Second Battle of the Somme

The Second Battle of the Somme is the British name for the offensive in which, from 21 August to 3 September 1918, the British Third and Fourth Armies drove the Germans off the old 1916 Somme battlefield. After the Battle of Amiens on 8–11 August, Field Marshal Douglas Haig did not want to go on striking frontally at the ever stronger German defences south of the Somme. He shifted the weight of the offensive to the north, where on 21 August the Third Army of General Julian Byng attacked. Within two weeks the British, Australians and New Zealanders retook Albert, Bapaume and Péronne, captured Mont Saint-Quentin and took several tens of thousands of prisoners. Ground that in 1916 had been fought over for almost five months, and that the Germans had taken in a few days in March 1918, the Allies recovered in less than two weeks. On 2 September the German Supreme Army Command decided to pull its armies back to the Hindenburg Line, from which they had set out for the spring offensive.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee (Battles Nomenclature Committee) distinguished “the Second Battles of the Somme 1918” (The Second Battles of the Somme 1918), lasting from 21 August to 3 September. They comprise the Battle of Albert (21–23 August, with the capture of Chuignes on 23 August) and the Second Battle of Bapaume (31 August – 3 September, with the capture of Mont Saint-Quentin and the occupation of Péronne). The committee left the days of 24–30 August without a separate name. In this classification the First Battles of the Somme 1918 are the German Operation Michael of March and April. The Battle of Amiens is a separate battle in it, although together with the Second Battles of the Somme it forms a group of operations called “the Advance in Picardy” (8 August – 3 September).

The name did not catch on widely. The author of the British official history, James Edmonds, observed that the term “Battles of the Somme” had in practice been reserved for the 1916 battle, and that the Battle of Albert actually lasted until 29 August. In his dispatch Haig described the fighting from 21 August to 1 September as a single “Battle of Bapaume”. Many chronologies and studies count the Second Battle of the Somme from the attack at Amiens on 8 August, treating the whole Advance in Picardy as one offensive. We keep to the official dates, 21 August – 3 September, and describe the Battle of Amiens separately. In parallel, from 26 August, the British First Army fought to the north of it on the Scarpe, as part of the so-called Second Battles of Arras.

Background

On 8 August the British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson and the French First Army of General Debeney broke the German front at Amiens, and Ludendorff called that day “the black day of the German Army”. After a few days the attack stalled in the belt of old 1916 trenches, and the Germans brought a dozen or more divisions into the threatened sector. Marshal Ferdinand Foch wanted the British and French to go on attacking towards Roye and Chaulnes. Haig, having looked at aerial photographs of the German positions, refused. On 15 August at Sarcus he told Foch that he was responsible to his government and his fellow countrymen for the lives of his soldiers, and won him over to his own plan: the attack was now to be taken over by the Third Army north of the Ancre, on ground little damaged by shellfire, where the Germans did not expect it. Striking towards Bapaume, it was to outflank the German line on the Somme from the north. Foch accepted the plan and himself widened the offensive on the other side of the salient: from 10 August the French Third Army of General Humbert was attacking, and from 17–18 August, with the main blow on 20 August, the Tenth Army of General Mangin attacked between the Oise and the Aisne.

Between 14 and 17 August the Germans themselves fell back from their forward positions near Serre and Beaumont-Hamel to shorten the front. Their Seventeenth Army under General Otto von Below and Second Army under General Georg von der Marwitz held lines dating from the spring offensive, along the Ancre and the Albert–Arras railway. From 12 August part of the front came under a new army group of General Max von Boehn. The German divisions, however, were exhausted, and there were not enough replacements.

Battle of Albert

On 21 August at 4.55 a.m., in thick fog, IV and VI Corps of the Third Army attacked on a front from the Ancre to Moyenneville, supported by about 150 tanks. The objective was limited: to take the Albert–Arras railway. Once again the fog helped the attackers. The British and New Zealanders took, among other places, Achiet-le-Petit and Bucquoy and captured about 2,000 prisoners, but after the fog lifted they were held up in the heat in front of the railway embankment. On 22 August Byng gave his troops a day to prepare, and the German counter-attacks were repulsed. The same day the left wing of the Fourth Army, the British III Corps, struck between the Ancre and the Somme, and the 18th Division retook the ruins of Albert, lost in March.

