Battle of the Beaurevoir Line

The Battle of the Beaurevoir Line was the final act in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line by General Henry Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army. After the Battle of the St Quentin Canal one more German position still stood before the British and Australians: the reserve line which the Germans called the Hindenburg-Reserve-Stellung and the British, after the village of Beaurevoir, the Beaurevoir Line. On 3 October 1918 the Fourth Army attacked it on a front of more than ten kilometres and broke through along its whole length, but could not at once hold the hills behind it. Only in renewed attacks on 4 and 5 October did Montbrehain and Beaurevoir fall. The fight for Montbrehain on 5 October was the last battle of the Australian infantry in the war.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee distinguished the “Battle of the Beaurevoir Line” (Battle of the Beaurevoir Line), 3–5 October 1918, as one of the Battles of the Hindenburg Line. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. V) adopts the same dates and ends the battle on the evening of 5 October, although its last objective, Guisancourt Farm north of Beaurevoir, was taken only before dawn on 6 October. Field Marshal Douglas Haig did not single out this battle in his despatch, but described together “the Battle of Cambrai and the Hindenburg Line” from 27 September to 5 October. Charles Bean’s Australian official history describes the fighting at Beaurevoir and Montbrehain as the conclusion of the attack on the Hindenburg Line. Some accounts merge it with the Battle of the St Quentin Canal.

The Beaurevoir Line

The Beaurevoir Line ran some three or four kilometres behind the main position of the Hindenburg Line, from around Fonsomme and Sequehart in the south through Ramicourt and Wiancourt to Beaurevoir and on to the north. Edmonds writes that it was a position rather than a line: two rows of trenches with concrete emplacements every two or three hundred metres, protected by very dense wire, with machine-gun nests scattered in depth behind them. According to Haig, many of them were unfinished. Behind the line stretched a belt of low hills with the villages of Montbrehain and Beaurevoir, cut by ravines and sunken roads. The real resistance came not from the trenches themselves but from machine guns hidden in pits, villages and ruins. In Sequehart alone the British later found about two hundred of them.

Before the battle the Fourth Army already held a piece of this position. On 1 October the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment, of the 32nd Division broke into the Beaurevoir Line east of Joncourt and held the breach despite counter-attacks. Over the next two days the Germans counter-attacked several times and took Sequehart back from the British, but did not close the breach.

Background

When the fighting on the St Quentin Canal died down on 2 October, Rawlinson ordered an attack on the Beaurevoir Line. Prisoners stated that there were no German reserves in the rear and that civilians were being evacuated from the area east of the Le Cateau–Valenciennes line, where the next position, the Hermann Line, was being built. Haig hoped that once this last prepared position was broken he could release into open country the Cavalry Corps, which was to seize the railway junctions at Busigny and Le Cateau and strike the rear of the Germans fighting the Third and First Armies at Cambrai. The attack was also to help the right wing of the Third Army, which still stood before the St Quentin Canal and the Hindenburg Line north of Vendhuile.

Three corps lined up for the attack. On the right was General Walter Braithwaite’s IX Corps with the 46th (North Midland) Division, which had crossed the canal on 29 September, and beside it the exhausted 32nd Division. In the centre was General John Monash’s Australian Corps, which had only one division left in the line, General Charles Rosenthal’s 2nd Australian Division. The other four Australian divisions had left the front to rest, and the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, was demanding the withdrawal of the whole corps, because reinforcements from home were growing ever scarcer. On the left, General Thomas Morland’s XIII Corps with the 50th Division was to cover the attack from the north by taking Prospect Hill, Gouy and Le Catelet. The American II Corps, which had suffered heavily on 29 September, was resting in reserve.

Opposite stood General Adolph von Carlowitz’s German Second Army, of General Max von Boehn’s army group. Edmonds writes that the British identified six divisions in the line and three counter-attack divisions, among them the 2nd Guard Division, which was down to a few hundred rifles. To the right of the British, General Marie-Eugène Debeney’s French First Army was to attack, but according to the French official history it tried in vain during these days to advance north and east of Saint-Quentin.

Course of the battle

3 October. The night was dark, and towards morning a thick fog came down which lifted only at about nine. At 6.05 a.m. the infantry moved off behind a creeping barrage. In the 46th Division the 139th Brigade, with six tanks, broke into the trenches of the Beaurevoir Line and pushed on. The village of Ramicourt was taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Vann of the 1/6th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, who personally led his headquarters and one company there. About 400 prisoners were taken, and Vann, awarded the Victoria Cross for the canal crossing on 29 September, was killed soon afterwards as he left the village. One of the companies drove the Germans out of Wiancourt, which the Australians had not yet reached. By 11.30 a.m. the brigade had taken Montbrehain with more than a thousand prisoners. The 137th Brigade on its right crossed the line under fire from the concrete emplacements and came out on the slope of Mannequin Hill. The Germans seemed to be falling back in disorder, and the commander of the 46th Division asked for a cavalry brigade, but the orders reached it late and no pursuit took place.

In the afternoon the Germans struck from both sides at the salient pushed out to Montbrehain. They threw into the counter-attack the remnants of several divisions, among them a Saxon regiment hastily formed from three battalions of the newly arrived 24th Division. The brigade, with no cover on either flank, fell back to a line in front of Ramicourt, and by 3 p.m. the Germans had regained Montbrehain. They got no further, however. On the right wing the 32nd Division took Sequehart and, driven out by a counter-attack, retook it. In the evening another attack here was beaten off by rifle fire alone.

