Battle of Rosières

The Battle of Rosières was the last battle that the British Fifth Army fought under the command of General Hubert Gough during Operation Michael. After five days of retreat from Saint-Quentin, its remnants stood on the open, agricultural Santerre plateau, south of the Somme, a few dozen kilometres short of Amiens, the most important railway junction at the point where the British and French armies met. On 26 March 1918 XIX Corps fell back a few kilometres to a new line in front of Rosières-en-Santerre, and that day the Germans took Chaulnes, Roye and, north of the Somme, Albert. On 27 March six exhausted British divisions repulsed the attack of eleven German ones and held their positions almost everywhere. On the same day, however, the Germans crossed the Somme behind the corps’ left flank, and in the south, where the French had fallen back, they entered Montdidier without a fight. During the night the command had to agree to a further retreat, and in front of Amiens there now stood only an improvised scratch force of sappers, railwaymen and students of military schools, known as Carey’s Force.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Rosières” and the dates 26–27 March 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. The battle belongs to the group named “the First Battles of the Somme, 1918” and covers the fighting of the Fifth Army south of the Somme on those two days. The French official history counts the same fighting as part of a wider “Battle of the Avre”, which it dates to 27–31 March. It should not be confused with the British Battle of the Avre of 4 April. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations. France and Belgium 1918) describes 26 March still in the first volume and 27 March already in the second, and notes that the war diaries for these days are very meagre, because the staffs had no time to keep them. We give exact times following that history. The village of Rosières, which gave the battle its name, lay just behind the line of the 8th Division and was abandoned only early on the morning of 28 March. Some studies, including some French ones, state that the Germans took it as early as 26 March, which does not agree with the British sources.

Background

On 21 March the Germans struck the British Fifth and Third Armies between Arras and the Oise. Within five days Oskar von Hutier with his Eighteenth Army and Georg von der Marwitz with the Second Army pushed the Fifth Army back behind the Crozat Canal and the Somme, took Péronne and Noyon, and reached the line of the 1916 trenches. The front south of the Somme was taken over by the Reserve Army Group of General Émile Fayolle, to whom the Fifth Army was also subordinated. On the morning of 26 March the French held about 29 km of front from the Oise to Roye, and the British about 30 km from Roye to the Somme.

The British forces were in a sorry state. General Herbert Watts’s XIX Corps had six divisions: the 24th, 8th, 50th, 66th, 39th and 16th (Irish). All except the 8th, which had arrived on the night of 23/24 March, had been fighting since the first day of the offensive, and many battalions numbered only a few hundred men. On its right, the four divisions of General Ivor Maxse’s XVIII Corps (the 20th, 30th, 36th (Ulster) and 61st) had been left without their artillery, which the French had kept to support their own troops. Between the French left flank at Roye and the right flank of XIX Corps yawned a gap nearly 5 km wide, and on the left flank, beyond the Somme, the right flank of the neighbouring Third Army already stood more than 6 km to the rear, at Bray.

Gough was aware that his troops might not hold out for long. On the night of 25/26 March he ordered the manning of the so-called Amiens Defence Line, built by the French in 1915: about 13 km of trenches running in an arc from Démuin on the Luce to Sailly-le-Sec on the Somme, roughly 25 km in front of the city. In 1917 some of these trenches had been filled in and the wire removed so that farmers could cultivate the fields. The army’s chief engineer, General P. G. Grant, gathered about 2,900 men to man them, mainly from field companies and rear units, the army and corps schools, as well as two companies of the American 6th Engineers, about 500 men with no combat training. They were given 76 Lewis guns and 16 Vickers heavy machine guns. On the evening of 26 March command of these troops was taken over by General George Carey, after whom they were named Carey’s Force.

Course

26 March. The night was quiet, and in the morning fog settled again, hampering the gunners’ observation for a time. Already during the night Watts, with Gough’s consent, had ordered that in the event of a strong attack the corps should fall back about 8 km, to a line from Rouvroy to Froissy on the Somme, running along a low, distinct ridge. The order reached the brigades only at about 9 a.m. At dawn the Germans attacked the right flank of the 24th Division, and at about 7–8 a.m. they captured the village of Herbécourt in the sector of the 39th Division, on the Flaucourt plateau, high above the Somme valley. From there they could enfilade the British line. The 39th and 66th Divisions began to fall back, so at 9.30 a.m. corps headquarters ordered the whole corps to retreat. It was meant to proceed slowly, but under German pressure the units reached the new line as early as the afternoon. The retreat was difficult, because owing to the course of the Somme the divisions had to move not due west but south-west, and gaps opened between them. The 17th Brigade of the 24th Division repulsed attacks on Chaulnes until 11 a.m. One of the battalions of the 72nd Brigade, the 9th East Surreys, was surrounded and fought until its ammunition ran out: of three hundred men, 57 unwounded were taken prisoner. The 8th Division withdrew in good order, repulsing two attacks on the way, and at about 2 p.m. passed through Lihons. On the new line the troops were awaited by field companies and an entrenching battalion, which had been digging it. In the evening the Germans also took the village of Framerville, which British heavy artillery shelled by mistake, and several counter-attacks failed to retake it.

