Third Battle of the Scarpe (1917)

The Third Battle of the Scarpe was the last great general British attack in the Battle of Arras. On 3 May 1917 at 3.45 a.m., while it was still dark, three armies went forward at once: General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army on both banks of the Scarpe, General Henry Horne’s First Army at Gavrelle, Oppy and Fresnoy, and on the right flank General Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army at Bullecourt. The attack, carried out by tired divisions against an enemy who was waiting for them, failed along almost the entire length of the front. The British official history called it “nothing less than a disaster”, and many of those who took part regarded the day as the blackest of the whole war. The only clear success was the capture of the village of Fresnoy by the Canadians. After this battle Douglas Haig gave up further general attacks at Arras and began moving forces to Flanders.

Name and dates

The name “Third Battle of the Scarpe” and the dates 3–4 May 1917 were given to it after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. In reality the fighting lasted less than a day: the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations France and Belgium 1917, volume I) states that on the front of the Third and First Armies everything was decided within 24 hours, and that on the night of 4 May the last units cut off in no man’s land were still being withdrawn. The committee treated the parallel attack of the Fifth Army as a separate battle of Bullecourt (3–17 May), because the Australians seized a foothold in the Hindenburg Line there and fought for it for two weeks. The British chronology of the war gives 2 May as the start of both battles, but the attack began in the early hours of 3 May, as the official history, the Canadian list of battle honours and the secondary literature all agree.

According to the same chronology, the end of the Third Battle of the Scarpe on 4 May closed the whole Battle of Arras. For the Battle of Arras we adopt the longer dates, to 16 May, as most studies do, because the fighting went on: at Bullecourt until 17 May, and for Rœux and its chemical works on 11–16 May. Falls also describes local attacks up to 24 May. These, however, were already limited operations, without a general attack by several armies.

Background

When the Battle of Arleux on 28 April brought only the capture of a single village, Haig already knew that the French offensive on the Aisne would not deliver the promised breakthrough. News was coming from Paris that General Robert Nivelle would soon lose his command, and on 29 April General Philippe Pétain became chief of the general staff. According to the official history, Haig judged that if the French broke off their offensive there was no longer any point in pushing on to Cambrai, because there would be no one to join forces with. On 30 April he told the commanders of the First, Third and Fifth Armies that the hope of meeting the French at Cambrai was gone. The plan for the coming days was modest: by about 15 May to reach the line Lens – Acheville – Fresnoy – Greenland Hill – Bois du Vert – Riencourt, and then to decide whether to attack further or to move troops elsewhere. On 1 May, in a memorandum to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, Haig wrote that if the French scaled down their efforts, he would confine himself for a few weeks to attacks costing as little as possible, and would begin the operation to clear the Belgian coast in Flanders as soon as he could.

Why, then, did three armies once again attack on so broad a front on 3 May? Falls lists several reasons. The orders had been issued earlier, while the French were still fighting on the Aisne and had to be supported. Even now it was not certain that they would stop, for they had planned important attacks for 4 and 5 May, and Haig intended to urge them to further efforts, so it would have been unseemly for him to break off the battle himself. Withdrawing from the fight might also have had a bad effect on the plans for the Italian and Russian offensives. Finally, the British had not yet reached “a good defensive line” anywhere, and so far general attacks had fared better than local ones.

Zero hour

The outcome of the battle was largely decided by the choice of the hour of attack. The Australians of the Fifth Army wanted to attack Bullecourt in the dark: they knew the ground, counted on surprise and trusted in their men’s ability to keep direction. Gough backed them. The Third and First Armies, on the other hand, needed light. At first it was agreed that the Fifth Army would go forward at 3.30 a.m. and the Third Army at 4.05 a.m., but Haig decided that all the attacks were to start simultaneously, and zero hour was fixed at 3.45 a.m. Allenby felt that in conferences with Haig he was losing out to Gough, who put his case better. The commander of XVII Corps, General Charles Fergusson, protested as best he could, since his divisions had to pass through the ruins of Rœux. Falls calls the decision unfortunate, “even disastrous”, and believes that the Third Army could quite well have started half an hour after the Fifth.

News of the change of hour reached brigade commanders only on the afternoon of 2 May, and sometimes at dusk. There was therefore no time to prepare a night attack: to set up boards painted with luminous paint in front of the German wire, to work out compass bearings or short intermediate objectives. The sun rose at 5.22 a.m., and a line of men could be seen at 50 yards (about 45 metres) only at about 4.05 a.m. Worse still, the moon, near full, set 16 minutes before zero hour. On long stretches of the front the men forming up for the attack were silhouetted against it and drew fire on themselves. Falls considered this “one of the most lamentable details of a lamentable episode”. Report after report draws the same conclusion: the worst handicap was the too early hour. A battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of the 9th Division wrote that the men were confident of success and would have taken their objectives but for the “fatal mistake” of fixing zero hour 25 minutes before dawn.