The Australians of the 5th and 7th Brigades waited in vain for the tanks, which were late after a night march across trenches and shell holes, and forced their way through the wire on their own. Between 7.15 and 7.45 a.m. the 5th Brigade took the trenches of the line, except for a stretch of about 500 metres by the road from Estrées, where the wire was impassable. That stretch was taken only at about 11.30 a.m., after half an hour’s bombardment, with 200 prisoners. By eight in the morning the 7th Brigade had occupied the line further north, and one of its battalions even reached Bellevue Farm right by Beaurevoir, but fire from the higher hills and a German counter-attack forced it back. In the evening, at 6.30, the Australians, reinforced by the 6th Brigade, attacked again and reached the ridge behind the line, but the attack on Beaurevoir was postponed. That day the 2nd Australian Division took 1,192 prisoners, 163 machine guns and 11 guns. On the left wing the 50th Division took Prospect Hill, Gouy and Le Catelet, but in the afternoon the Germans retook Le Catelet.

Bean calculates that by evening IX Corps held the Beaurevoir Line on a front of about 4.5 km, from Sequehart to Joncourt, and the Australians on a further 5.5 km. The hills behind it, however, were still in German hands.

4 October. The 46th Division’s attack on Mannequin Hill failed, because the Germans counter-attacked all day and French support on the right was limited to taking a few trenches near Chardon Vert. In the fog the Australian 6th Brigade pushed its left flank up to the buildings of Genève Farm. That night the British 25th Division came into the line before Beaurevoir; it had been re-formed after the defeat on the Aisne in May from battalions brought back from the Italian front. Its 7th Brigade broke into Ponchaux and Beaurevoir, but heavy losses forced it in the afternoon to fall back behind the railway embankment. The 50th Division finally occupied Le Catelet and the high ground near La Pannerie, closing up the Fourth Army’s left flank. Rawlinson ordered the attack to go on, so as “to give the enemy no rest and no time to reorganise”.

5 October. Rawlinson could not relieve the 2nd Australian Division before nightfall and asked Monash for one more day of fighting. Monash chose Montbrehain as the objective, as it lay on a plateau commanding the road further east. At 6.05 a.m. the 21st and 24th Battalions and the 2nd Pioneer Battalion, used as infantry, moved off behind a creeping barrage. The Mark V tanks were late, but eleven of them caught up with the infantry and did a great deal in the village streets. The Germans defended themselves stubbornly, and as many as ten different regiments were identified among the prisoners. The hardest fighting was at the quarry on the north-western edge of the village, where about a hundred Germans had several dozen machine guns. Lieutenant George Ingram of the 24th Battalion led several assaults on it and received for that day the Victoria Cross, the last awarded to an Australian on the Western Front. In the afternoon the reserve battalions joined the fight, and by 4 p.m. the whole of Montbrehain was in Australian hands. According to Edmonds they took more than 600 prisoners and 150 machine guns; according to Bean, nearly 400 prisoners.

At Beaurevoir two brigades of the 25th Division took Bellevue Farm in the morning, but had to give it up when the fog lifted, and the bombardment did not silence the machine guns in the houses and the cemetery. In the evening, at 6.40 p.m., after a fresh bombardment, the 1/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, climbed the railway embankment in front of the village even before the barrage lifted, cleared the posts behind it and entered Beaurevoir, where companies of the Worcestershire Regiment joined it. Guisancourt Farm was taken before dawn on 6 October. That day the Germans also abandoned the line of the St Quentin Canal in front of the right wing of the Third Army, whose V and IV Corps crossed the canal and occupied the abandoned trenches of the Hindenburg Line.

Casualties

According to Edmonds, in the three days of fighting twelve divisions of the Fourth Army fought twenty German ones, and from 29 September to 5 October the Fourth Army took 14,664 prisoners, including 307 officers. The official history gives no full British casualty figures for the battle alone. According to Bean, the 2nd Australian Division lost about 95 officers and 1,600 men on 2–6 October, of whom the action at Montbrehain alone cost about 30 officers and 400 men. Edmonds calculates that since 8 August the Australian Corps had taken more than 22,800 prisoners and 332 guns, losing more than 25,500 killed, wounded, missing and captured. German losses cannot be separated out.

Significance

The Battle of the Beaurevoir Line completed the breaking of the Hindenburg Line on the Fourth Army’s sector. The British came out onto ground where, according to reconnaissance, there were no more prepared defences or demolitions, and the gently rolling fields were suitable for cavalry. The capture of the hills at Beaurevoir outflanked the Germans holding the canal near Cambrai and forced them to retreat. Edmonds notes that German accounts tried to play down this defeat and did not mention the loss of the last line of the Hindenburg system at all. On 5 October Emperor Wilhelm II announced in an order to the army and navy that Germany and her allies had approached their enemies with an offer of peace.

For the Australians Montbrehain was the end of the war. On the night of 5–6 October the 2nd Division was relieved by the American 30th Division, and the whole Australian Corps went to rest far in the rear, by the English Channel, and did not return to the front before the armistice. Edmonds wrote that Mont-Saint-Quentin and Montbrehain were the finest examples of Australian methods, when a few hundred men drove the infantry of two or even three German divisions out of fortified positions. Bean considered the action at Montbrehain one of the most brilliant feats of the Australian infantry, but doubted whether it was necessary: in his view the attack was devised rather to use these troops once more before their withdrawal, and many of the 6th Brigade’s best leaders fell in it.