On the right flank the French of General Robillot’s corps lost Roye in the morning and fell back south-west, towards Montdidier, while the British fell back north-west, towards Amiens. Maxse ordered his divisions to plug the gap between Roye and XIX Corps. Five brigades of the 20th and 61st Divisions, which had spent the night in and around Roye, marched out at 7 a.m. and only just made it: right behind them passed a German regiment that had gone round the French flank. The 30th Division took up position at Bouchoir, and the 36th Division, without artillery support, deployed in old French trenches from 1916. About a hundred men of the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, under Captain Combe held out in the village of Le Quesnoy until 6.30 p.m., covering the division’s deployment. Late in the evening a German column broke in between two brigades of the 36th Division and took Erches, but got no further. By nightfall the large gap of the morning had been closed.

The corps’ left flank was the most threatened. During the day the Third Army’s VII Corps, as a result of a misunderstanding, fell back from Bray behind the river Ancre, leaving a stretch of several kilometres on the Somme almost undefended. The British official history regards this unnecessary retreat as the main cause of the Fifth Army’s troubles the next day. The 16th Division, facing north along the Somme, withdrew to the new line between Proyart and Froissy, and in the evening repulsed an attack supported by artillery fire from the north bank of the river, which after the retreat of VII Corps lay open to the Germans. Only at 9 p.m. did Watts learn how far the right flank of the Third Army had fallen back. He ordered the bridges over the Somme to be blown as far as Cerisy and asked Gough for help. The crossings were manned by small, hastily assembled detachments: sappers, a Canadian machine-gun battery and a battalion made up of 350 men. By the evening there was no longer any connection between the left flank of the Fifth Army and the right flank of the Third Army, which had been drawn back more than 8 km to the rear.

On the north bank of the Somme, outside the immediate area of the battle, the Third Army’s V Corps, which had withdrawn behind the Ancre during the night, decided to defend itself not on the heights east of Albert but on the heights west of the town, and left the ruins of Albert to the Germans. Units of the German 3rd Naval Division and 54th Reserve Division entered the town at about 5 p.m., but their attempts to advance beyond the railway embankment broke down under the fire of British machine guns. The German study by Georg Goes admits that the soldiers, who had been hungry for two days, found abundant stocks of food in Albert, “drink too”. On the same day, at the Doullens conference, the Allies entrusted General Ferdinand Foch with the coordination of the operations of their armies on the Western Front.

On the evening of 26 March General Erich Ludendorff issued new orders. The Eighteenth Army was to advance south-west, to the river Avre, and the Second Army was to direct its main effort south of the Somme and take Amiens. According to the German general Hermann von Kuhl, these orders widened the already stretched framework of the operation still further, and the armies’ strength was no longer sufficient for so many tasks.

27 March. The night was frosty and quiet. XIX Corps was ordered to hold at all costs a line about 14 km long, from Rouvroy to the Somme, until the French arrived. Its only reserve was Carey’s Force, numbering about 3,000 men. The British official history observes that Watts had more divisions and more men under his command than the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and fought on a wider front, for longer and against greater odds. He was attacked by eleven German divisions. Only five of them had stood in the front line on 21 March; the rest had come up from the second and third echelons.

The first crisis came on the Somme. At about 8 a.m. the German Guard Ersatz Division struck at Proyart, and when the frontal attack failed it went round the left flank of the 47th Brigade of the 16th Division and at about 10 a.m. forced it to retreat. The 39th Division had to bend its flank back to the north-west. Watts ordered the strongest of his divisions, General William Heneker’s 8th Division, to counter-attack. Two battalions and a composite battalion from the 50th Division, under Lieutenant-Colonel Cope, advanced from Rosières across open ground criss-crossed by old wire entanglements and at about 4 p.m. drove the Germans from the crossroads by the burning sugar factory on the Roman road from Amiens to Saint-Quentin, taking many prisoners. Meanwhile in the 50th Division, of which in practice one brigade was left, a misunderstood warning order caused the battalions to begin falling back at about 1 p.m. and give up the village of Vauvillers. A counter-attack by the 8th and 66th Divisions retook it at about 3 p.m., but the Germans, attacking in eight to ten waves, broke in again when the defenders ran out of ammunition. By the evening the line ran along the light railway east of Harbonnières. On the right flank the 24th Division twice lost and once retook the village of Rouvroy, and after 2 p.m. fell back a little to keep in touch with XVIII Corps. Only the 8th Division held its morning line in front of Rosières all day, but the rest of the corps fell back at most by under 2 km. The British field artillery often changed position only when the Germans came within 500–600 metres.