Forces

According to Falls, eleven British and Canadian divisions took part in the attack, of which only two, the 18th and the 31st, could be called fresh. The others had already fought in April, and their battalions had been filled up with poorly trained recruits. The official history cites the example of a Black Watch battalion of the 9th Division which, a few days before the battle, received 97 men transferred from the transport lines without any infantry training. Some of them could not even load a rifle. The division’s South African brigade was so weakened that it did not go into action at all.

On the right flank of the Third Army, General Thomas Snow’s VII Corps (21st, 18th and 14th Divisions) was to cross the Sensée stream, take Fontaine-lès-Croisilles and Chérisy and link up with the Fifth Army. General Aylmer Haldane’s VI Corps (56th, 3rd and 12th Divisions) attacked from the Cambrai road past Monchy-le-Preux towards the Bois du Sart and the village of Pelves. North of the Scarpe, XVII Corps (4th and 9th Divisions) was once again to take Rœux, the chemical works and Greenland Hill, and then the station at Plouvain. In the First Army, XIII Corps (the 31st Division and the badly weakened 2nd Division, which put up only one brigade composed of the remnants of three) attacked from Gavrelle to Oppy Wood, and General Julian Byng’s Canadian Corps attacked Fresnoy-en-Gohelle with one brigade each from the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions. The Third Army had only four tanks, because most had been given to the Fifth Army. According to the official history the front of attack of the three armies was more than 14 miles (more than 22 km) long. Some studies give about 16 miles.

On the German side, the Sixth Army of General Otto von Below, whose chief of staff was Colonel Fritz von Loßberg, held the front with seven divisions. They were in better condition than the British: some had just arrived from Flanders or from the south, or had returned from rest. The Germans were expecting an attack. During the night they shelled the British assembly trenches, and in the Monchy sector they deluged them with gas and high-explosive shells even before zero hour.

Course of the battle

The Third Army south of the Scarpe. After several days of bombardment, including a night gas bombardment on 30 April, the infantry set off into the darkness. In VII Corps, the 21st Division’s attack on Fontaine stalled in front of the trench covering Chérisy, and a German counter-attack cut off the men who had got further. Observers saw whole groups surrendering in the valley. The 18th Division was thrown into disorder by a tank that turned back through its ranks, while someone shouted “Retire!”. Even so, its 55th Brigade took Chérisy, and parts of two battalions reached the final objective. Before supports came up, a counter-attack hidden in the mist over the Sensée valley took everything back. According to German accounts, three platoons were enough to retake Chérisy. The 14th Division, enfiladed from across the Cojeul stream, fell back behind its neighbours. Falls sums up the fighting of VII Corps: confusion in the darkness, German artillery fire that came down at once and continued without a break for about fifteen hours, the Germans’ readiness to give up their front line and their vigorous counter-attacks, and on the British side the bewilderment of infantry who found themselves in the open and did not know how to beat off a determined counter-stroke.

In VI Corps, the 169th Brigade of the London 56th Division took the buildings of Cavalry Farm and reached the St. Rohart factory, but the neighbouring 167th Brigade was shattered by fire from a trench that had survived the bombardment, whose garrison stood shoulder to shoulder, contrary to the usual defensive practice of the time. During the night of 3/4 May the Londoners had to withdraw. At Monchy, the 3rd Division, whose assembly trenches the Germans had drenched with gas shells, lost its barrage and was driven back, and two of its battalions, which had reached the first objective between the Bois des Aubépines and the Bois du Sart, were thrown back by a second counter-attack. The 12th Division took a piece of the German front line south of the Scarpe: 500 yards deep on a front of 1,000 yards. It was the only gain of the whole Third Army. In the evening, in one of the captured dugouts, Corporal George Jarratt of the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, who had earlier been taken prisoner together with wounded men, put his foot on a grenade thrown inside. He saved the wounded, lost both his legs and died. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

The Third Army north of the Scarpe. XVII Corps attacked Rœux yet again. On 1 and 2 May heavy artillery, including a 15-inch howitzer, shelled the village, the woods by the river and the roads, but according to Falls too few shells fell on the buildings immediately in front of the line. In the darkness the 4th Division lost its way completely. A Somerset battalion got only to the edge of Rœux, and a German machine gun hidden behind a wall caught the advancing lines in crossfire. Isolated parties of several battalions reached the first objective, and one wounded man reported that from where he lay he could see “a big village” below, probably Plouvain, but few came back. About a hundred men from four battalions, without officers, held out on the first objective until the afternoon and fell back to their own lines after dark. The division lost more than 2,000 men. In the 9th Division the darkness led to even worse mistakes: battalions veered off course and became mixed up with their neighbours, and part of one of them took the British front line for the German one and opened fire on it. The 6th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers lost more than four hundred men and virtually ceased to exist. In this sector the German 25th Infantry Regiment, which had earlier been withdrawn as exhausted and reorganised into a single battalion, counter-attacked along the river, took 358 prisoners and relieved a company of pioneers that was still holding out in Rœux.

