British take Bapaume

On the morning of 17 March 1917 soldiers of the Australian 5th Division entered Bapaume, a small town in Artois towards which the British armies had been attacking for half a year in the Battle of the Somme. In the summer of 1916 it was supposed to be reached in the first days of the offensive. In time it became a goal in itself, which could not be reached despite the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers. Now the Germans gave it up without a fight, withdrawing to the Hindenburg Line.

The Germans held the trenches in front of Bapaume until the last moment. The main garrisons left at 1.30 a.m. on 17 March, on the second “marching day” of the retreat. They left behind patrols which until dawn fired rifles and sent up flares, pretending that the line was manned. Part of a battalion of the 5th Guard Grenadier Regiment held the ramparts of the old fortress for two hours to cover the passage of the 4th Guard Division through the town. The Australians had been waiting for this moment for several days. General John Gellibrand, commander of the 6th Brigade, even wanted to attack at 3 a.m. to surprise the retreating Germans, but the commander of the 2nd Division, General Nevill Smyth, would not allow it. At about 6 a.m. patrols of the 5th Division found that the front line was empty. It soon turned out that the second line, which just in front of Bapaume almost touched it, had also been abandoned.

Companies of the 30th Battalion of the 8th Brigade entered the town. In the last few days the Germans had blown up a large part of the houses, many were still burning, and smoke made it hard to see along the streets. According to German reports Bapaume had been set on fire in 400 places and mined. At the junction of the Péronne road with the Cambrai road gaped a huge, freshly blown crater. Isolated German posts were still firing from houses, so at about 10.30 a.m. Captain W. J. R. Cheeseman led a company through the town. Beyond the last houses the Australians saw something they had not seen for months: green fields, untouched by shells. For the first time they moved forward in extended order as in a war of movement, and in the distance they saw columns of German troops and transport disappearing to the east. At about the same time units of the Australian 6th Brigade entered the suburb of Avesnes, and the British 2nd Division reached Biefvillers and Sapignies north of the town.

The news of the capture of Bapaume caused great joy throughout the British Army. The Australian official historian Charles Bean compared Bapaume to the hill of Achi Baba at Gallipoli: both were meant to be only a stage in the advance, and in time both became goals in themselves. The official communiqué spoke of “stiff fighting”, although taking the town cost only a few skirmishes with snipers. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria noted in his diary that the enemy communiqués were lying about the German retreat. The very next day crowds of staff officers, correspondents and photographers streamed into Bapaume, to the irritation of the pioneers who were filling in the craters blown in the road from Albert. That same day the British 61st Division occupied Chaulnes, and their French allies entered Roye.

The town hall of Bapaume, a building with arcades and balconies, was one of the few that survived, and it was judged safe after a mine had been removed from its cellars. It was a trick. The Germans had left in it a second, hidden charge with a chemical fuse, which was set off after many days by a wire eaten through by acid. On the night of 25/26 March the town hall blew up, burying the people sleeping in it, most of them Australians, and also two French deputies from the Pas-de-Calais department, Raoul Briquet and Albert Tailliandier. Bapaume returned to German hands a year later, during the spring offensive of 1918.