Battle of Villers-Bretonneux

The Battle of Villers-Bretonneux was the last German attempt to get closer to Amiens in the spring of 1918. Three weeks after the end of Operation Michael, on the morning of 24 April 1918, four divisions of the German Second Army, preceded by thirteen A7V tanks, struck two weakened British divisions in thick fog and took the small town of Villers-Bretonneux, which stood on a hill from which Amiens and its railway junction could be seen. That day, near the neighbouring village of Cachy, the first tank-versus-tank engagement in history took place. That same night two Australian brigades, supported by the British, without artillery preparation and by moonlight, went round the town from the north and from the south. By the morning of 25 April, the third anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, Villers-Bretonneux was again in Allied hands. For the Australians the battle became one of the most important places of remembrance of both world wars.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee named this fighting the “Actions of Villers-Bretonneux” (Actions of Villers-Bretonneux) and dated it 24–25 April 1918. It is a separate “action” and not part of the “First Battles of the Somme 1918”, which were closed by the fighting on the Avre and the Ancre on 4–5 April. English-language literature often speaks of the “Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux”, to distinguish it from the fighting of 4 April, when the Germans first came up to the town (Battle of the Avre). Some accounts, including the English-language Wikipedia, extend the battle to 27 April, because on 26 April an attack by the French Moroccan Division tried to recover the rest of the lost ground, and in the night of 26/27 April the Australians closed the last gap in the line. We keep to the committee’s dates and describe the fighting of 26 and 27 April as the completion of the battle. Times and figures are given after the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume II, 1937).

Background

When Erich Ludendorff broke off Operation Michael on 5 April, the front before Amiens came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres from the city. The most important point of the defence was the small plateau of Villers-Bretonneux, rising between the valleys of the Somme and the Avre. Whoever held it could observe and shell Amiens, through which ran the railway linking the British and French armies as well as the line from Amiens to Paris. The ground east of the town was flat, agricultural and firm, almost free of shell craters. By day it could not be crossed under machine-gun fire, but it was excellent for tanks.

For the next two weeks there was no quiet on this sector. The Australians and the French fought several times for the village of Hangard and Hangard Wood at the junction of the two armies, and the British complained that the French had given up the heights south of Hangard, from which the Germans could see the rear and right flank of the position at Villers-Bretonneux. The German Second Army of General Georg von der Marwitz at first planned a broad attack as far as Gentelles and the approaches to Amiens, but for lack of troops it gradually reduced and postponed it. In the end the aim was to “round off” the projecting wedge by taking Villers-Bretonneux and the plateau up to the line Fouilloy–Gentelles–Hangard. According to Second Army documents, the attack was above all meant to pin down Allied forces on this sector and draw attention away from the great battle in Flanders, where the offensive on the Lys had been under way since 9 April and an assault on Mount Kemmel was being prepared. The second aim was to get close enough for the artillery to shell the great railway stations of Amiens more effectively.

The British expected an attack. On 17 April the Germans drenched Villers-Bretonneux, Aquenne Wood and Cachy with phosgene and mustard gas shells and repeated the bombardment over the following days. The gas put 1,074 British and Australian soldiers out of action. Prisoners and deserters announced the attack, first for 17, then for 23 April, and finally said that it would begin early in the morning of 24 April, after a bombardment lasting two and a quarter hours, and that tanks would take part in it.

Forces

The sector was defended by the British III Corps of General Richard Butler, part of the Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson. On the right, from Hangard to Cachy, stood the 58th (London) Division, and in front of Villers-Bretonneux itself the 8th Division of General William Heneker, which had lost nearly 5,000 men in March and had been made up largely with eighteen-year-old recruits from England. North of the town, as far as the Somme and beyond it, stood the Australian Corps. Its 5th Division under General Talbot Hobbs kept in reserve near Aubigny the 15th Australian Brigade of General Harold Elliott, which knew the ground and had for some two weeks been preparing to counter-attack should the town be lost. In army reserve, on the north bank of the Somme, was the 13th Australian Brigade of General Thomas William Glasgow from the 4th Division, exhausted by the fighting at Dernancourt at the beginning of April. The corps also had nine heavy Mark IV tanks and seven light Whippet tanks, and four heavy tanks were at the disposal of the 8th Division in the Bois l’Abbé. On the right flank stood the French XXXI Corps of the First Army of General Marie-Eugène Debeney.

On the German side four divisions of the XIV and XI Corps were assigned to the attack: the 228th, the 4th Guards Division, the 77th Reserve Division, newly arrived from Russia, and the 208th, with three more in reserve. The Guards Ersatz Division was to attack Hangard. The attack was accompanied by three assault armoured vehicle detachments. Of the fifteen A7V tanks assigned to the operation, two broke down on the way and thirteen set off in three groups: one against Villers-Bretonneux itself, the second against the sector between the town and Cachy, the third against Cachy. It was the largest German tank attack of the whole war. The A7V was a heavy, clumsy vehicle with an armoured shell hanging low over the tracks, a 57 mm gun and six machine guns, crewed by at least eighteen men.

