Nivelle Offensive

The Nivelle Offensive was the great French spring offensive of 1917, on which France staked everything after the bloody year of 1916. General Robert Nivelle, who in December 1916 had replaced Joffre at the head of the French armies, promised the government and the Allies that with the method tested in the autumn at Verdun he would break the German front within 24, at most 48 hours, and end trench warfare. On 16 April 1917 three French armies attacked the Chemin des Dames ridge above the Aisne and the plain north of Reims, and the next day a fourth attacked the Moronvilliers hills in Champagne. The French took a large part of the ridge, almost all the hills and tens of thousands of prisoners, but there was no breakthrough, and from the first day the losses exceeded all expectations. The offensive that was to decide the war turned into a struggle for limited objectives, and on 9 May it was halted. A few days later Nivelle lost his command, and a wave of mutinies swept through the French army.

Name and dates

The French speak of the “Nivelle offensive”, the “offensive of 16 April” or, after the ridge on which the heaviest fighting took place, the Battle of the Chemin des Dames. On our site the offensive consists of two battles: the Second Battle of the Aisne, the main blow between Soissons and Reims, named in reference to the First Battle of the Aisne of 1914, and the Third Battle of Champagne, the subsidiary attack on the Moronvilliers hills east of Reims.

We adopt the dates 16 April – 9 May 1917, as English Wikipedia and many historians do. The main blow began on 16 April, and on 8–9 May, after the last great attacks on the Chemin des Dames, the offensive was halted. The British chronology of the war, on which our timeline is based, says that the French offensive “was stopped” as early as 20 April: on that day the attempt to break through was indeed abandoned, but the fighting went on. In the hills of Champagne the French fought on until 20 May, when they took Mont Cornillet, and we describe that fighting on the page of the Third Battle of Champagne. Some French authors extend the Battle of the Chemin des Dames as far as October 1917, when the French took Fort La Malmaison and drove the Germans off the whole ridge. That, however, was a different operation, carried out by Nivelle’s successor on different principles.

In a broader sense the Nivelle Offensive also included the preliminary attacks north of the Oise. The most important of them was the Battle of Arras, in which from 9 April three British armies were to draw German reserves onto themselves before the blow on the Aisne. English Wikipedia counts it as the British part of the Nivelle Offensive. We describe it as a separate battle, not part of this page: it began a week earlier, it was fought by British armies under Haig’s command, and when the French offensive failed it went on until mid-May for reasons of its own.

Background

The Allies drew up their plan for 1917 in November 1916 at Chantilly: in the spring the British and French were to resume their attacks on both sides of the old battlefield of the Somme. Nivelle changed the spirit of that plan. Instead of attrition, the British at Arras and the French Northern Army Group of General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey between the Somme and the Oise were first to pin down the German reserves. The main blow was then to be struck on the Aisne by the newly formed Reserve Army Group (GAR) of General Alfred Micheler: two armies, the Fifth and Sixth, were to take the whole system of German fortifications, up to the artillery positions, in a single violent assault, and a third, the Tenth, was to pass through the breach. According to the British official history the aim was a general advance northwards, in the direction from Craonne to Guise, with the left wing heading for Laon and Saint-Quentin. The Centre Army Group of General Philippe Pétain was to make a subsidiary attack east of Reims. If the breakthrough failed, the offensive was to be broken off.

Nivelle’s self-assurance, eloquence and fluent English won over the politicians. The British prime minister David Lloyd George, who did not trust his own commander-in-chief, backed at the Calais conference a plan to subordinate the British army to the Frenchman. It ended in a compromise, clarified in London: for the duration of the offensive Field Marshal Douglas Haig was to follow Nivelle’s general directions, but kept command of his own armies.