On 23 August came a general attack on a front which, according to Haig, was 33 miles (about 53 kilometres) long, from Lihons to Mercatel near Arras. South of the Somme the Australian 1st Division attacked Chuignes and the valley beyond it, taking about 2,000 prisoners. In the north the Third Army took the Albert–Arras railway embankment, the last strong German position in that sector. According to the Australian official history, the two armies took about 8,000 prisoners that day. Over the following days the British advanced across the old 1916 battlefield. On 24 August they retook La Boisselle, Ovillers, Pozières and Thiepval, and the Australians occupied Bray on the Somme. On 25 August there was fighting for Mametz Wood. This time places that in 1916 had cost weeks of fighting and tens of thousands of dead were taken within hours.

Retreat to the Somme

On 26 August, north of the Third Army, the British First Army attacked on the Scarpe, with the Canadian Corps brought up from Amiens. That day the German Supreme Army Command ordered a retreat to the Somme line, extended northwards past Bapaume to the Drocourt–Quéant position. Over the following days the Germans fell back, covered by rearguards and machine guns, and the British and French followed them. On 27 August the French First Army retook Roye, and on 28 August Chaulnes, reaching Nesle. On 29 August the French of the Third Army entered Noyon, and at dawn that day the Germans abandoned Bapaume, which had held up the advance of IV Corps for four days. At about 8.30 a.m. the New Zealand Division passed through the town, lost on the night of 24–25 March during the First Battle of Bapaume. In the south the Australians reached the bend of the Somme opposite Péronne.

Second Battle of Bapaume

The Somme line looked strong. Here the river flows north through a wide, marshy valley, and the northern flank of Péronne is covered by the hill of Mont Saint-Quentin, held by elite troops of the German 2nd Guard Division. General John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps, decided to take it on the move, before the Germans could settle in. On 30 August the Australian 2nd Division seized a bridgehead across the Somme near Cléry, and on 31 August at 5 a.m. its 5th Brigade, only about 1,300 strong, attacked the hill from the north-west. The attack took the Germans completely by surprise, and the Australians captured the village of Mont Saint-Quentin. A counter-attack drove them off the summit, but the next day, 1 September, the 6th Brigade retook the hill, and the 5th Division broke across the moat into Péronne and occupied most of the town. Rawlinson, according to an often-quoted account, called this fighting the greatest military achievement of the war.

In the north the Third Army pressed on east of Bapaume. On 2 September the British First Army with the Canadians broke through the Drocourt–Quéant position on the Scarpe, the fortified extension of the Hindenburg Line. That same day the German Supreme Army Command ordered a retreat along the whole front from Vimy to Vailly on the Aisne to the Hindenburg Line, to which the Germans had withdrawn in the spring of 1917 and from which they had launched their offensive in March 1918. On 3 September the British Third and Fourth Armies began the pursuit towards the Canal du Nord, and the Second Battle of the Somme came to an end.

Losses

According to the British official history, from 21 August to 3 September the Fourth Army took 12,414 prisoners, and the Third and First Armies together 33,827, the latter figure also including the fighting on the Scarpe and at the Drocourt–Quéant position. The Fourth Army’s losses in this period came to about 33,700 men, and those of the Third Army and the Canadian Corps of the First Army to about 55,700. Edmonds reckoned that the Fourth Army fought with sixteen divisions against thirty-three German ones, and the Third Army with the Canadians with eighteen against at least thirty-three, although many German divisions were very weak. Total German losses are not known; the Bavarian official history wrote that in August the German divisions “simply melted away”, and for lack of replacements whole divisions and regiments had to be broken up.

Significance

The Second Battle of the Somme was the first battle in which the British Army moved from single, carefully prepared attacks to a continuous, mobile advance on a wide front. Instead of breaking through frontally against ever stronger defences, Haig struck at new places in turn, and the Germans, as soon as they were threatened with being outflanked, fell back before the Allies could exploit their success. The British had no large reserves, so breakthroughs could not be turned into encirclements, but the German armies were losing men faster than they could replace them. Most of the ground won in March in Operation Michael was recovered, and the Germans also had to abandon the salient on the Lys in Flanders.

The battle brought an enormous growth of confidence in victory on the Allied side and a further collapse of morale on the German side. Ludendorff, who as late as July had hoped to decide the war, had to admit at the beginning of September that the army could now only defend itself on the Hindenburg Line. At the end of September the British, French and Americans attacked that line too.