What happened behind the left flank proved decisive. The German 1st Division from the north bank of the Somme crossed by a partly demolished bridge at Chipilly and between 1 and 2 p.m. took Cerisy. An attack by about four hundred men of the 39th and 16th Divisions halted it briefly, but by the evening the Germans were already advancing into the depths of the plateau and at about 7 p.m. took the villages of Lamotte and Warfusée (Lamotte-Warfusée) on the Roman road, just in front of the line of Carey’s Force and behind the back of the 39th Division. Three battalions of the 16th Division that had remained at Proyart held out until 8 p.m., and then, numbering about two hundred men, slipped through the German lines along the Somme by night, having learnt the German password beforehand. General Julian Byng, commander of the Third Army, sent the 1st Cavalry Division to the south bank, and Gough sent the 61st Division by lorry to Marcelcave to counter-attack towards Lamotte at dawn.

At the same time, on the right flank, the French corps fell back west and north-west, uncovering the right flank of XVIII Corps. Towards evening the Germans of the Eighteenth Army took Montdidier without a fight, and the gap at the junction of the French armies remained open through the night. XVIII and XIX Corps, threatened on both flanks, stood in a projecting salient. At about midnight the commanders of the 8th, 50th and 66th Divisions concluded at a conference in Cayeux that if Lamotte could not be retaken, the greater part of their troops faced encirclement. Watts had already put the same case to Gough earlier, but had been told that, in accordance with Foch’s instruction, no voluntary retreat was allowed. Gough turned to Foch himself, who, woken at 3 a.m., agreed to the withdrawal of the corps’ left flank. At 4.45 a.m. on 28 March the order to retreat was issued and the 8th Division left Rosières.

Between 5 and 6 p.m. the Military Secretary, General Ruggles-Brise, arrived at Gough’s headquarters with the news that the following day General Henry Rawlinson would take over command of the Fifth Army. The government in London held Gough to blame for the defeat. Gough was still in command that night and prepared the counter-attack on Lamotte.

Losses

The losses suffered in the Battle of Rosières itself cannot be isolated, because the divisions of both corps had been fighting without a break since 21 March, and units became intermingled and passed from one command to another. According to the British official history, the four divisions of XVIII Corps lost a total of about 21,700 officers and men between 21 and 27 March, including the lightly wounded and stragglers who later returned. The 36th Division fell to less than half its infantry strength, and the 50th Division was so weak that its brigades in practice ceased to exist. The Germans, according to prisoners’ statements and their own studies, suffered heavy losses in these days from artillery and machine-gun fire, and some of their divisions had received no rations for two days.

Significance

The Battle of Rosières showed that the Fifth Army, regarded in London as broken, could still fight. The British official history stresses that after six days of fighting, the exhausted, poorly trained troops not only halted the advance with little loss of ground but also counter-attacked successfully many times. The Germans followed the retreating British at a distance of a few kilometres and stopped as soon as the British stood and opened fire. Without artillery, which could not keep up across the shell-cratered battlefield of 1916 and the belt of land devastated by the Germans in 1917, the German infantry lost momentum. In German accounts 27 March is sometimes called the turning point of the offensive, and the Bavarian crown prince Rupprecht, on learning that day that the Supreme Army Command had refused him reinforcements for the Seventeenth Army at Arras, is said to have exclaimed: “In that case we have lost the war.”

On the other hand, the battle brought no stabilisation. The crossing at Cerisy, a consequence of VII Corps’ retreat the day before, and the gap at Montdidier forced XIX Corps to retreat further towards Amiens, and the German general Wetzell later considered the failure to exploit the breach in the French front at Montdidier one of the main reasons for the failure of the whole offensive. Carey’s Force held its line until the night of 30/31 March, when its remnants were absorbed by other units. The fighting in front of Amiens went on for more than another week, until the Battle of the Avre on 4 April and the attack on Villers-Bretonneux, and Gough, whose removal was decided on 27 March, became in Britain the scapegoat for the March defeat. After the war many historians, as well as the British official history, judged his command much more leniently than the government had in 1918.