In the spring, however, circumstances began to turn against the French. In March the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, shortened their front and gained a dozen or more reserve divisions, and the sector where the Northern Army Group was to attack ceased to exist. Revolution broke out in Russia, removing the hope of a simultaneous Russian attack. In Paris the Briand government fell, and in the Ribot cabinet the minister of war was Paul Painlevé, distrustful of Nivelle from the start. The commanders who were to carry out the plan also had doubts. Micheler wrote on 22 March that the Germans had built more positions, had more reserves and were expecting an attack. At the council of war at Compiègne on 6 April, the day on which the United States declared war on Germany, Micheler would not vouch for a breakthrough, and Pétain argued for an attack with limited objectives. Nivelle offered his resignation, but the ministers did not accept it, judging a change of commander on the eve of the offensive even more dangerous. President Raymond Poincaré summed up that they must attack and, if the front could not be broken, break off the attack.

The Germans, meanwhile, knew perfectly well what was coming. The French preparations could not be hidden, and on 4 April near Sapigneul the attack plan of one of the Fifth Army’s battalions fell into their hands. The front from the Oise to the Argonne belonged to the army group of Crown Prince Wilhelm. The Chemin des Dames was defended by the Seventh Army of General Max von Boehn, the sector from the Aisne to Champagne was taken over just before the battle by the First Army of General Fritz von Below, and further east stood the Third Army of General Karl von Einem. On the threatened front the Germans had, according to the British official history, 21 divisions in the front line and 17 in reserve, and many of them were ready to counter-attack under the new principles of elastic defence. The French massed about 53 infantry divisions on the Aisne and in Champagne and, according to various counts, between 5,000 and 7,000 guns. The preparatory bombardment went on from the beginning of April, but rain, snow and low cloud hampered observation, and many German wire entanglements and machine-gun nests survived.

Preliminary attacks (9–15 April)

The British went first, on 9 April at Arras. The first day was one of the greatest successes of the British army in this war: the Canadians took almost all of Vimy Ridge, and on the Scarpe the British advanced more than five kilometres. After a few days, however, the Germans closed the gap with fresh divisions. The attack at Arras drew in part of the German reserves, but not enough to decide the fate of the blow on the Aisne.

The French Northern Army Group fared worse. After the German withdrawal, instead of a great attack, it was to make only a local assault on the Hindenburg Line at Saint-Quentin, supported by the artillery of the neighbouring British Fourth Army. After several days of fighting for the outposts, the Third Army of General Georges Humbert attacked on 13 April, but made almost no progress. The main blow on the Aisne, originally set for 12 April, was postponed several times because of the weather. On 13 April it was finally settled that the Reserve Army Group would attack on the 16th, and the Fourth Army in Champagne on 17 April.

The Chemin des Dames, 16 April

On 16 April at six in the morning the infantry of the Fifth and Sixth Armies left their trenches on a front about 40 kilometres long, from Laffaux near Soissons to Courcy near Reims. Behind a creeping barrage it was to cross the first and second German positions in a few hours, descend that same day into the valley of the Ailette behind the ridge, and in the following days release the cavalry onto the plain around Laon. Within the first hour it was clear that the artillery preparation had not been enough. Machine guns hidden in concrete shelters, on reverse slopes and in the mouths of underground quarries swept the French climbing uphill, and from caves linked by tunnels to the front line the Germans emerged in the rear of the attackers. Things went worst in the centre, near Hurtebise farm, where II Colonial Corps, with battalions of Senegalese tirailleurs, advanced a few hundred metres at most. On the western wing, near Laffaux, the French broke into the German fortifications by barely a few hundred metres.

The Fifth Army of General Olivier Mazel got furthest, on the flat ground north of the Aisne, where it advanced about 4 kilometres. Here, for the first time in the history of the French army, tanks went into battle: heavy, slow Schneider CA1s. They came too late, however, the infantry could not keep up with them, and the German artillery destroyed them one after another. Near Berry-au-Bac the commander of one of the groups, Commandant Louis Bossut, was killed. According to French figures, of the roughly 130 tanks that went into action, 57 were destroyed. On the Fifth Army’s right wing the Russian 1st Brigade of the expeditionary force in France took the village of Courcy. In the evening, as snow began to fall, the French in most places held only the first line of German trenches and nowhere had reached the objectives set for 9.30 a.m. They had taken more than 10,000 prisoners, but the losses were very heavy, and the overwhelmed medical services could not keep up with evacuating the wounded.

