Fighting on the Ancre

On 5 April 1918, the sixteenth day of Operation Michael, the Germans made their last attempt to break through to Amiens. The day before, their attack south of the Somme, on the Avre and at Villers-Bretonneux, had stuck in the rain before the Australian and French lines. Now the blow was to fall north of the river, on the British Third Army holding the heights above the valley of the Ancre, from Buire past German-held Albert to Hébuterne and Bucquoy. By evening the Germans had won only a few scraps of ground, paid for with heavy losses, and Erich Ludendorff ordered a halt to the offensive which since 21 March had been meant to decide the war.

The night before the attack

The British knew what was coming. On 4 April prisoners and deserters spoke of an attack the next day, and French headquarters passed on a warning, based, according to the Australian official historian Charles Bean, on the report of a trusted spy, that the Germans would strike at Amiens concentrically from the direction of Albert and Roye. The commander of VII Corps, General Walter Congreve, ordered his two Australian divisions to shell at 7.30 all the places where German troops might be assembling.

The most threatened sector was that of the 4th Australian Division near the village of Dernancourt. Its front line ran along a railway embankment which curved round the foot of the hill, right next to the houses of the German-held village. Before midnight the warning reached the brigade commanders, who sent out patrols. The commander of the 52nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Whitham, went round the companies repeating that if they were pushed off the front line, they were to fight to the end on the support line. Until two in the morning he talked at the railway bridge with Captain Fraser, commander of the left company. “There’ll be no question of going back,” Fraser is said to have replied. “I’m not even considering it.” When Whitham stressed that the order was serious, the captain answered: “I’m perfectly calm. I hope they come!” During the night patrols saw Germans at the footbridges over the Ancre, and in the morning two hundred soldiers hidden in a hollow west of the village. A thick mist settled over the valley, limiting visibility to 150–200 metres. Fraser, certain of an attack, even held back the serving of breakfast, which according to Bean was something unusual in the Australian army.

Dernancourt

At 7 a.m. the German artillery opened fire along the whole front of the Third Army, first with gas shells on the batteries. At about 9–9.30, while the bombardment was still going on, the infantry of the German 50th Reserve Division came out of Dernancourt against the Australian 47th Battalion. Trench mortars hidden in the houses smashed a section of the embankment, and after half an hour’s fighting the Germans broke the line. Lieutenant Heilemann of the 230th Reserve Infantry Regiment described how his company rolled up the defenders along the embankment and how before 10 a.m. prisoners in uniforms yellowish with mud ran through the village to the rear “with their hands above their heads, like fleeing flocks of geese with raised wings”. A light mine-thrower, carried onto the embankment by many hands at once, silenced an Australian machine gun in a signal box. At 10.30 the Germans were on the ridge. Through the gap in the curve of the line they fired into the backs of the defenders on both sides, and even hauled up field guns. The companies on the flanks nevertheless held on until almost 4 p.m. In the first hour, however, the mist and the shelling had cut communications, so the artillery did not manage to strike Dernancourt before the Germans left the village.

Further battalions followed the Germans. Before noon heavy British shellfire fell on the embankment and the village, called down by observers who had seen “masses” of Germans in Dernancourt. The commander of the 229th Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel von Thadden, led his men across the embankment towards the cemetery and fell mortally wounded by shrapnel. When he regained consciousness, his first question is said to have been: “Have we got the cemetery?” By the afternoon the whole 50th Reserve Division stood on the slope, ready to go on towards Amiens. It turned out, however, that instead of being behind the enemy’s lines it was facing a new line of resistance, and the neighbouring divisions had not kept pace. On its right the 79th Reserve Division had been repulsed at Albert, and on its left the 13th Division had not advanced a step at Buire.

At 5.15 p.m., after a six-minute bombardment, the Australians counter-attacked. The 49th Battalion, with the remnants of the 45th and 47th Battalions, came out onto the ridge straight into machine-gun fire that one officer called “the devil’s tattoo”. About two hundred yards from the Germans the soldiers broke into a running charge. The German reserves, crowded into a gravel pit below the ridge, began to withdraw at the patrols’ cry of “Tommy is coming!”, and a captured sergeant of the 229th Regiment later called the attack sehr schneidig, “very dashing”. In view of their heavy losses the Australians did not go down the open slope to the embankment. After 6 p.m. they dug in along the Buire–Albert road, about half a kilometre to a kilometre behind the morning’s front. Bean judged the German attack at Dernancourt the strongest the Australians ever faced, and their evening counter-attack one of the finest in their history.

From Albert to Bucquoy

Further north tired, depleted British divisions were fighting. North of Albert the 12th Division lost only an orchard near the station, and in the wood near Aveluy the Londoners of the 47th Division held off for two hours Germans advancing from shell hole to shell hole. In the evening a flank of the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division fell back, but the next morning a counter-attack by sailors and pioneers restored the old line. At Hébuterne the New Zealanders endured what the historian of their division called perhaps the heaviest bombardment of the whole war. They lost the forward farm of La Signy, held by fourteen riflemen, but the Germans got no further. A wounded rifleman, R. C. Shannon, whose machine gun had been smashed, jumped out of the trench and bombed a hundred Germans coming up an old communication trench, killing the officer leading them. Only at Bucquoy did the storm troops of the German 17th Division take the eastern half of the village before 11 a.m. and hold it despite counter-attacks.

The end of Michael

By evening there were no more illusions at the German headquarters. Crown Prince Rupprecht, the army group commander, wrote in his diary that the final result of the day was “the unpleasant fact that our offensive has come to a complete standstill”, and that continuing it without careful preparation offered no prospect of success. That same evening Ludendorff ordered the attacks to be broken off and to be carried on only where improving the local situation required it. The British official history observed that the German offensive had ended as many Allied offensives had: with a few isolated, spasmodic attacks, “sure signs of a failing effort”.

Ludendorff later wrote that “the enemy’s resistance was beyond our strength” and that the command had had to take “the extremely difficult decision to abandon the attack on Amiens for good”. The offensive, which in sixteen days had moved the front more than 60 kilometres, had not separated the British and French armies. The German staff was already preparing the next blow. Four days later it was to fall on the British and Portuguese in Flanders, on the river Lys.