The Battle of St Quentin was the first phase of Operation Michael, the great German offensive that the Germans called the “Great Battle in France” and, colloquially, the Kaiserschlacht, the “Kaiser’s Battle”. On the morning of 21 March 1918, after a five-hour bombardment by more than six thousand guns, three German armies attacked on a front some 70–80 kilometres long, from the Oise to the outskirts of Arras. Thick fog meant that the British defenders saw the attackers only at a distance of a few dozen metres. The heaviest blow fell on the British Fifth Army of General Hubert Gough, which, stretched over too long a sector, lost the whole of its Forward Zone on the first day and, on its right wing, the Battle Zone as well. That day the British lost about 38,000 men, nearly 21,000 of them prisoners. After 1 July 1916 it was the worst day in the history of the British Army. Over the next two days the Fifth Army fell back behind the Crozat Canal and the Somme, and the Third Army of General Julian Byng gave up the Flesquières salient. German losses, however, were just as heavy, and in the north the attack stalled.

Name and dates

After the war the British Battles Nomenclature Committee named the whole of the operations from 21 March to 5 April 1918 the “Offensive in Picardy” or the First Battles of the Somme 1918 and divided them into successive battles: St Quentin (21–23 March), Bapaume (24–25 March), Rosières (26–27 March), the First Battle of Arras (28 March), the Avre (4 April) and the Ancre (5 April). The fighting for the Somme crossings on 24–25 March is counted as a separate episode. The name Battle of St Quentin covers all of the first three days of the offensive, both on the Fifth Army’s front and on that of the Third Army north of the Flesquières salient, where the fighting took place at Bullecourt and Croisilles, far from the town itself. On the German side the attack of the Seventeenth Army was code-named “Michael I”, that of the Second Army “Michael II” and that of the Eighteenth Army “Michael III”.

Times are given according to the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. I, 1935), which compares them with German orders. The casualty figures for the first day come from later studies, as the official history does not give them.

Background

After the peace with Russia the Germans were able for the first time since 1914 to concentrate almost all their forces in the west. By March 1918 they had transferred several dozen divisions from the east. Erich Ludendorff, the de facto head of the German Supreme Army Command, decided to settle the war before the mass of Americans reached France. For the first blow he chose the British front between Arras and the Oise. The Seventeenth Army of General Otto von Below and the Second Army of General Georg von der Marwitz, from the army group of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, were to cut off the Flesquières salient left over from the Battle of Cambrai and advance north-west. The Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier, from the army group of the German Crown Prince, Wilhelm, was to reach the Somme and the Crozat Canal on both sides of Saint-Quentin and cover the whole operation against the French.

According to figures from the German Reichsarchiv passed to the British official history, the three armies had 6,473 guns and 3,532 trench mortars. Some studies give about 6,600 guns. Against Gough’s Fifth Army, with 12 infantry divisions and 3 cavalry divisions, the Germans massed about 43 divisions. The Eighteenth Army’s bombardment was planned by Lieutenant-Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, an outstanding artilleryman who had earlier been retired. His plan divided the five hours of fire into phases. First the guns were to strike the British batteries, command posts and communications with gas and high-explosive shells, then the infantry lines. Finally the infantry was to advance behind a creeping barrage. So as not to betray the intention, the Eighteenth Army did almost no registration of targets beforehand. The attack was to be made by assault divisions trained over the winter, led by storm troops, Stoßtruppen, who were to bypass points of resistance and push in as deep as possible, leaving those to the following waves.

The British knew the blow was coming, and on the eve even knew its hour from prisoners’ statements. But they were weak. At the demand of the French and of his own government, Douglas Haig had taken over from the French in January 1918 a sector reaching beyond the Oise, to Barisis. British divisions had been reduced from twelve to nine battalions, and most of them had been bled white in the autumn in the Third Battle of Ypres. The general reserve promised by the Supreme War Council had not been created. Haig, who above all had to cover the Channel ports, held the south most weakly: the Fifth Army held a front 42 miles (about 68 km) long, roughly one division per 6 km, and had only 1,566 guns. The new British system of defence in depth, modelled on the German one, existed largely only on maps. The Forward Zone, that is, the old front line, was held by a network of outposts and redoubts. The Battle Zone consisted in practice of two lines of trenches with few strongpoints between them, and the Rear Zone, the so-called Green Line, was marked out only by shallow trenches and bits of wire. On the sectors taken over from the French there was no time and no manpower to change this.

Course

21 March, the bombardment. On the evening of 20 March a mist began to rise over the whole front of the Fifth and Third Armies, and it thickened during the night. At about 4.40 a.m. thousands of guns opened fire along the whole front of the Fifth Army and three-quarters of the Third Army’s front. Feint bombardments also fell further north and on the French front in Champagne. The Germans had reconnoitred their targets carefully from the air: they hit divisional headquarters, telephone exchanges and cable junctions, even deeply buried ones. Within a short time almost all communication with the Forward Zone was cut. Masses of gas shells, including lachrymators, fell on the battery positions. The Flesquières salient was drenched with mustard gas, which British specialists at once read as a sign that the Germans did not intend to attack it but to cut it off. Men from the reserves, in gas masks, holding on to one another like the blind, moved up to their battle positions in the darkness and the fog.

