

The attack

At 5.30 a.m. the creeping barrage moved off, and the infantry behind it. The morning brought squalls of rain, sleet and snow. A strong westerly wind drove the flurries into the Germans’ faces, which, according to the official history, several times clearly helped the attackers. The German front lines had been levelled. The defenders were sitting in deep dugouts, and many of them, taken by surprise, came straight out into captivity. On most of the front the first position was taken quickly, on schedule.

North of the Scarpe General Charles Fergusson’s XVII Corps took all its positions in turn. The 9th (Scottish) Division, in which the South African Brigade was fighting, went through the village of Athies, which, according to the official history, crumbled into dust before the eyes of the advancing infantry, and took the Point du Jour line. One of its battalions lost only 69 men in doing so. In the afternoon the fresh 4th Division passed through its ranks and broke the next position, the Oppy–Méricourt line. Many Germans surrendered at once, others fled. A platoon of a Rifle Brigade battalion that was to attack the Hyderabad Redoubt kicked a football towards it and charged after it, taking the redoubt. In the sunken road to Gavrelle a German general whose chauffeur had abandoned him was taken prisoner. In the evening a battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s occupied Fampoux. In all, the 4th Division advanced about 3.5 miles. According to the official history, this was the longest advance in a single day made on the Western Front by any of the belligerent armies since the start of trench warfare.

South of the river VI Corps took Tilloy, where dozens of Germans came out with their hands up, and crossed Observation Ridge. When two battalions of the 12th Division came down from it into Battery Valley, a scene took place which, as the official history writes, was rare on this front: the whole valley was dotted with German batteries, some abandoned, others fleeing, and still others firing over open sights at the infantry from a few hundred metres. The British took them in rushes, covered by machine-gun fire. Further progress, however, was halted by fire from the defences at Feuchy Chapel on the road to Cambrai. Only the 15th (Scottish) Division took the Wancourt–Feuchy position on its sector, at about 5.30 p.m., with the help of the only tank that reached it. Most of the Third Army’s 40 tanks stuck in the mud or were hit. On the right wing VII Corps, which attacked in succession from the left, went through the defences of Neuville-Vitasse and Telegraph Hill, but the two divisions facing the Hindenburg Line itself were halted by uncut wire.

At the same time, in the north, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, fighting together for the first time, stormed Vimy Ridge. By evening they had taken almost the whole ridge except Hill 145 and the hill at its northern end, captured more than 3,400 prisoners and opened up a view over the Douai plain.

A lost opportunity

Towards evening a gap opened east of Arras. Two cavalry divisions were waiting between Arras and Tilloy, but south of the Scarpe, where they were to move forward, the Wancourt–Feuchy position fell too late. In the evening they were withdrawn to bivouacs. Officers of the 4th and 9th Divisions were convinced that on the northern bank the cavalry had an open road. Brigadier-General Adrian Carton de Wiart, himself a cavalryman, told a liaison officer that the nearest cavalry brigade would arrive only the next day, and “tomorrow will be too late”. One of the battalion commanders of the 9th Division telephoned his brigadier in the same vein. The official history admits that instead of whole cavalry divisions it would have been better to send individual squadrons, which could have occupied a good deal of ground, and the infantry would have taken it over after dark. Engineers and pioneers moved off immediately behind the infantry and worked all night repairing roads and laying light railway track to bring the artillery forward.

In the evening the Third Army reported the capture of 5,600 prisoners and 36 guns, and prisoners and guns were still coming in. According to the official history, the losses were certainly less than half of those inflicted on the Germans. The two divisions of VII Corps that went through Neuville-Vitasse and Telegraph Hill lost on average just under 1,000 men each. The official history names two factors that most distinguished this day from the first day on the Somme: above all a far stronger artillery and better ammunition, and secondly the weaknesses of the German defence.

On the German side

The defeat of Colonel-General Ludwig von Falkenhausen’s German 6th Army stemmed largely from his own mistakes. The front lines were densely manned and were to be held at all costs, and when they fell each division lost about a third of its infantry. The five reserve divisions that were to counter-attack stood 25–30 km behind the front, because Falkenhausen expected the attack only in mid-April. They did not manage to enter the battle that day. The army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, wrote in his diary: “Now we must suffer because the 6th Army, despite my express wishes, did not move the reserves closer to the front-line divisions”. General Erich Ludendorff, who was celebrating his 52nd birthday on that very day, recalled after the war that he had awaited the attack with confidence, and that after the reports from Arras he was deeply depressed. He at once began bringing reserves to Arras.

At Arras, however, there was no breakthrough. Behind the captured positions lay one more line of defence, the Drocourt–Quéant Switch, and fresh German divisions were approaching the battlefield. In the following days the British also took Monchy-le-Preux and the rest of Vimy Ridge, but with each day they advanced more slowly and suffered heavier losses.