End of the Battle of the St Quentin Canal

On 2 October 1918 General Henry Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army ended the Battle of the St Quentin Canal. Four days earlier its 46th Division had crossed the canal in fog at Bellenglise, while Americans and Australians had broken into the Hindenburg Line above the tunnel at Bellicourt. The last two days of the battle were spent completing what had been begun on 29 September: taking the rest of the main German position and closing up to the last line of its system, the Beaurevoir Line. This is how the British Battles Nomenclature Committee dates the battle, counting the fighting for the Beaurevoir Line itself, from 3 October, separately.

On 1 October, in better weather that at last allowed the air forces to operate, the Australian 5th Division attacked at six in the morning in thick mist, supported by ten Whippet light tanks. Its brigades took Mill Ridge, Estrées and Folemprise Farm, and patrols, together with a battalion of the British 32nd Division, entered Joncourt, which the Germans had abandoned during the night, falling back to the Beaurevoir Line. In the north the Australian 3rd Division, which had been fighting trench by trench for two days, at last took Bony and the hill above the northern entrance to the tunnel by midday. At four in the afternoon the 32nd Division attacked the Beaurevoir Line itself. The 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, with nine tanks, broke through the dense wire and by half past six in the evening had captured a stretch about 1,300 metres long, taking more than two hundred prisoners. The Scots of the 5/6th Battalion, Royal Scots, took Sequehart with 150 prisoners, but in the evening, attacked from two sides, had to withdraw from it. That day, on the British right flank, the French First Army entered Saint-Quentin, abandoned by the Germans.

On 2 October almost nothing changed on the Fourth Army’s front. At six in the morning the 32nd Division took Sequehart once again and at nine lost it again, while attacks on Preselles and Ramicourt broke down under fire from the flank. The Germans counter-attacked the breach in the Beaurevoir Line several times but did not retake it. The Australian 3rd and 5th Divisions were relieved by the British 50th Division and the Australian 2nd Division, and the two tired divisions went to rest near Amiens. The cavalry divisions, which had been waiting by the canal for the way to open, were sent back to billets before noon. Rawlinson complained that as long as the French First Army stood on the canal, all the German reserves would strike the projecting wedge of his IX Corps, and he asked Haig to ask Marshal Ferdinand Foch once again to hurry the French along. The French left wing did attack, but gained little. In the afternoon Rawlinson issued orders for an attack on the Beaurevoir Line the next day. The British official history notes that the short pause was welcomed not only by the infantry but also by the gunners, because bringing up ammunition over the ruined roads was an enormous effort: at Templeux-le-Guérard station alone fifteen ammunition trains were unloaded every day.

In four days the Fourth Army had taken the main position and the support position of the Hindenburg Line on a front of more than ten kilometres and stood before its last line. The 46th Division alone took about 4,200 prisoners on 29 September, and the Fourth Army as a whole took almost 21,500 prisoners and 245 guns in September. Not everything had succeeded: on the northern flank the Germans still held Vendhuile and Macquincourt Farm, and, in front of the right flank of the neighbouring Third Army, also the canal and the Hindenburg Line behind it, from which they withdrew only a few days later. The breakthrough was nevertheless a fact, and in Berlin this was well understood. On the morning of 2 October an emissary of the Supreme Army Command, Major Erich von dem Bussche, told the party leaders in the Reichstag that the war was lost and that every day only made the situation worse. A few days later Germany asked President Wilson for an armistice.