Course: the Germans take the town (24 April)

On 24 April at 3.45 a.m. the bombardment began, similar to that of 21 March: first gas and shells on the roads, rear areas, batteries and Amiens itself, then fire on the front line. At 6 a.m. the infantry moved off with the tanks. The fog was so thick that in places visibility did not exceed 30–40 metres, and at Villers-Bretonneux the Germans thickened it further with smoke. The tanks crossed no man’s land almost unnoticed. Wherever they appeared the front broke: they straddled the trenches and enfiladed them, and young soldiers without anti-tank weapons surrendered in many places. One officer fired his revolver in vain at the back of a tank. Where the German infantry advanced without tanks it was repulsed, but the flanks had to fall back behind the centre. Reduced to 140 men, the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment defended the railway station until 9 a.m., and then the remnants of the 23rd Brigade withdrew to the reserve line. Behind the tanks came soldiers with flamethrowers. By about 8.30 a.m. reliable news had reached headquarters that Villers-Bretonneux was in German hands. The 4th Guards Division also entered Aquenne Wood west of the town, and farther south the Germans took Hangard in the evening. A pocket about six kilometres wide and one and a half deep opened in the Allied line. The farthest the Germans got was the road from Cachy to Fouilloy, running in a ravine between Aquenne Wood and the Bois l’Abbé. There they were stopped by a counter-attack of the 1st Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters. According to the British official history, this was the point closest to Amiens that the Germans reached in 1918, about 13 kilometres from the city.

At about 9.30 a.m. three British Mark IV tanks of the 1st Tank Battalion, one “male” with two 6-pounder guns and two “females” armed only with machine guns, sent to defend the line in front of Cachy, ran into a German tank. It was the A7V Nixe of Lieutenant Wilhelm Biltz. Nixe’s shells pierced the armour of both “females”, which had to withdraw. Then the “male” of Lieutenant Frank Mitchell, although one of its guns was already damaged, hit the German tank several times. Nixe heeled over, the crew abandoned the vehicle and some of them were killed by British fire. Mitchell later wrote that he had fought three German tanks at once, but research by Ralf Raths of the German Tank Museum in Munster indicates that the German tanks did not move together and that Mitchell in fact engaged only one. Two more A7Vs appeared: the crew of one fled, the other tried to reach Cachy, but the fire of six machine guns forced its men to surrender. Mitchell’s tank was finally immobilised by German artillery, and the crew made their way into a British trench.

At about 10.20 a.m. seven Whippets of the 3rd Tank Battalion were ordered to clear the ground in front of Cachy. An airman dropped a message that two battalions of German infantry were resting in a dip in the ground. The light tanks caught soldiers of the 77th Reserve Division in the open and drove through them in line, first southwards and then back northwards. By British estimates they killed or wounded at least four hundred men, and the rest scattered. One Whippet was destroyed by artillery and its whole three-man crew was killed. Three others were damaged. The German attack on Cachy was not renewed.

Course: the night counter-attack (24/25 April)

Rawlinson at once decided that the town had to be retaken before the Germans could dig in there. General Hobbs twice proposed using the 15th Australian Brigade, but III Corps headquarters at first refused, believing that the 8th Division could manage on its own. A British counter-attack by day across the open plateau had no chance, and the French General Debeney agreed to co-operate only the following day. Rawlinson therefore sent the 13th Australian Brigade from the north bank of the Somme, and at 3.10 p.m. placed the 5th Australian Division under III Corps. Rawlinson was also urged on by General Ferdinand Foch, since 14 April commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in France, who wrote that Villers-Bretonneux, “dominating Amiens”, could not be allowed to go unrecovered at once. Field Marshal Douglas Haig, for his part, asked Foch to order Debeney to co-operate.

The plan of Heneker, who commanded the whole operation, provided for a night attack by two brigades, which were to bypass Villers-Bretonneux on both sides and meet east of it, cutting off the town’s garrison. Elliott’s 15th Brigade was to go north of the town, Glasgow’s 13th Brigade south of it, with the British 54th Brigade beside it. Two British battalions, the 2nd Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment and the 22nd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, were then to clear the streets themselves. There was no preliminary bombardment and no creeping barrage. The artillery was only to shell the town and its surroundings for an hour and then lift its fire beyond the objective line. Glasgow refused to attack at 8 p.m., while it was still light. According to Australian sources he said: “If it was God Almighty who gave the order, we couldn’t do it in daylight.” The hour of attack was moved to 10 p.m.

