German attack at Arras

On 28 March 1918, Maundy Thursday, the German spring offensive struck in a new place. In the first week of Operation Michael the German forces had advanced several dozen kilometres on the Somme, but furthest in the south, against the shattered British Fifth Army and the approaching French. On the northern wing General Otto von Below’s Seventeenth Army had been unable since 21 March to break the British Third Army. Now it was to do so at Arras, on both sides of the river Scarpe, in an operation called Mars. The German soldiers, as the British official history records, went into the attack convinced that one more effort would be enough to break the British front. By evening it was clear that the attack had failed.

The plan

The attack on Arras had from the start been the most difficult part of the German plan. The town was shielded from the north by Vimy Ridge, taken by the Canadians in April 1917, from which the British could see the whole plain as far as Douai. Before the offensive both the Supreme Army Command and the staff of the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had judged it too difficult and postponed it. On 25 March, however, Erich Ludendorff decided that the British front on both sides of the Scarpe, as far as the coalfield of Lens, was to be smashed by two attacks: Mars Süd south of the river and Mars Nord north of it. A day later the Walküre attack was to follow against the Lorette heights, and then a march to the north-west. Prisoners later stated that they were to reach the sea in four days and had been given rations for six.

The heavy artillery and the mortars that had opened the offensive on 21 March were moved to Arras. Nine German divisions, almost all of them fresh, were to strike four British ones: the 3rd and 15th (Scottish) south of the Scarpe and the 4th and 56th (London) north of it. The British expected the attack. First Army intelligence had noticed new batteries, marked roads and mortar positions, and a prisoner taken on 23 March even gave the date, though three days too early. The commanders, who already knew what had happened to the Fifth Army’s forward zone, held the front line only with outposts and deployed their machine guns in depth.

A bombardment without fog

At three in the morning, in darkness and silence, the German artillery opened fire from Ayette in the south to Oppy in the north. First mustard gas shells fell on the British battery positions, then the fire shifted to the trenches, command posts and roads, and finally the trench mortars thundered. Almost all the buried telephone cables were cut. The bombardment resembled that of 21 March, with one difference that was to decide the outcome: the night was cloudy, but there was no fog. The men in the front line, as the British official history records, quickly understood that “this time it was their turn”. A few minutes before the assault they saw in the grey light of morning a glinting line of German bayonets.

South of the Scarpe the first attacks set off as early as 5.50 a.m., earlier than the plan provided. The Germans came on in waves through the smoke and ran into the fire of machine guns and mortars that had survived the bombardment in underground shelters. After seven, however, they got through a small gap along the Arras–Cambrai road into the rear of the Scottish brigades, and by 8.30 a.m. the 3rd and 15th Divisions had lost the forward line of their defence zone. The fighting then turned into a series of short assaults: German soldiers in the front line fired green flares, the artillery laid fire on the indicated stretch, and when it lifted, the infantry moved forward again. A British witness called it an “object lesson” in infiltration. In the afternoon both divisions withdrew to the rear Green Line. Some units, such as the 9th Brigade, did so slowly, with open flanks, firing from every position and taking all their wounded with them. The village of Neuville-Vitasse fell only at 4.30 p.m. Half an hour later the attack on that sector died away.

Between Gavrelle and Oppy

The heaviest blow fell north of the river, where seven divisions struck the 4th and 56th Divisions at 7.30 a.m. It was a battlefield well known to the British: in the spring of 1917 they had fought bloodily for Gavrelle, Oppy and Rœux. No man’s land here was less than a hundred metres wide. The last message from one of the outposts read: “The Germans are on the wire. We will do what we can.” Two outposts the Germans had overlooked, Towy Post and Wood Post, held out until they were surrounded, and a handful of survivors fought their way back to their own lines. The German infantry, held up on the old trenches and wire, lost its barrage and went on across open ground, as the official history puts it, shoulder to shoulder through Gavrelle. The Londoners of the 1/16th and 1/5th Battalions of the London Regiment fired into these masses until the Germans worked round their flanks. The most dangerous breach opened in a shallow, marshy valley at the junction of the two divisions. The 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment, surrounded on two sides, was overwhelmed at about 10.30 a.m. Only 35 men came back from the front line to battalion headquarters.

At about noon a German aircraft with three officers aboard was shot down over Oppy. The pilot was carrying a map with the plan of attack. It showed that eight divisions were to break the front and a ninth was to take Arras itself, and that if this succeeded an attack was to be launched on the coalfield near Béthune. By then the plan was already out of date. By 1.45 p.m. both British divisions had withdrawn in good order to the front line of the battle zone and stood there on a continuous front. The artillery smashed German field guns that were being brought forward, and attacks at 4.15 and 5 p.m. collapsed under fire. In the afternoon it began to rain. In the course of that day the British field artillery fired some 750 rounds per 18-pounder gun, one of the highest expenditures of ammunition of the whole war, but the main reason for the success was held to be the well-concealed machine guns.

On the rest of the front of General Julian Byng’s Third Army, from Ayette through Bucquoy and Hébuterne to the Ancre valley near Albert, the Germans also attacked and were everywhere repulsed. At Ayette columns in march formation came over the horizon and advanced until the artillery broke them up. According to the German historian Wolfgang Foerster, the fighting stopped in the afternoon “partly on the orders of the commanders, partly as a result of the attitude of the troops themselves”. At six in the evening Byng gave the corps two divisions from the army reserve, the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions, in case the attack was renewed the next day. It was not.

Evening at headquarters

Field Marshal Douglas Haig could not yet know that he had won an important battle that day. He expected new attacks at Arras, and bad news was coming from the south. At 5.15 p.m. he received two notes from General Ferdinand Foch, who since the Doullens conference had been coordinating the action of the Allied armies before Amiens: in view of the fighting at Montdidier the French could not extend their front north to the Somme, and the remnants of the British Fifth Army had to hold where they stood, “at all costs”. A consolation was the news from London that every fit trained soldier would be sent to France.

Meanwhile at German headquarters a decision was taken that changed the course of the offensive. Rupprecht’s staff proposed renewing the attack at Arras after a few days, with new forces and after careful preparation. Ludendorff refused. On the evening of 28 March he ordered that Operation Mars was not to be renewed, that the Walküre attack was cancelled and that the Seventeenth Army was henceforth to make only local attacks. The main effort was to shift to where the front was still fluid: to the southern wing of the Second Army and to the Eighteenth Army, advancing on Amiens and the junction of the British and French forces. At the same time he ordered the Georgette attack on the river Lys, towards Hazebrouck, to be prepared as quickly as possible. The German author Gustaf Goes later wrote that as the sun set behind the rain clouds, the hopes the Supreme Command had placed in this attack faded too: Mars, “to which so much blood had been sacrificed”, had failed to break the British salient at Arras.

The British official history summed up the day briefly: in a defensive battle of this kind there is little to describe except the heavy losses inflicted on the enemy. The Germans never gave their total number. The preparation of Georgette was to take at least eight to ten days. The offensive at Amiens went on for another week, but no longer with any hope of smashing the British at one blow, and on 9 April the Battle of the Lys began.