Fighting at Rosières

On 27 March 1918, the seventh day of the German spring offensive, the remnants of the British Fifth Army fought one of the most stubborn defensive battles of the war on the Santerre plateau, before the village of Rosières-en-Santerre. General Herbert Watts’s XIX Corps had six divisions which had been fighting and retreating almost without a break since 21 March, and facing them stood eleven German divisions. The British held their positions almost everywhere, and on several sectors counter-attacked successfully. Even so, by evening their situation was more dangerous than in the morning: the Germans had crossed the Somme behind the corps’ left flank, and on its right had taken Montdidier. In front of Amiens there stood only an improvised scratch force of engineers and railwaymen, and that evening the army commander, General Hubert Gough, learned that he was being recalled.

The line before Rosières

The day before, XIX Corps had given up Chaulnes and fallen back about 8 km, to a line running along a low ridge from Rouvroy to the Somme. At noon on 26 March, at the Doullens conference, the Allies entrusted General Ferdinand Foch with coordinating the operations of the British and French armies, and Foch at once demanded that not another inch of ground be given up. Watts was ordered to hold on at all costs until the French arrived. His front was about 14 km long. From the right it was held by the 24th, 8th, 50th, 66th, 39th and 16th (Irish) Divisions, all except the 8th in action since the first day of the offensive, some reduced to a single brigade. The 50th Division held more than 3.5 km of front with what was in practice one brigade, and the 16th Division as a whole had lost more than 5,500 men by 24 March. The British official history observes that Watts had more divisions and more men under his command than Wellington at Waterloo, and fought on a wider front, for longer and against greater odds. He was supported by about 370 field guns, too few for such a sector, but on the open Santerre plain the gunners could see the advancing infantry well.

The night was frosty and quiet. In the morning mist settled again, but it lifted earlier than on previous days. At about 7.30 a.m. the Germans attacked the 8th and 24th Divisions on the right. Major-General William Heneker’s 8th Division lost a small stretch of trench but recovered it and held its morning line before Rosières all day, the only division in the corps to do so. The 24th Division lost the village of Rouvroy at about 10 a.m., retook it by counter-attack at noon, and after 2 p.m., when it ran out of grenades, gave it up again. Because the neighbouring XVIII Corps had to fall back, the division withdrew slightly to keep in touch with it.

Crisis on the Somme

Things were more dangerous on the left. At about 8 a.m. the German Guard Reserve Division attacked the village of Proyart, defended by the 47th Brigade of the 16th Division. The frontal attack was repulsed, but the Germans, reinforced by infantry brought up in lorries, worked round the brigade’s left flank and at about 10 a.m. forced it to retreat. Through the gap they got behind the left flank of the 39th Division, which had to bend its line back to face north-west. The other two brigades of the 16th Division, under fire from the front and from across the Somme on the north bank, held on until 2.30 p.m.

Watts demanded troops from Heneker for a counter-attack. From near Rosières two battalions of the 8th Division, the 2nd Devonshires and the 22nd Durham Light Infantry, moved off together with a composite battalion of engineers and remnants of the 50th Division, under Lieutenant-Colonel Cope. At about 2 p.m. they crossed the ridge near Harbonnières and, under machine-gun fire, advanced across open ground criss-crossed with old wire. At about 4 p.m. they drove the Germans out of the houses and trenches at the crossroads on the Roman road from Amiens to Saint-Quentin, marked by a burning sugar factory, and took many prisoners. The 57-year-old commander of the Durham battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan, was mortally wounded.

At about the same time in the 50th Division a misunderstood warning order caused the battalions to start falling back, and they gave up the village of Vauvillers. At about 3 p.m. a counter-attack by troops of the 8th, 50th and 66th Divisions, with engineers, pioneers and an entrenching battalion, struck the Germans, who were advancing in eight to ten waves, threw them back and retook the village. When the defenders began to run short of ammunition, however, the Germans broke in again, and by evening the British line ran along the light railway east of Harbonnières. Despite these losses the rest of the corps fell back during the day by less than 2 km at most. The British field artillery often changed position only when the Germans came within 500–600 metres, and the German infantry, with almost no support from its own guns, was reluctant to attack under fire.

