Battle of the Avre

The Battle of the Avre was the last great German blow of Operation Michael, the offensive launched on 21 March 1918. After a three-day pause, in rain that did not let up all day, two German armies attacked on 4 April on a front about 24 km long, from Grivesnes south of Moreuil to the Somme. They aimed to seize ground from which heavy artillery could shell the railway junction and bridges at Amiens, and to strike at the city itself the following day. In the south the French First Army lost several villages on the Avre and fell back more than 3 km. In the north the British XIX Corps gave ground along the Somme and lost the village of Le Hamel, and by evening the Germans stood a few hundred metres from Villers-Bretonneux, a small town on the plateau commanding the road to Amiens. A counter-attack by the Australian 36th Battalion and British units threw them back at the last moment. The attack achieved none of its objectives, and a day later the German command gave up further attacks on Amiens.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of the Avre” and the date of 4 April 1918 were given after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. Together with the Battle of the Ancre (5 April), the battle closes the group named the “First Battles of the Somme 1918”. The name can be misleading, because the French used “Battle of the Avre” for the fighting of their troops in the last days of March, and the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. II) uses this French name in the titles of its chapters on 27–31 March. The Australians, for whom the fighting for Villers-Bretonneux mattered most, call it the First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and date it from 30 March to 5 April. It is separated by three weeks from the second battle for the town, fought on 24–25 April. Times and figures are given after the British official history and the Australian official history by Charles Bean (vol. V, 1937). The French official history gives different times, as noted below.

Background

By the end of March Operation Michael was clearly losing momentum. The Germans had advanced more than 60 km, but their infantry was exhausted, artillery and supplies could not keep up across the devastated battlefield of 1916, and ever more fresh French divisions stood against them. On 30 and 31 March attacks on both banks of the Avre achieved little. A German study quoted by the British official history admits that the great offensive threatened to turn into a battle of attrition and that the infantry had to “reach for the spade”. The Supreme Army Command nevertheless decided, despite preparations for an attack in Flanders, “to try its luck once more with Amiens”. From 1 to 3 April attacks were halted and all efforts were directed to preparing a blow set for 4 April.

As early as 31 March General Erich Ludendorff had concluded that pressure on Amiens north of the Somme promised little, and shifted the main effort south of the river. The right wing of General Oskar von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army was to strike west of Moreuil and push the French back behind the river Noye, while General Georg von der Marwitz’s Second Army was to advance on Amiens along the Avre valley and the Somme. The objective for the day was a line from Grivesnes through the area of Ailly-sur-Noye and the wood near Gentelles to Blangy-Tronville, about 8 km from Amiens. From there heavy long-range guns could shell the station and the railway bridges in the city. According to the British official history, based on German regimental histories, 17 divisions were used in the attack, six of them fresh: twelve on a front of about 14 km against the French and five on a front of about 10 km against the British. The French official history at the time estimated the forces attacking the French at sixteen divisions, and French contemporary accounts spoke of fifteen, seven of them fresh.

On the Allied side much had changed in those days. On 26 March, at the conference at Doullens, General Ferdinand Foch was charged with co-ordinating the operations of the British and French armies, and on 3 April at Beauvais he was entrusted with the strategic direction of operations. Since Gough’s dismissal the British Fifth Army had been commanded by General Henry Rawlinson. On 2 April it was renamed the Fourth Army, and on the night of 1/2 April it passed from the orders of the French General Émile Fayolle back under the command of Field Marshal Douglas Haig. On Foch’s orders the French took over, on 1–3 April, the front from Moreuil up to and including the village of Hangard. The sector between Hangard and the Somme remained with General Herbert Watts’s XIX Corps. From Hangard to the railway it was held by the 18th Division; further on, between the railway and the Roman road from Amiens to Saint-Quentin, by the 35th Battalion of the 9th Australian Brigade; and from the road to the Somme by the 14th Division. Both British divisions had suffered heavily in the fighting since 21 March and had received fresh recruits who had not even been absorbed, let alone trained. On three successive nights the 14th Division changed sectors, and it took up its final positions on the night of 3/4 April without having seen them by daylight.

The 9th Australian Brigade of General Charles Rosenthal, from General John Monash’s 3rd Australian Division, had arrived from Flanders at the end of March to close the gap between the British and General Marie-Eugène Debeney’s French First Army. It numbered about 2,250 men in the line. Because Rosenthal had his headquarters far from the town and shells constantly cut the telephone lines, he placed all units in Villers-Bretonneux under the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Goddard, commander of the 35th Battalion. Behind the front stood in reserve the 24th Division, the 3rd Cavalry Division and the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, with the 2nd Cavalry Division near Amiens. In the French sector, from Montdidier to Hangard, Debeney had seven divisions in the line and eight more nearby, with 580 field guns and 878 heavy guns.