At dawn the fog was so thick that in the Oise valley and along the St Quentin Canal a column of troops could not be seen at ten metres. On the Fifth Army’s right wing it lasted until about one in the afternoon. North of the Flesquières salient, on the front of the Third Army’s IV Corps, it cleared as early as about ten. Airmen of the Royal Flying Corps over the Fifth Army’s front could see almost nothing until midday. Pigeons, light signals and visual signalling did not work either. Runners lost their way in the fog and under fire.

21 March, the assault. According to German orders the infantry was to advance at 9.40 a.m. along the whole front from the Oise to Croisilles, except for the Flesquières salient. On some sectors it attacked earlier: near La Fère as early as about six in the morning. The Germans emerged from the fog right in front of the outposts, and their S.O.S. signals were not seen by their own artillery. The Forward Zone was taken almost everywhere in the first rush, and the machine guns on which the defence relied often did not fire a single shot. German assault groups infiltrated along the valleys, where the fog was thickest, and pushed on towards the Battle Zone. The redoubts of the Forward Zone, however, cut off and surrounded, held out for hours, and some even for two days. The fort on the hill at Vendeuil and the post at Travecy surrendered only on the evening of 22 March, when their ammunition ran out. On the so-called Manchester Hill near Saint-Quentin the 16th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, held out until about 4.30 p.m. Its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrith Elstob, was killed, and the last message received from him was “Goodbye”. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. The resistance of the redoubts did not stop the attack, but it tied down many Germans who would otherwise have supported the assault on the Battle Zone.

It was worst on the right wing, where General Richard Butler’s III Corps held a wide sector on both sides of the Oise. Hutier had deployed his troops much as Butler had: weakly by the river, strongly north of it. Seven German divisions faced the single British 14th Division. By about eleven the Germans had reached its Battle Zone, and in the afternoon they broke through it at Essigny-le-Grand. Two other breaches opened at the junctions between corps, in the Omignon valley near Maissemy and the Cologne valley near Ronssoy and Templeux-le-Guérard. Elsewhere the Battle Zone held. During the day the Germans took neither Le Verguier nor Épehy, where the 21st Division held out all day. On the Third Army’s front the Seventeenth Army penetrated the Battle Zone along the Cambrai–Bapaume road and at Bullecourt, where it broke through the weak defence of the 59th Division, but did not break through the zone. The British corps there fell back to the rear line of the Battle Zone.

At about one in the afternoon Gough was visited by the French general Georges Humbert, appointed to command the troops the French were to send to help the British. He said that for the moment all he had at his disposal was the pennant on his car: Je n’ai qu’un fanion. The commander of the French army, Philippe Pétain, still feared that the main blow would fall in Champagne, although in the evening, on his own initiative, he had V Corps with two divisions and a dismounted cavalry division made ready to march. Gough, who knew that apart from the two divisions of GHQ reserve he would not quickly receive reinforcements, decided to fight while falling back. Each day the army was to resist and at night move to a new line, until reinforcements arrived. As early as the afternoon he agreed to III Corps withdrawing behind the Crozat Canal, and at 9.45 p.m., with Haig’s consent, he issued a written order: III Corps was to cross the canal, and the XVIII Corps of General Ivor Maxse was to swing its right flank back behind the Somme. Army headquarters moved to Villers-Bretonneux. During the night III Corps crossed the canal, 9–12 metres wide and impossible to ford, without interference from the enemy. Byng withdrew V Corps from the forward part of the Flesquières salient by about two kilometres.

21 March, the balance. For the Germans the first day was not as successful as it seemed to the British. Only the Eighteenth Army reached its objectives. The Seventeenth Army and most of the Second Army stopped in front of the British Battle Zone, and the British artillery positions were not taken as planned. The chief of staff of Rupprecht’s army group, General Hermann von Kuhl, admitted that the expected objectives had not been reached. Nevertheless the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who watched the battle from an observation post of the Eighteenth Army, proclaimed a complete victory. On the very first day Ludendorff allotted six fresh divisions to the German Crown Prince’s army group, while the Seventeenth Army, until then regarded as the axis of the whole operation, received no reinforcements.