The hills of Champagne and the end of hopes for a breakthrough (17–20 April)

On 17 April at 4.45 a.m., in darkness and a blizzard, the Fourth Army of General François Anthoine, from Pétain’s army group, went into the attack east of Reims. Its objective was the Moronvilliers massif, a chain of chalk hills from which the Germans had overlooked the whole plain of Champagne since 1914. That day the Zouaves took Mont Sans Nom, and in the following days the French broke onto Mont Haut, Le Téton and most of the other summits. On Mont Cornillet, however, the German garrison of a tunnel dug under the hill beat off every assault, and on 19 April the Germans threw three divisions into a counter-attack, which the French artillery broke up with fire directed from the captured summits.

On the Aisne, Nivelle ordered the Fifth Army to press on to the north-east, but it achieved little more. The most spectacular success came instead from the Sixth Army of General Charles Mangin, which kept pressing without pause, after dark as well. Threatened from two sides, the Germans on 17–18 April abandoned the whole salient of the front between Braye, Condé-sur-Aisne and Laffaux and fell back to the Hindenburg Line, leaving behind many guns and huge stocks of ammunition. By 20 April, according to the British official history, the French had taken more than 20,000 prisoners and 147 guns, freed the railway from Soissons to Reims and driven the Germans out of the Aisne valley west of the Oise–Aisne canal. On the Chemin des Dames ridge, however, they held only part of the German positions, and at Craonne and on the Ailette the Germans still had the upper hand. There was no breakthrough, and around 20 April the full-scale attack was halted.

In Paris this meant defeat. Nivelle had promised a decision, and the result was measured against that promise. The British official history writes that disillusionment, horror and anger in political circles called for a scapegoat, and from then on the commander-in-chief was “bound hand and foot”: he could not even have an operation studied without being cross-questioned or forbidden by the government. The British, who were fighting at Arras chiefly to support the French, pressed for the offensive to continue. On 20 April in Paris, with Lloyd George present, it was decided to fight on.

An offensive with limited objectives (21 April – 9 May)

On 21 April Micheler proposed a change of objectives: instead of a breakthrough, to capture and hold the whole Chemin des Dames ridge, and then Fort Brimont north of Reims. Nivelle agreed in principle. According to the British official history the offensive then changed its character entirely: it became a limited operation to secure the whole ridge and push the Germans back from Reims. That same day the Tenth Army of General Denis Duchêne came into line between the Fifth and Sixth. For the following days the fighting was local. On 29 April the government appointed Pétain chief of the general staff and its military adviser, and command of the Centre Army Group passed from him to General Émile Fayolle. On 2 May Mangin, Nivelle’s closest collaborator from Verdun, lost command of the Sixth Army, which passed to General Paul Maistre. The attack on Fort Brimont was “postponed” by the government at Painlevé’s request and never took place, which according to the British official history dealt the final blow to the commander-in-chief’s authority.

On 4 and 5 May the French carried out the last great attack of the offensive. Nivelle did not direct it from close by, because together with Haig he was attending the Franco-British conference in Paris, at which the principle of attacks with limited objectives instead of attempts to break the front was adopted. The Tenth Army took the ruins of Craonne and the Californie plateau at the eastern end of the ridge. The Sixth Army broke into the Hindenburg Line on the Chemin des Dames on a front of about 4 kilometres and took the mill near Laffaux, capturing more than 4,000 prisoners. The attacks of the Fourth and Fifth Armies achieved little. On the nights from 6 to 9 May the Germans counter-attacked on the ridge, and on 8–9 May the offensive was halted. Micheler’s Reserve Army Group was also broken up. In Champagne the Fourth Army fought on until 20 May, when, after a heavy bombardment that buried the exits of the tunnel, it finally took Mont Cornillet. On the Chemin des Dames bloody fighting for observation points went on all summer.