The First Army. In the XIII Corps sector the setting moon proved even more dangerous than the early hour. Three Yorkshire battalions of the 31st Division reached the final objective in places, but after the failure of the neighbouring brigade at Oppy Wood, which felled trees had turned into one great obstacle, counter-attacks pushed them back. The Germans even briefly took the windmill at Gavrelle, but a company of a Durham Light Infantry battalion recaptured it. Second Lieutenant John Harrison of the East Yorkshire battalion, who single-handedly rushed a German machine gun at Oppy, went missing and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. The 31st Division lost about 1,900 men. The composite brigade of the 2nd Division, about 1,800 rifles strong, bled itself white but covered the Canadians’ right flank.

Fresnoy. Only on the left flank did the attack succeed. The 1st Brigade of General Arthur Currie’s 1st Canadian Division attacked with three battalions on a front of about 1.3 km. The Germans of the 15th Reserve Division were expecting an attack, but not before dawn, and here the surprise of a night attack paid off. The Toronto battalion took the wood in front of the village, where 75 Germans surrendered in the dugouts, and captured the trench beyond it before sunrise. The Eastern Ontario battalion worked round three machine guns in the ruins and went through the village, taking more than 220 prisoners, and by about 4.30 a.m. it was already on the final objective. The Western Ontario battalion occupied the trench beyond the village and the park by the Lille road. Things were harder for the 6th Brigade of the 2nd Canadian Division, which covered the left flank on the Acheville side: the Winnipeg battalion took most of its allotted trench, and Lieutenant Robert Combe, who held the captured section with a handful of men, was killed and posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. The Alberta battalion was held up in front of a new, unmanned trench with untouched wire. At about 10.30 a.m. and in the afternoon the Germans counter-attacked, but Canadian machine-gun and artillery fire broke up their attacks. The Canadian Corps lost 64 officers and 1,410 other ranks, but took 12 officers and 479 men prisoner. Falls called the capture of Fresnoy the crowning of a series of Canadian successes at Arras and the only bright spot of the day. He saw one of the reasons in the better training of Canadian reinforcements.

4 May. By the morning the battle was effectively over. During the night survivors made their way back to their own lines, and the Londoners of the 56th Division abandoned the trenches they had taken at Cavalry Farm. By the morning of 5 May the British 5th Division had relieved the exhausted 2nd Division and the 1st Canadian Division in the Fresnoy area. At Bullecourt the fighting went on.

Casualties

The official history gives no total losses for 3 May, only figures for individual divisions and battalions, often very high. Some popular accounts give a figure of nearly 6,000 killed, but it is not known what calculations it rests on. In many divisions a large part of the losses consisted of the missing, in practice prisoners. The Germans lost most at Fresnoy: the 17th Reserve Infantry Regiment alone reported 650 killed, wounded and missing, and the losses of the 25th Reserve Regiment, which defended the village, were higher still. In other sectors the Germans repulsed the attack without using their reserve divisions, often with counter-attacks by one or two companies. At least three Victoria Crosses were awarded for the fighting of 3 May on the front of the Third and First Armies, all of them posthumously.

Significance

The Third Battle of the Scarpe was the worst day of the whole Battle of Arras. Falls writes in his summing-up that the Battle of Arleux had been on the whole a failure, the attack of 3 May “nothing less than a disaster”, and the first attack on Bullecourt, on its smaller scale, equally calamitous. The failure was due to the fatigue and poor training of reinforcements, German counter-attacks on Loßberg’s method, insufficiently accurate bombardment and above all an unprepared attack in the dark. For the British it was a painful lesson that a night attack has a chance only when it surprises the enemy and is carefully prepared.

The capture of Fresnoy could not be exploited, and on 8 May the fresh 5th Bavarian Division retook the village from the British 5th Division and the Canadians. Falls judged this loss the most serious the British suffered from German counter-attacks in the whole battle. On 4 May, at a conference in Paris, Haig, General Robertson and Generals Nivelle and Pétain agreed that a breakthrough was no longer possible and that the Allies were to wear down the enemy with attacks with limited objectives. It was also agreed unofficially that in the summer the British would lead the main operations. From then on only local fighting took place at Arras, in which the chemical works and Rœux were finally taken on 11–13 May, a German counter-attack was repulsed on 16 May, and the Battle of Bullecourt ended on 17 May. On 7 May Haig told his army commanders that in a month he would attack the Messines ridge, and began moving artillery and divisions to Flanders. On 7 June the Battle of Messines began, the prelude to the great offensive at Ypres.