22 March. In the morning there was fog again, in the low ground by the rivers until about eleven. Because of the breaches the Fifth Army’s front had lengthened to more than 40 miles (about 65 km), and its divisions had less than half their infantry left. At 10.45 a.m. Gough told the corps in writing that in the event of a serious attack they were to fight rearguard actions, falling back to the Green Line and further if necessary. Maxse took this in practice as an order to retreat and early in the afternoon ordered XVIII Corps to go back through the Green Line all the way behind the Somme and the canal. The British official history judges this long leap critically: it exposed the neighbouring XIX Corps, which was not prepared for so long a retreat. It also allowed Hutier to report that he had reached the line of the canals without difficulty, which later influenced the decisions of the German command. On the right wing the Germans forced the canal at Tergnier, which fell in the evening, and seized a bridgehead there. By the evening the first French division, the 125th, appeared near Chauny. By nightfall the Fifth Army had lost the whole of the Battle Zone and most of the Green Line. Only its left wing, the VII Corps of General Walter Congreve, still held that line, and a gap threatened at the junction with the Third Army.

The Third Army was in a much better position. It had almost twice as many men and guns per kilometre of front and better-developed trenches, and the fog had lifted earlier here. Its IV and VI Corps, despite heavy losses, repulsed the attacks of the Seventeenth Army for most of the day. Only after four in the afternoon did the Germans take Vaulx-Vraucourt. Byng was long unwilling to give up the Flesquières salient, won at great cost in November 1917. Finally, late in the evening, GHQ ordered the Third Army to fall back to the Green Line. On the northern wing XVII Corps abandoned Monchy-le-Preux without a fight, which the Germans later presented as a capture.

23 March. The fog was again thickest on the right wing. Early in the morning the Germans crossed the Crozat Canal at Jussy, and then at many other places, and began to outflank the brigades of III Corps. The German 231st Division broke into Ham and crossed the Somme there. XIX Corps abandoned part of the bridgehead in front of Péronne. In twenty-four hours the Fifth Army’s line fell back 4–6 miles (about 6–10 km). By the evening its centre stood behind the Somme from Ham to Biaches opposite Péronne; its right wing, driven from the canal, had for the most part already been relieved by the French; and its left wing had no contact with the Third Army. At 5 p.m. British GHQ ordered the Somme line to be held “at all costs”, but by the time the order was sent it had already been lost in several places. The same day, at 1 p.m., the rearguards of V Corps left the Flesquières salient as the German pincers on both its sides began to close. Fifth Army intelligence had by now identified 45 German divisions on its front.

Early in the afternoon Haig visited Gough, and at about four he met Pétain at Dury near Amiens. Pétain announced that the army group of General Émile Fayolle, with eleven divisions, would take its place on the British right. It was agreed that from the night of 24 March Fayolle would take command of all troops, British included, south of Péronne. III Corps passed under the orders of Humbert’s French Third Army as early as the evening of 23 March. To Haig’s request for twenty divisions to be concentrated near Amiens, however, Pétain replied that he expected an attack in Champagne at any moment.

Ludendorff’s change of plan. On the morning of 23 March Ludendorff, encouraged by the Eighteenth Army’s success and by misleading reports from the north, issued a new directive. Instead of concentrating his forces on the right wing, he ordered the three armies to advance in divergent directions: the Seventeenth Army on Arras and Saint-Pol, the Second Army westwards towards Amiens, and the Eighteenth Army on Chaulnes and Noyon. The aim was now to separate the British and the French, drive the British into the sea and defeat the French. Kuhl later wrote of a “complete change of plan”, and the British official history observes that Ludendorff did not have enough troops to achieve so many objectives at once.

Casualties

The British official history does not give losses for these three days. According to the research of Martin Middlebrook and data from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), the British lost about 38,500 men on 21 March, nearly 21,000 of them taken prisoner. Many of these were the garrisons of the surrounded redoubts of the Forward Zone. The loss of whole battalions also meant the loss of a large share of machine guns, which were lacking in the following days. Middlebrook estimates German losses on the first day at almost 40,000, slightly more than the British. British prisoners saw the Germans carrying away their dead, and heard from German doctors that there were three times as many wounded as had been expected. The losses of 22 and 23 March cannot be separated from the overall losses of Operation Michael.

Significance

In three days the Germans advanced further than either side on the Western Front since the autumn of 1914. In the south they covered about 20 kilometres, broke through every zone of the British defence and forced the line of the canals. The British official history sees the main cause of the defeat not in the conduct of the soldiers but in the army having been stretched over too long a front, without reserves and with unfinished defences, while the fog deprived the defenders of the fire of their machine guns and artillery. On the Third Army’s front, where the trenches were better and the fog thinner, the same soldiers inflicted heavy losses on the Germans and gave up much less ground.

The battle did not, however, bring the Germans a decision. The Fifth Army was falling back, but it did not disintegrate. The most important objective of the first stage, cutting off the Flesquières salient together with its garrison, was not achieved. The greatest success was won by the Eighteenth Army, which was only meant to cover the operation, in a direction of little strategic importance. Ludendorff’s decision of 23 March to disperse the effort in three directions weakened the attack over the following days. On the Allied side the first days of the offensive exposed the lack of a unified command: each commander-in-chief thought first and foremost of his own front. Gough, whose army took the heaviest blow, was soon removed from command, although many historians later concluded that he did not bear the main blame for the defeat.