Battle of the Scarpe (1918)

The Battle of the Scarpe in 1918 extended the Allies’ August offensive northwards, to the front of General Henry Horne’s British First Army at Arras. A few days after the victory at Amiens, General Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps returned to its old positions east of the town. At 3 a.m. on 26 August it attacked on both sides of the road from Arras to Cambrai, and north of the River Scarpe it was joined by the Scottish 51st (Highland) Division. That same morning the Canadians retook the hill with the village of Monchy-le-Preux, captured with such difficulty in April 1917 and lost in March 1918. Over the next three days they ground their way into successive German lines among the old trenches of 1917–1918, and on 28 August they broke through the Fresnes–Rouvroy position along a considerable length. They paid for it with heavy losses. On 30 August the battle ended, and the Canadian Corps now faced the strongest German position in the area, the Drocourt–Quéant line.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of the Scarpe, 1918” and the dates 26–30 August were assigned after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. The battle opens the group of the “Second Battles of Arras 1918”, which also includes the Battle of the Drocourt–Quéant Line (2–3 September). In the list of Canadian battle honours it carries the addition “Capture of Monchy-le-Preux”. It should not be confused with the three Battles of the Scarpe of 1917, fought over the same ground: the first (9–14 April), the second (23–24 April) and the third (3–4 May).

The main sources for this page are the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume IV) and the Canadian official history (G. W. L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919). Under the same dates Edmonds also describes the fighting of the neighbouring XVII Corps of General Charles Fergusson, the left wing of the Third Army, which advanced together with the Canadians south-eastwards along the Hindenburg Line. According to Edmonds, the same committee ruled that the Battle of Albert ended on 23 August, and the fighting of 24 and 25 August received no name at all. For the committee, the Battle of the Scarpe was therefore a further, separate stage of the offensive.

Background

On 8 August the British Fourth Army and the French First Army broke through the front at Amiens, and the Canadian Corps was one of the Fourth Army’s two main battering rams. When the attack began to bog down, Field Marshal Douglas Haig and Ferdinand Foch decided not to keep striking at the same place but to widen the offensive onto the flanks. On 21 August General Julian Byng’s Third Army attacked north of the Ancre, opening the Battle of Albert. Haig was convinced that the Germans were weakening and ordered his army commanders to act boldly: units were to go straight for their objectives, and reserves were to be committed wherever the attack was making progress.

As early as 15 August British General Headquarters had instructed Horne to prepare an attack on Orange Hill and Monchy-le-Preux, or a pursuit should the Germans fall back. The Canadians were brought up from Amiens: on the night of 19/20 August the 2nd Canadian Division set off north by bus and rail, and the 3rd a day later. On the nights of 22/23 and 23/24 August the Canadian Corps took over from XVII Corps the sector from Neuville-Vitasse to the Scarpe, while the 1st and 4th Canadian Divisions were still on their way (they arrived on 27 and 29 August). Currie was also given command of the 51st Division, which stood north of the river. On 24 August General Headquarters issued its order: the Third Army was to push on eastwards, and the First Army was to break through the Drocourt–Quéant line and wheel south-east, into the rear of the Germans fighting Byng.

The task was difficult. The ground east of Arras consists of the north-eastern slopes of the Artois hills, cut by the valleys of the Scarpe, the Cojeul and the Sensée. The area was dominated by three heights in German hands: Chapel Hill by the Cambrai road, the long ridge of Orange Hill running towards the Scarpe, and behind them the hill with the ruins of Monchy-le-Preux. The ground was covered by a tangle of trenches from the battles of 1917 and from March 1918, which the Germans had skilfully rebuilt. Behind the old German front line, some three kilometres east of Monchy, ran the Fresnes–Rouvroy line, the southward extension across the Scarpe of the position near Lens. A kilometre and a half further on lay the Drocourt–Quéant line, the northern extension of the Hindenburg Line, built to bar the Allies’ way to the Douai plain, and further still the unfinished Canal du Nord. For the Germans the positions at Monchy were the pivot of any withdrawal south of the Scarpe. Nicholson writes that, apart from the hour of attack, surprise was out of the question here: the Canadians faced a succession of frontal, attritional assaults on well-prepared lines.

On the German side stood the Seventeenth Army of General Otto von Below. Anticipating an extension of the attack, the Germans had concentrated three divisions on both sides of the Scarpe: the 48th Reserve north of the river, the 214th from the river to the Cambrai road and the 39th at Neuville-Vitasse. The last of these had already given up Neuville-Vitasse on 24 August without a prolonged defence, according to German sources because the arrival of the Canadians, “the best British troops”, had been detected.

Course of the battle

26 August. Currie moved the hour of attack, originally set for dawn, to 3 a.m. to mislead the enemy. It rained during the night. Under cover of a barrage from fourteen field and nine heavy artillery brigades, General Henry Burstall’s 2nd Canadian Division and General Louis Lipsett’s 3rd Canadian Division crossed the German forward zone in the dark. Shortly after six the 20th Battalion took Chapel Hill. The 3rd Division’s 8th Brigade, made up of battalions of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, outflanked Orange Hill along the river, took it from the north and struck Monchy-le-Preux from the north and west. At 7.40 a.m. the village was in Canadian hands. In the afternoon the 2nd Division took Guémappe and the ruined tower on the ridge near Wancourt, although its attack on the ridge beyond the Cojeul valley was halted by uncut wire. North of the Scarpe the 51st Division advanced to Rœux and the western slopes of Greenland Hill. To the right of the Canadians the 52nd Division of XVII Corps broke into the flank of the Hindenburg Line and took the hill near Hénin. Later two regiments of the German 35th Division, brought up from the Drocourt–Quéant line, counter-attacked from the Bois du Vert and Jigsaw Wood to retake Monchy. They were broken up, but the Canadians advanced no further. For that day Lieutenant Charles Rutherford of the 5th Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles, received the Victoria Cross: single-handed he took several dozen Germans prisoner and silenced several machine-gun nests.

