Battle of Albert (1918)

The Battle of Albert was the second great British blow of the Hundred Days Offensive, which had begun on 8 August 1918 at Amiens. When the Fourth Army’s advance south of the Somme bogged down on the old trenches of 1916, Douglas Haig shifted the weight of the offensive northwards, to the front of General Julian Byng’s Third Army, between the river Ancre and Arras. At dawn on 21 August, in thick fog, two of Byng’s corps attacked with tanks without any preliminary bombardment and reached the railway line from Albert to Arras, on which the Germans had their main line of resistance. On 22 August the left wing of General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army retook the ruins of Albert, lost in March, and on 23 August both armies attacked on a front more than 50 km long, from the Somme to near Arras. The German line on the railway fell, the Australians took Chuignes south of the Somme, and in three days more than 10,000 Germans were taken prisoner. It was the start of a continuous advance which in the following weeks pushed the Germans all the way back to the Siegfried Line.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Albert, 1918” and the dates 21–23 August 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It counted the battle, together with the Second Battle of Bapaume at the turn of August and September, among the “Second Battles of the Somme, 1918”, and treated the capture of Chuignes by the Australians on 23 August as an episode of this battle. It is the third battle of that name: the first was fought in the autumn of 1914, and the second was the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume IV, 1947) points out that the committee’s dates are arbitrary. The fighting went on without a break on 24 and 25 August as well, for which the committee provided no name at all, and Edmonds himself still describes them as a continuation of the Battle of Albert and considers that it ended only on 29 August. Facts, figures and times are given after that history and after Haig’s dispatches (1919 edition). Times are British time.

Background

The Battle of Amiens brought the Allies their greatest success since the start of trench warfare, but after three days the advance lost momentum. The British and French reached the belt of trenches, craters and wire left by the Battle of the Somme of 1916, which tanks and infantry could cross only at the cost of heavy losses. Marshal Ferdinand Foch pressed for the Fourth Army and the French First Army to keep attacking towards Roye and Chaulnes regardless. Haig objected. On 15 August he went to Foch’s headquarters at Sarcus and declared that he was responsible for his troops to his government and his fellow countrymen and would not send them into an unprepared attack. Foch gave way and soon afterwards accepted Haig’s plan in writing: the blow was to shift north of the Somme, to the Third Army’s front, and the French First Army returned to General Pétain’s command.

Several reasons favoured this choice. The ground between the Ancre and Arras was less torn up by shells than the old Somme battlefield and well suited to tanks. Since the spring the British had held part of the high ground near Bucquoy, which in 1916 had lain deep behind the German lines, so they had good observation. A blow from this sector in a south-easterly direction could outflank the German defence on the Somme at Péronne from the north. The Germans, alarmed by the defeat at Amiens, had themselves begun to straighten their front. Between 14 and 17 August they abandoned their forward positions near Serre and Beaumont-Hamel, and Byng’s patrols entered those villages and the edge of Bucquoy. The Third Army’s front now ran roughly where Operation Michael had come to a halt in the spring: from Albert, which the Germans had taken on 26 March, along the Ancre, where on 5 April the last battle of that offensive had been fought, to Moyenneville south of Arras.

Facing the Third Army stood eight divisions of the German Seventeenth Army of General Otto von Below, part of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s army group, with two divisions in reserve. According to the British official history only one of them, the 4th Bavarian Division, was regarded as first-class, and two, including the 3rd Naval Division, as third-class. South of the Ancre, at Albert and between the Ancre and the Somme, the front was held by the Second Army of General Georg von der Marwitz, shattered at Amiens and from 12 August subordinated to the new army group of General Max von Boehn. The Germans intended to defend in depth. They were to abandon the forward zone, about 3 km deep, in the event of an attack, and they based their main line of resistance on the embankment and cutting of the Albert–Arras railway.