Course

Morning. On the night of 3/4 April heavy rain fell, and in the morning fog settled. Later it rained all day. The battlefield turned to mud, rifles clogged so that they could not be fired, and aircraft hardly flew. Prisoners taken on 3 April had foretold the attack, so the hurricane bombardment came as no surprise. According to the British official history it began at about 5.15 a.m., according to Bean at about 5.30 a.m., and it fell not only on the front line but also on the batteries, which the Germans drenched mainly with gas shells, and on the villages in the rear. The infantry went forward at about 6.30 a.m. The French official history states that the bombardment began at 4 a.m. and the attack at 7.30 a.m., but British records confirm the German regimental histories.

In front of the Australian 35th Battalion, the fresh 9th Bavarian Reserve Division advanced from Marcelcave and Warfusée (Lamotte-Warfusée). Three times it tried to attack and three times it was stopped by artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire, not much beyond its starting positions. North of the Roman road, however, Germans of the 228th Division and the 4th Guard Division broke into the line of the tired 14th Division. Its 41st Brigade fell back in disorder and at about 10 a.m. halted on a ridge west of the wood near Vaire, nearly 3 km to the rear. The neighbouring 42nd Brigade, attacked in front, on its exposed flank and from the rear, also had to withdraw. Its commander, General George Forster, not wishing to cause alarm by withdrawing his headquarters too early, stayed in Le Hamel to the end, was taken prisoner at about noon and was killed shortly afterwards by a stray bullet. The Germans then turned on the flank of the 35th Battalion, which fell back fighting to a position about 1.5 km east of Villers-Bretonneux, while the 33rd Battalion extended its line. The gap between the divisions was plugged by three regiments of the 6th Cavalry Brigade, used as infantry.

North of the Roman road the new line held until evening. All further attempts to attack were stopped mainly by artillery. The British batteries kept firing although the Germans came within 1.5 km of them, and several guns of the 16th Division were run up onto the ridge, from where they fired over open sights. At 2 p.m. the commander of the British Third Army, General Julian Byng, sent across the Somme two battalions of General Harold Elliott’s 15th Australian Brigade, and the Third Army’s artillery on the north bank of the river shelled the attackers all day. In the south the German 25th Division did not attack in the Luce valley at all, because it was to wait until the 19th Division had taken the hill north of Hangard. That attack collapsed under British artillery fire.

On the Avre. The Germans gained most ground in the French sector. On the front from Sauvillers to the wood near Moreuil, held by the French XXXVI Corps with only two divisions in the line, the 163rd Infantry Division and the 2nd Dismounted Cavalry Division, five fresh German divisions attacked. They pushed the French back more than 3 km, west of the Avre, and the neighbouring divisions, the 166th on the right and the 29th on the left, had to conform to this retreat. The Germans took the villages of Mailly-Raineval, Morisel and Castel, the Bois de l’Arrière-Cour and part of the Bois Sénécat. A deep dent formed in the French front in the Avre basin, but further advance was stopped by counter-attacks of the reserves and by reinforcements arriving from the 59th and 17th Divisions. The German historian Georg Goes admitted that the attack, “which had begun so well, was broken and, despite all valour, could no longer be set in motion”. The French 415th Infantry Regiment, withdrawn from the line for rest on the night of 3/4 April, saw the Germans in front of its reserve trenches at about 10 a.m. and, together with other units, beat off all attacks that day.

Afternoon: Villers-Bretonneux. At about 4 p.m., after an hour-long hurricane bombardment, the Guard Ersatz Division and the 9th Bavarian Reserve Division struck from the south-east, in the rain, towards Cachy and Villers-Bretonneux, against the 18th Division. Its 55th Brigade, whose flank was already bent back and whose rifles were clogged with mud, was driven from its positions. The Germans entered Lancer Wood and outflanked the 7th Battalion, Royal West Kent, which barely escaped encirclement. A counter-attack by the 8th Battalion, Royal Berkshire, held them for a moment, but after heavy losses both battalions fell back more than 1.5 km, to the road from Villers-Bretonneux to Hangard Wood. The commanding officer of the Berkshires, Lieutenant-Colonel Dewing, was killed. The 53rd and 54th Brigades halted on the new line, and the right wing of the 54th Brigade kept touch with the French at Hangard. The shattered 55th Brigade, however, fell back further, and a wide gap opened between it and the Australians. The exposed 35th Battalion, after trying to close it, withdrew to Villers-Bretonneux, drawing part of the 33rd Battalion with it. According to the British official history, the road to the town from the south-east seemed open. On the edge of the town five Canadian motor machine-gun batteries with six armoured cars took up positions, sent by army headquarters with orders to defend Villers-Bretonneux to the last.