27 August. It poured during the night, and on the slippery ground it was hard to assemble the units for the attack. The 3rd Division moved off at 4.55 a.m. Its 9th Brigade cleared the Bois du Vert and Bois du Sart, but fire from Jigsaw Wood and Artillery Hill stopped it short of Boiry-Notre-Dame. The defence here was held by the newly arrived German 35th Division. The 2nd Division, held up by a late brigade, did not start until ten. It took Vis-en-Artois and Chérisy without much difficulty and after heavy fighting seized bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the Sensée, where it ran into the approaching Württemberg 26th Reserve Division. The Scots of the 51st Division got onto Greenland Hill, but a counter-attack pushed them back. Edmonds judges that of all the troops of the Third and First Armies fighting that day, the Canadian Corps had the most successful day. Stubborn resistance, however, upset Currie’s plan, which was to commit only one brigade from each division to battle each day, so that the divisions could last three days in the line. The relief of both exhausted divisions, planned for the evening of 27 August, was postponed, and they themselves were ordered to break through the Fresnes–Rouvroy line the next day.

28 August. The day was warm and sunny, and the fighting, as Nicholson writes, “extremely bitter”. Lipsett put all three brigades of the 3rd Division side by side for the assault and decided to smother the German machine-gun nests with an enormous concentration of artillery. In the morning his left wing took Pelves on the Scarpe. At eleven the 9th Brigade, supported by the whole divisional artillery, broke through the Fresnes–Rouvroy line between Boiry and the Cojeul and took Boiry-Notre-Dame and Artillery Hill. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the 42nd Battalion drove the Württembergers out of Jigsaw Wood, and the 8th Brigade took the ridge between the Cojeul and the Sensée. The 2nd Division, exhausted by two days of fighting and by more than a week without sleep, attacked towards Cagnicourt at 12.30 p.m. Its men took only a sliver of the German line, because they were stopped by uncut wire and dense machine-gun fire, and an evening counter-attack pushed them back almost to their starting positions. The French-speaking 22nd Battalion lost all its officers, and Major Georges Vanier, the future Governor General of Canada, who had taken command the day before, lost his right leg. Lieutenant-Colonel William Clark-Kennedy of the 24th Battalion, despite a severe wound, combined the remnants of both battalions and continued to lead them in the attack, for which he received the Victoria Cross. A German communiqué of 29 August praised the gallant defence of the Württemberg regiments on both sides of the Cambrai road. To the right of the Canadians, XVII Corps took Croisilles. On the night of 28/29 August the 2nd Canadian Division was relieved by the 1st, and the 3rd Canadian Division by the British 4th Division, placed under Currie’s command.

29–30 August. After three days of heavy fighting came smaller operations intended to provide a good starting line for the assault on the Drocourt–Quéant line. On 29 August General Raymond Brutinel’s motorised group of machine-gunners and cyclists advanced nearly a kilometre north of Boiry-Notre-Dame, and the 4th Division took Rémy and Haucourt and the rest of the trenches of the Fresnes–Rouvroy line as far as the Sensée. The 51st Division finally took Greenland Hill in the morning, and at noon passed under the command of XXII Corps. XVII Corps meanwhile occupied the ruins of Bullecourt and, briefly, Hendecourt. At 4.40 a.m. on 30 August the 1st Canadian Brigade attacked the switch line near Vis-en-Artois with converging thrusts from two sides and took the defenders by surprise. According to a German account, two battalions of the 121st Reserve Regiment ceased to exist. In the afternoon the British 4th Division crossed the marshes of the Sensée and took Éterpigny, and the 51st Division took Plouvain, abandoned by the Germans. In XVII Corps’ sector, however, a fresh German division retook Bullecourt in the morning. That same day Horne and Currie agreed that the Drocourt–Quéant line must not be attacked hastily: they had to wait until everything was ready, “and then go all out”.

Losses

According to the Canadian official history, the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions lost 254 officers and 5,547 other ranks killed, wounded and missing in the three days of fighting, 26–28 August. In that time they took more than 3,300 prisoners, 53 guns and 519 machine guns. These sources do not give in a single tally the full losses of the whole corps for 26–30 August, nor those of the 51st Division and XVII Corps. German losses are not known. Edmonds cites the regimental histories of the German 39th Division, which on 26 August lost 1,300 prisoners in the sector from Hénin to Wancourt, while one of its battalions was reduced to 76 men.

Significance

Edmonds writes that extending the offensive to the First Army’s front brought “very great success”. The attack at Arras threatened the northern flank of the German armies on the Somme, which were already falling back under British and French pressure. On 26 August the German command issued orders for the Second and Eighteenth Armies to withdraw to the line of the Somme, while the left wing of the Seventeenth Army was to fall back, giving up Bapaume. According to Edmonds, on the night of 26/27 August preparations began for a retreat which this time was no longer voluntary. Ludendorff then agreed that the armies would have to be withdrawn gradually, but regarded the Hindenburg Line as the limit beyond which there could be no retreat. The decision to retreat also covered the Lys salient, from which the Germans began to withdraw on the night of 29/30 August.

For the Canadian Corps the battle was the start of long fighting east of Arras. The Canadians gained a good starting line for the attack on the Drocourt–Quéant line, which began on 2 September and ended in its breakthrough. They paid a high price, however, because unlike at Amiens they did not have surprise on their side here and had to storm one line of trenches after another. Ahead of them still lay the Canal du Nord and Cambrai.