Germans take Bapaume and Péronne

On 24 March 1918, Palm Sunday, the fourth day of the German Operation Michael passed. Fog again lay in the valleys until 9–10 a.m. A British chronology of the war records under this date that German troops took Bapaume and Péronne. In reality the two towns did not fall on the same day, and neither was taken by storm. The British Fifth Army had already left Péronne in the afternoon of 23 March, and the Third Army gave up Bapaume without a fight late in the evening of 24 March. According to the histories of their own regiments, the Germans entered it only at about noon on 25 March. The loss of the two towns nevertheless closed a day on which the divisions of General Julian Byng retreated across the battlefield of 1916 and the Germans forced their way into the gap between two British armies. That night, at Dury near Amiens, a conversation took place after which Field Marshal Douglas Haig concluded that the Allies’ common front might fall apart.

Towns taken a year before

Both towns had special significance for the British. Bapaume, a road junction on the plateau above the Somme, had been the objective of the whole Battle of the Somme in 1916, one the British army had failed to reach in four and a half months of fighting. It took the town only on 17 March 1917, almost without a fight, when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line. A day later the British entered Péronne, an old fortified town on the Somme. Now, a year and a week later, both were returning to German hands.

Péronne was abandoned in haste, but in good order. On 23 March crowds of refugees, transport and ambulance columns evacuating the hospitals and dressing stations passed through the town, which formed a defile more than 2 kilometres long. The British official history praises the traffic control, but many stores, even the army canteens, had to be set on fire. Cover was provided by battalions of the 16th and 39th Divisions fighting near Doingt and on the hill of Mont-Saint-Quentin. In the afternoon, between 3 and 6 p.m., men of the 16th Division crossed the Somme by a bridge known as Bristol Bridge and dug in on the west bank near Biaches. Behind them sappers destroyed the bridges. The official history records an anecdote that circulated among the soldiers, who believed that the Germans in Péronne had been held up by cases of whisky abandoned in an officers’ canteen. On 24 March the enemy fired across to the other bank from buildings right on the water’s edge, and at about 6.30 p.m. a German battalion, which during the night had built a footbridge beside the destroyed road bridge south of the town, crossed the river man by man and established itself behind the ramparts of the old fort. A counter-attack by a battalion of the Durham Light Infantry failed to dislodge it.

Across the old battlefield

North of Péronne the most dangerous episode of the day took place. In the morning the Germans drove the left wing of the Fifth Army back towards Combles and Maricourt, and the right wing of the Third Army, withdrawing from the Flesquières salient, did not manage to link up with it. By 10 a.m. the gap between the armies had grown to more than 6 kilometres. All day German units advanced west through it, taking in turn Sailly-Saillisel, Combles, Morval, Lesbœufs and Ginchy, villages for which the British had fought for weeks in the autumn of 1916. The South African Brigade, which was to stop them at Marrières Wood, was almost completely destroyed after a seven-hour defence. At 3.45 p.m. Byng ordered the right wing of the Third Army to fall back in a wide arc behind Bapaume.

The retreat across the wasteland was like no earlier one. Telephone communications broke down, and orders reached the brigades hours late or not at all. By battalions and companies the soldiers walked west through shell holes, overgrown trenches and remnants of wire, passing places where their comrades had died two years before. Nothing was left of the villages but names on the map, water was scarce, and some units were lucky enough to come across food dumps. In the evening, as the official history admits, the spirit of the men of the 47th Division for once wavered a little. Until then they had believed that the retreat was going “according to plan” and that beyond the wasteland they would pass through the lines of fresh divisions, whose names they had even been told. Instead they were still in the front line.

The Germans too could barely move. Their artillery could not keep up across the devastated ground, and the heavy guns mostly shelled crossroads and the sites of former villages by the map. British prisoners later said that the enemy advanced slowly because he feared traps, the roads were blocked by columns of infantry, guns and transport, supply had broken down, and one German staff officer asked a prisoner where exactly he was. Even so, the commander of the German Second Army, General Georg von der Marwitz, reported in the evening that the enemy had been beaten wherever he had been met.