Plan

Byng prepared a limited attack: on 21 August the left wing of IV Corps and the right of VI Corps were to take the Ablainzevelle–Moyenneville ridge and reach the railway, and cavalry and tanks were to exploit the success. On 19 August Haig visited Byng and his corps commanders and criticised the plan as too cautious. What he wanted was to break through the front, reach Bapaume quickly and not give the Germans time to destroy bridges and roads. In the end a three-day timetable was agreed: on 21 August the Third Army would take the line of the railway, on 22 August it would bring up its guns while the left wing of the Fourth Army eliminated the German salient between the Somme and the Ancre and retook Albert, and on 23 August both armies would attack together. In a letter of 20 August Foch reminded Haig that the Germans were shaken and asked that the Third Army attack “with violence”. That day the French Tenth Army of General Mangin struck the main blow north of Soissons in the Second Battle of Noyon.

The Third Army numbered thirteen divisions in three corps: V Corps under General Cameron Shute, IV Corps under General George Harper and VI Corps under General Aylmer Haldane. According to the official history, half of its infantry were reportedly eighteen- and nineteen-year-old recruits who had not been trained in open warfare. Part of the Fourth Army’s artillery was moved to Byng, so that according to a GHQ return he had about 830 field guns and light howitzers and nearly 470 heavy guns (the army’s own report gives more). He received five tank battalions, 156 machines in all: older Mark IVs, newer Mark Vs, fast Whippet light tanks and armoured cars. The attack was to go in at 4.55 a.m. without any preliminary bombardment, behind a creeping barrage. The divisions were to leapfrog: the first took the first objective, and a fresh division passed through its line and carried on. Two cavalry divisions waited in army reserve, and the Royal Air Force brigade working with the army, reinforced to ten squadrons including two American ones, was to attack ground targets and German anti-tank guns from low level, among other tasks.

Course

21 August. At dawn a thick fog lay over the battlefield, limiting visibility according to some accounts to a few metres. At 4.55 the British artillery opened fire and the infantry advanced on a front about 14 km long, from Miraumont on the Ancre to Moyenneville. The Germans fell back from the forward zone as planned, so the first objectives were taken quickly and cheaply. In VI Corps the Guards and the 2nd Division took Moyenneville and Courcelles, and the 3rd Division reached the railway before 9 a.m. In IV Corps the 37th Division took Bucquoy with the help of tanks, and the New Zealanders captured Puisieux, finding their way in the fog by the sound of firing. The 5th Division and the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division passed through their lines. At about 8.30 a brigade of the 5th Division took Achiet-le-Petit, helping itself with a captured battery of German howitzers, and briefly even got beyond the railway. But the fog misled the attackers too. Many tanks lost their way, and the field artillery could not move forward in time. When the fog lifted between 10 and 12 and a hot day set in, the tanks and infantry found themselves in open ground under the fire of German guns and machine guns from Achiet-le-Grand and Irles. The Germans counter-attacked and pushed the British back behind the track. On the right flank V Corps took the village of Beaucourt-sur-l’Ancre, but crossings of the flooded, marshy Ancre valley mostly failed.

By the evening the Third Army stood on the line of the railway or just short of it, having advanced a few kilometres, about 5 km in the centre, and taken more than 2,000 prisoners. The cavalry and the Whippets found no gap to exploit. The German official history regarded the day as a defensive success: the attack “came to a standstill on the Miraumont–Courcelles railway and on the Ancre” without the main reserves being used. Byng decided that the 38th (Welsh) Division would not force the Ancre marshes but would pass through Albert once the Fourth Army had taken the town.

22 August. Before dawn, at 4.45, the Fourth Army’s III Corps attacked, commanded in place of the sick General Butler by General Alexander Godley. The 47th (London) and 12th (Eastern) Divisions advanced along the ridge between the Somme and the Ancre east of the village of Méaulte, covered on the right by the Australian 3rd Division at Bray-sur-Somme. General Richard Lee’s 18th (Eastern) Division threw sixteen footbridges across the Ancre during the night, crossed the river south of Albert and went round the town from the south-east, while its 8th East Surrey battalion cleared the ruins. By 10 a.m. Albert was almost free of Germans. In the afternoon the fresh German 25th Division counter-attacked in the 47th Division’s sector and pushed back part of its line, but did not break the front and withdrew during the night. In the sector of the Third Army, which was to stand still that day, Below hastily ordered an attack on a broad front, convinced that the British had attempted a breakthrough and been defeated. His attacks broke down against the British lines. In the 5th Division’s sector two scouts of the 1st Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, Lance Corporal George Onions and Private Eades, opened fire on a party of Germans that had blundered into their trench in the fog and took 242 men prisoner. Onions received the Victoria Cross for it.