Casualties

The casualty figures were a matter of political dispute from the outset. The British official history (Cyril Falls) gives Nivelle’s corrected figures up to 25 April, later accepted by the French historical service: 96,125 men, including 15,589 killed, 60,086 wounded and 20,500 missing, many of whom were dead. These figures include the losses of the two Russian brigades. Other authors give more: Jean de Pierrefeu about 118,000, and the American historian Robert Doughty about 134,000, including 30,000 killed, on the Aisne alone between 16 and 25 April. For the offensive as a whole the most often cited figure is that of the Canadian official historian Gerald Nicholson: about 187,000 men. The colonial troops suffered heavily. According to the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour the Senegalese tirailleurs lost more than 7,000 of the roughly 16,500 who went into action, and the Russian brigades more than 5,000 men. Before the battle the French command had expected the medical services to receive about 10,000 wounded.

German losses for the period of the offensive alone are not known. The British official history estimated, by comparing the returns for April–July 1917, that up to 25 April the Germans lost about 83,000 men on the Aisne and in Champagne. According to German figures cited by Nicholson, they lost about 163,000 in the fighting against the French spring offensives up to the end of June. By 10 May the French had taken about 28,500 prisoners and 187 guns, and in Champagne up to 20 May several thousand more prisoners.

Significance

By the standards of trench warfare the Nivelle Offensive was not a disaster. The French captured strongly fortified positions, including a large part of the Chemin des Dames ridge and almost all the Moronvilliers hills, took tens of thousands of prisoners and bled many German divisions white. The British official history concedes that compared with earlier offensives their gains were large. It also writes, however, that all this was nullified by “the terrible shock of disappointment”. It had been taken for granted that if there was no breakthrough the whole operation would count as a failure, and that is how it was judged. On 15 May the government removed Nivelle. Pétain became commander-in-chief of the Armies of the North and North-East, and General Ferdinand Foch chief of the general staff. Nivelle was later sent to North Africa, and his offensive was examined by a special commission.

The gravest consequences appeared within the army itself. The first collective refusals to obey occurred while the fighting was still going on, at the end of April in the hills of Champagne and at the beginning of May near Soissons, and after the offensive ended the mutinies spread widely. According to the French official history, cited by Falls, of the 119 cases of collective indiscipline 80 fell in the period from 25 May to 10 June, and they affected 54 divisions. The soldiers generally did not refuse to defend the trenches, but to take part in further attacks, which in their eyes achieved nothing. To the disappointment after the promise of quick victory were added the lack of leave, chaotic changes of orders, the sight of thousands of wounded waiting for help and weariness with the third year of war. Pétain brought the crisis under control by combining the severity of courts martial, which passed several hundred death sentences, carried out in several dozen cases, with reforms: regular leave, better food and billets, and the abandonment of costly attacks. He decided on new, carefully prepared attacks with limited objectives only in August at Verdun and in October at La Malmaison, where in a few days the French took what they had failed to take in the spring and forced the Germans to give up the Chemin des Dames ridge.

The offensive also changed the balance within the coalition. Until the end of 1917 the French army was incapable of a great offensive, and the burden of the fighting on the Western Front passed to the British, who struck in Flanders in the summer. Pétain, according to a saying attributed to him, was waiting “for the tanks and the Americans”: for the light Renault FT tanks and for the army of the United States, which had only just entered the war. In France the name Chemin des Dames became a symbol of senseless slaughter, and one of its memorials is the anti-war “Song of Craonne” (La Chanson de Craonne), sung by soldiers in 1917. Some historians, however, consider the verdict on Nivelle too harsh, since his offensive gained more than many earlier ones and the German army came out of it badly weakened.