Bapaume

Byng’s order meant giving up Bapaume. The commander of the Third Army pointed out to an envoy from GHQ that roads ran out of the town in every direction and that the Péronne–Bapaume–Arras highway linked the two wings of his army. In the morning the Germans did not attack here with infantry, as they feared a British counter-attack. In the afternoon, however, they broke into the position near Beugny, and at about 5 p.m. they entered Frémicourt, east of the town. Bapaume was shelled until 10 p.m. The last British brigades of the 19th Division left its eastern outskirts between 9.30 and 10.30 p.m., disturbed by no one. The official history writes that such silence reigned in the German lines that, apart from the rumble of transport, almost nothing could be heard.

German accounts presented it differently. According to them Bapaume was taken “after heavy fighting” by the 1st Guard Reserve Division and the 20th Division, and its capture was the most important event of the day. The regimental histories confirm, however, that the town was occupied without a fight. British patrols found it empty at 5 a.m. on 25 March, and the German 2nd Guard Reserve Regiment entered it only at 12.30 p.m. North of Bapaume VI Corps beat off attacks near Mory and Ervillers all day, and at Arras the front hardly moved.

The night at Dury

Haig spent the day gathering news. His chief of staff, General Herbert Lawrence, in the post since January, visited in the afternoon the headquarters of General Hubert Gough and the Fifth Army’s corps commanders, as well as the French General Fayolle, who declared that he would get no more troops for four days. At 8 p.m. Haig was at Byng’s headquarters and ordered him to hold on with his left wing at Arras at all costs. He wanted to bring reserves down from the north and strike southwards with them if the Germans advanced on Amiens. Everything depended, however, on what the French would do south of the Somme.

At 11 p.m. the French commander-in-chief, General Philippe Pétain, came to Dury, where Haig had his advanced headquarters, for the second time in two days. According to the British note, written down immediately, he was visibly agitated and very anxious. Haig asked him to concentrate as many troops as possible near Amiens, astride the Somme. Pétain replied that the British were in a difficult position, but that he himself expected a German offensive in Champagne at any moment and did not believe the main blow had yet fallen. Even so, he promised Fayolle all available troops. He also handed Haig his order to the French armies. Its first aim was “above all to keep the French armies together as a single compact whole”, and only the second, “if possible”, contact with the British. The French Reserve Army Group was, if necessary, to fall back to the Noyon–Roye line, and the British Fifth Army to the river Avre between Montdidier and Amiens.

Haig asked whether Pétain intended to abandon the British right wing. According to the British account the Frenchman nodded in silence and then said that it was “the only thing possible if the enemy compels the Allies to retreat further”. Haig concluded that the French were concerned above all with covering Paris, which since the previous day had been shelled by a long-range gun. He telegraphed London for the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Henry Wilson, and the minister Lord Alfred Milner to come to France at once. According to his later account he added that unless General Ferdinand Foch or some other determined general who would fight took over the direction of operations in France, there would be a disaster. Milner was in fact already on his way, as the Prime Minister had sent him to Paris that same day, before Haig’s message arrived.

The assessment of this conversation is disputed to this day. French records suggest that Pétain misread the situation. On the morning of 24 March, through a liaison officer, he asked President Raymond Poincaré to have the government bring pressure on Haig, who in his view was stubbornly pulling “to the north”, or else the armies would separate. Some historians, notably Elizabeth Greenhalgh, believe on the other hand that Haig added the version of Pétain ready to abandon the British, and of the telegram demanding a unified command, later, when rewriting his diary. The manuscript from those days lacks these details. Whoever was right, on the night of 24–25 March it became clear that the two armies might move apart in opposite directions. The question of joint direction of the armies, which the February general reserve plan had not settled, suddenly became urgent. Two days later the Allies met at Doullens.