In the evening Haig sent the army commanders an instruction, based on a memorandum by Foch, popularly known as the ginger note (an urging to make haste). He wrote that the methods of limited-objective attacks, suitable against a strong enemy, did not fit the present state of the German army. Divisions were to push on even if their flanks were temporarily exposed, and reserves were to be sent where the troops were gaining ground, not where they had been held up.

23 August. The main attack covered a front more than 50 km long, from the junction with the French near Lihons to Mercatel south of Arras, with about a hundred tanks taking part. South of the Somme General John Monash’s Australian Corps attacked at 4.45 with the British 32nd Division and the Australian 1st Division. They took Herleville, Chuignolles and Chuignes and more than 2,000 prisoners, and in Arcy Wood they captured an enormous German 15-inch gun. Two Australian officers, Lieutenants Lawrence McCarthy and William Joynt, received the Victoria Cross. At Albert the 18th and 38th Divisions took Tara and Usna hills on either side of the Albert–Bapaume road. That day the 54th Brigade of the 18th Division was commanded, in place of its wounded commander, by Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Percival, in 1942 the commander of the British defence of Singapore. Two Welsh companies which had waded the Ancre near the village of Hamel held on to the far bank all day under constant counter-attacks.

North of the Ancre IV and VI Corps took the German railway line in a pincer instead of attacking it frontally. As early as 5 a.m. the 3rd Division took the village of Gomiecourt with several hundred prisoners. The 3rd Division and the Guards shattered the German 234th Division, whose historian called the day its “black day”, and VI Corps also took Ervillers, Boyelles and Boiry-Becquerelle. IV Corps captured Achiet-le-Grand and Bihucourt. The Third Army alone took more than 5,000 prisoners that day. German regimental accounts quoted by Edmonds describe the day as a disaster: the 232nd Reserve Infantry Regiment lost all its company commanders and more than 600 men, and of the 4th Bavarian Division and the 2nd Guard Reserve Division there remained, as the German official history puts it, “remnants”. In the evening Byng ordered the advance to continue, and the new attack went in during the night, before dawn on 24 August.

Losses

The British official history gives no separate British losses for this battle. The attack cost the attackers much less than an assault in good visibility would have done, because the fog on 21 and 22 August allowed the infantry to get close to the German machine-gun nests. Heavy losses were suffered, however, by the battalions that found themselves in open ground after the fog lifted, and by the tank crews. A cavalry brigade which on 21 August had waited for a chance to pursue lost 98 men and 163 horses to no purpose. According to Haig’s dispatches more than 10,000 Germans were taken prisoner in the three days: more than 2,000 on 21 August, more than 2,400 on 22 August, and more than 5,000 by the Third Army and more than 2,000 by the Australians on 23 August. German losses in killed and wounded are not known in full. The 234th Division alone lost on 23 August, according to its historian, more than 2,400 infantrymen, including about 1,600 missing.

Significance

The Battle of Albert carried the Allied offensive from a narrow sector at Amiens on to a broad front and began a series of attacks that gave the Germans no respite. The British official history stresses that the fighting closely resembled open warfare, of a kind the British army had not waged in the attack since 1914: the Germans no longer held continuous lines, and battalions advanced by bounds, with advanced guards and mounted scouts, behind artillery fire and with the help of tanks and aircraft. What was surprising was that the success was won by young soldiers poorly trained in such fighting. Haig’s plan of striking in turn at different places and forcing the Germans to disperse their reserves proved effective. Erich Ludendorff later wrote that around 25 August the situation on the old Somme battlefield east of Albert was “extremely critical”.

The advance went on without a break. On 26 August the First Army attacked on the Scarpe at Arras, on 29 August the New Zealanders entered Bapaume, and at the turn of August and September the Australians took Mont Saint-Quentin and Péronne. In September the Germans fell back to the Siegfried Line, the same line from which they had set out on their great offensive in March.