At about 5 p.m. the Germans had almost reached the road from Démuin to Villers-Bretonneux, and the artillery south of the town was withdrawing. The last battery was fired on from about 400 yards (under 400 metres) as it drove off. Goddard’s headquarters received word that it was now the most advanced post of the defence. Goddard turned to Lieutenant-Colonel John Milne, commander of the 36th Battalion, who was waiting in a small valley south of the town: “Colonel, you must counter-attack at once.” At about 5.45 p.m. the 36th Battalion went forward south of the railway. On the left flank, north of the line, went Captain Sayers’s reserve company of the 35th Battalion, led straight out of the town’s cellars. On the right flank the 7th Battalion, the Queen’s, was led in person by the commander of the 55th Brigade, General Wood, and companies of the London 6th Battalion advanced in the second line. The Australians moved quickly in one long line under heavy fire from the orchards and buildings of a farm beside the monument to those who fell in the battle of 1870, hence named Monument Farm. They suffered heavy losses, but the Germans, outflanked, began to flee. According to the British official history, these few fresh troops, “thrown in at exactly the right moment”, drove back the attackers with great dash. A squadron of the 17th Lancers covered the left flank, a Canadian machine-gun battery silenced the German machine guns, and the 34th Battalion plugged the last gap. By about 7 p.m. the line east of Villers-Bretonneux was secure again. A German study admits that, in the face of strong counter-attacks, both German divisions lost what they had gained in the afternoon.

Night. During the night the 3rd Cavalry Division, reinforced by the 15th Australian Brigade, moved into the altered line along the Somme, and the 5th Australian Brigade arrived from GHQ reserve. At one in the morning on the night of 4/5 April, in complete darkness, two battalions of the 9th Brigade silently advanced 200–300 metres to regain a trench lost in the afternoon and a better field of fire. The German order to continue the attack on 5 April on both banks of the Somme was carried out only in part. The attacks at Villers-Bretonneux and Hangard collapsed, and the French counter-attacks on the Avre were also unsuccessful. On the evening of 5 April Ludendorff halted the offensive.

Losses

The losses of the battle as a whole cannot be isolated, because most units on both sides had been fighting for many days. According to Bean, the 9th Australian Brigade lost 30 officers and 635 other ranks in the fighting of 4 and 5 April, nearly a third of its strength. The 14th and 18th Divisions suffered heavy losses. The French 415th Infantry Regiment, in nine days of fighting near Moreuil, including 4 April, lost 73 killed, 458 wounded and 107 missing. On the German side Bean found full figures only for the two regiments that took Le Hamel: the 5th Guard Grenadier Regiment lost 278 men and the 5th Foot Guards Regiment 220. The British and Australians judged that the fire of their artillery and machine guns had inflicted very heavy losses on the attackers, who often advanced in close formation.

Significance

4 April was the last attempt to break through on the road to Amiens during Operation Michael. Along the whole front the Germans pushed the Allies back 2–3 km, but took neither Villers-Bretonneux nor a line from which they could effectively shell Amiens. The German Crown Prince Wilhelm reported that the enemy could no longer be pushed back behind the Noye and that the only gain was a slight widening of the bridgehead over the Avre. Even that proved troublesome, because almost all the artillery had been moved to the west bank and ammunition could be brought up to it only with the greatest difficulty. General Hermann von Kuhl later wrote that the end of the fighting left the German troops, “especially on the Avre, in very unfavourable positions, which led to an extraordinary bleeding”. Ludendorff himself considered that the battle ended on 4 April.

For the Australians the defence of Villers-Bretonneux became one of the important chapters of their war. Bean credited the averting of the danger above all to the 3rd Cavalry Division and the 9th Australian Brigade, while the British commander of the 6th London Battalion wrote that the greatest credit was due to the commander of the 36th Battalion, who had organised and led the counter-attack. Milne was killed eight days later by a shell that hit his headquarters. The battle also hastened a change in this sector: from 6 April the Fourth Army’s front south of the Somme was held almost exclusively by Australian units. Villers-Bretonneux nevertheless remained the most advanced point of the defence of Amiens, and the Germans, focused from 9 April on the offensive in Flanders, tried once more to take it at the end of the month.