What decided the day, however, was what was happening behind the corps. The right flank of the neighbouring Third Army had fallen back from near Bray the day before, and the Somme bridges between Bray and Sailly were guarded only by small, hastily gathered detachments. The German 1st Division from the north bank crossed by the partly blown bridge at Chipilly, despite the resistance of about eighty soldiers of the 16th Division, and between 1 and 2 p.m. took Cerisy. A counter-attack by about four hundred men of the 39th and 16th Divisions, led by Captain Peirson, reached the copse near Cerisy but was thrown back. At about 7 p.m. the Germans entered Lamotte and Warfusée (Lamotte-Warfusée) on the Roman road, almost without a fight. The headquarters of the 61st Division, which had stopped at Warfusée, only just managed to leave it. Three battalions of the 16th Division, cut off near Proyart, held on until 8 p.m. and then, about two hundred men strong, slipped away by night along the towpath of the Somme canal, surprising German posts thanks to a German password they had learned earlier.

Carey’s Force

Just beyond Lamotte began the line which Carey’s Force was to defend. These were troops gathered the day before on Gough’s orders to man the old French Amiens defence line of 1915, running from Démuin on the Luce to Sailly-le-Sec on the Somme. The Fifth Army’s chief engineer had assembled about 3,000 men: field companies from the army’s rear units, tunnelling, electrical and survey companies, students and instructors of infantry schools, sniping and musketry schools, as well as two companies of the American 6th Engineer Regiment and about 500 railwaymen without combat training. They were given 76 Lewis guns and 16 Vickers heavy machine guns. On the evening of 26 March command was taken over by General George Carey, who had just arrived to take command of a division. On the morning of 27 March some of these troops were sent to defend the Somme crossings.

Until the evening of 27 March soldiers retreating from the Somme streamed back onto the Carey’s Force line: battalions of the 16th Division, engineers and pioneers, scattered stragglers gathered up by staff officers. The British official history remarks that had this improvised force been capable of counter-attacking, a blow along the Somme might have had good results, but after dark it could not be used in that way. General Julian Byng, commander of the Third Army, as soon as he learned of the German crossing at Cerisy, sent the 1st Cavalry Division to the south bank of the Somme, and Gough had the 61st Division taken by lorry to Marcelcave, behind the Carey’s Force line. Both were to counter-attack towards Lamotte at dawn.

The night and Foch’s decision

In the south the situation was just as bad. The French corps to the right of the British fell back to the west and north-west, the Germans entered Montdidier without a fight, and General Ivor Maxse’s XVIII Corps had to bend back its right flank. The British divisions on the plateau stood in a forward salient, threatened from both sides.

At 11 p.m. the three brigadiers of the 39th Division, cut off from their commander by the Germans in Lamotte, agreed on the Roman road that at 2 a.m. they would withdraw their brigades to the south-west unless they received other orders. Around midnight the commanders of the 8th, 50th and 66th Divisions met at Cayeux and concluded that unless Lamotte could be retaken, most of their troops were in danger of being surrounded. Watts had already put the same assessment to Gough earlier, but had been told that in accordance with Foch’s instructions no voluntary withdrawal was permitted. Gough therefore turned to Foch himself. Woken at 3 a.m. on 28 March, the new coordinator of the Allied armies agreed to the withdrawal of XIX Corps’ left flank to the Carey’s Force line. At 4.45 a.m. the order to retreat was issued, and the 8th Division left Rosières.

Between 5 and 6 p.m. the Military Secretary, General Ruggles-Brise, arrived at Gough’s headquarters. He brought the news that the government had decided to recall Gough and that General Henry Rawlinson would take command of the Fifth Army the following day. Gough, like his staff, went on working that night on the counter-attack towards Lamotte.

Significance of the day

The British official history regards 27 March as the day on which the exhausted, mostly poorly trained troops of the Fifth Army showed “extraordinary powers of resistance”. The Germans followed the retreating British at a distance of a few kilometres and halted as soon as the British lay down and opened fire. Prisoners complained that their units were thrown into battle straight from long marches, without set objectives, and that supplies could not keep up. Some German officers regarded the day as the turning point of the offensive: only the right wing of the Eighteenth Army in the south, towards Montdidier, was still advancing, while the Second Army, on which the taking of Amiens depended, had by its own reports made “little progress”. According to the British official history, the difficulties into which the Fifth Army fell that day were due above all to the unnecessary retreat of the Third Army’s right flank from near Bray the day before. The fighting before Amiens was to last for more than another week.