The 13th Brigade moved off at 10.10 p.m., with the 51st and 52nd Battalions in the first line. It was held up by the wire of the line in front of Cachy, and German machine guns fired from Aquenne Wood into its left flank. The platoon of Lieutenant Clifford Sadlier of the 51st Battalion went into the wood and took them one after another; Sadlier, wounded twice, received the Victoria Cross for it. The brigade reached the road from Hangard Wood to Villers-Bretonneux, but not its objective, because heavy fire came from the railway embankment and from the monument on the hill south-east of the town. The 15th Brigade set off almost two hours late, at about midnight, because the battalion commanders were late back from their briefing, and the units lost their way in the dark and skirted hollows full of gas. When the German outposts began to fire, the officer leading the 59th Battalion shouted “Charge!” and the whole line, cheering, rushed forward in a bayonet charge, guided by the light of burning houses and German flares. The Australians passed the northern edges of the town, from which the machine guns fired too high, and at about 1.30 a.m. reached the road to Hamel, losing only about 150 men.

The two brigades almost encircled Villers-Bretonneux. Between them, however, a gap about 1.5 kilometres wide remained, and part of the German garrison escaped through it along the railway cutting. The British battalions that were to clear the town ran into Germans fully on the alert and failed to get inside.

Course: the town recovered (25–27 April)

At dawn on 25 April, again in fog, the remnants of the British 23rd Brigade, now only 440 men strong, with three tanks drove the Germans out of Aquenne Wood, taking 70 prisoners and 25 machine guns. Two companies of the Australian 57th Battalion and the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment entered Villers-Bretonneux from the north, and the Durham battalion from the west. They met in the middle of the town, taking 472 prisoners and 60 machine guns. The 2nd Northamptons cleared the area around the station. Many of the prisoners taken in the town were suffering from their own side’s gas. The Germans ordered a counter-attack for the morning, but such confusion reigned in their ranks that no one knew where their own units were, and the counter-attack was postponed several times until it was called off. In the night of 25/26 April the Australians closed the gap between the brigades.

On 26 April at 5.15 a.m. the French Moroccan Division, in which Zouaves, the Foreign Legion and colonial tirailleurs fought, attacked south of the town with two British battalions and tanks, towards Hangard Wood and the monument. The British official history judged this attack a failure: the Moroccans ran into the Germans closer than they had thought, lost their covering fire and, according to reports, about 3,500 men, and Hangard remained in German hands. Some later historians, such as Romain Fathi, stress, however, that the attack moved the line eastwards and relieved the Australian battalions, and that its importance was passed over in Australian memory. In the night of 26/27 April the Australian 60th Battalion straightened the last stretch of the front, and III Corps handed over its sector to the French and the Australians.

Losses

The exact losses of the battle itself cannot be given. According to the British official history, the three divisions of III Corps (the 8th, 18th and 58th) lost 9,529 men from 5 to 27 April, including gas casualties, and the Australian units (the 5th Division with its gas casualties and the 13th Brigade) about 2,500. The Moroccan Division lost about 3,500 men on 26 April. The Germans claimed to have taken 2,400 prisoners on 24 April. German losses as a whole are not known. The 77th Reserve Division alone lost 2,945 men, and some accounts estimate total German losses at about 10,000. The British and Australians took several hundred prisoners in the town itself. The Germans lost three tanks on the battlefield. Nixe was blown up during the night by German sappers. The overturned Elfriede was dragged out of no man’s land in May by the French and British, and Mephisto, which had got stuck in a crater, was captured by the Australians only in July. Taken to Brisbane as a trophy, it is the only surviving A7V and is kept in the Queensland Museum.

Significance

Militarily, the battle ended the German attempts to take Amiens. The Germans achieved none of their aims: they did not take the plateau, did not draw Allied reserves away from Flanders and got no closer to the railway junction. The front at Villers-Bretonneux remained in Allied hands until the end of the war, and it was from here that on 8 August 1918 the Australians and Canadians set off into the Battle of Amiens, which opened the final Allied offensive. Rawlinson wrote that the Australian counter-attack had succeeded beyond his expectations, and General John Monash later called it the turning point of the war. According to the Australian official historian Charles Bean, Foch praised the “altogether astonishing valour” of the Australians.

The battle also entered the history of armoured warfare. The clash at Cachy was the first duel of tank against tank, and the success of the Whippets showed what fast tanks could achieve in open country. The German tanks helped to take the town, but the few, slow and unreliable A7Vs could not change the position of Germany, which built only twenty of them, against thousands of British and French tanks.

The most lasting significance of Villers-Bretonneux, however, is for Australia. The recapture of the town exactly on the third anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, on Anzac Day, made it a symbol. Elliott had himself landed at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 and regarded the night counter-attack as the most important fight of his life. The school in the ruined town was rebuilt after the war with donations from schoolchildren in the state of Victoria, and above the blackboards in the classrooms the words N’oublions jamais l’Australie (“Let us never forget Australia”) were put up. Near the town, in 1938, King George VI unveiled the Australian National Memorial, commemorating almost 11,000 Australians killed in France who have no known grave. Since 2008 an Anzac Day dawn service has been held there every year on 25 April.