Germans withdraw from the Ancre

On 25 February 1917 soldiers of the British Fifth Army entered Serre without a fight, a village on the river Ancre against which attack after attack had broken for more than half a year. South of the river they occupied Pys, reached the outskirts of Miraumont and got to Warlencourt. The Germans, who had held these positions since the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, had simply vanished. Along a stretch of more than ten kilometres, from Le Transloy to Serre, the British had almost no contact with them anywhere. Nobody knew it yet, but this was the first step of the great German retreat to a new position, which the British called the Hindenburg Line.

Winter fighting on the Ancre

After the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916, the front on the Ancre did not fall quiet. General Hubert Gough, commander of the Fifth Army, which had taken Beaumont-Hamel and Beaucourt in the Battle of the Ancre, wanted to attack in the spring the fortified German line in front of Bapaume, which ran from Le Transloy through Loupart Wood to Achiet-le-Petit. To get close to it, from 11 January 1917 his divisions took one trench after another in the river valley in a series of small attacks. In early February the Germans abandoned Grandcourt, which was threatened with encirclement. On 17 February, in thaw and fog, the British struck along both banks of the Ancre at the high ground above Miraumont. The attack gained some ground but did not reach its main objective, and it cost more than 2,700 men. According to the British official history, the Germans had probably been warned by a deserter.

These battles, however, weighed more than the British thought. In winter the German 1st Army of General Fritz von Below sat in flooded shell holes and the remains of trenches, and its divisions were exhausted after the Battle of the Somme. As early as 4 February Kaiser Wilhelm II had approved a plan to withdraw the whole front between Arras and Soissons to a new position, the Siegfriedstellung, which had been under construction far behind the front since the autumn. Under the plan, code-named “Alberich”, the troops were not to move until mid-March, after five weeks of removing materials and devastating the abandoned territory. But after the attack at Miraumont the army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, decided that the 1st Army would not withstand another month of such pressure. On 18 February he ordered it to fall back a few kilometres to the first intermediate position, which the Germans called Riegel I. The infantry withdrew on the night of 22–23 February, leaving a few posts on the old line that sent up flares.

Discovery

The British had a warning. On 20 and 21 February they intercepted messages ordering German wireless stations behind the front to dismantle their equipment and prepare to move. The information, however, was not passed on to the troops at the front. The retreat was discovered by patrols. On the afternoon of 22 February Lieutenant F. L. Lucas of a Royal West Kent battalion of the 18th Division, reconnoitring while shrapnel from his own artillery burst behind him, found that there were no Germans on the ridge in front of Petit Miraumont. The next morning soldiers of his brigade occupied the ridge without a fight, and in the German trench below they saw fires, as if dugouts were burning. At 9.30 a.m. on 24 February II Corps headquarters received a report that patrols had passed through the German trench and were heading towards Petit Miraumont.

More astonishing news came from Serre. On the morning of 24 February three patrols of a Manchester battalion of the 7th Division went by different routes towards the village, passed it and reached the Serre–Hébuterne road, almost 800 metres deep into the German positions, without seeing a single German or hearing a shot. Their commanding officer, Colonel W. Norman, who had watched them cross the ridge, wrote in his report: “The above report seems almost incredible, but I am of opinion that it is reliable.” At the same time the brigade major of a brigade of the 62nd Division, Captain C. H. Hoare, worried by the silence at the front, went out almost one and a half kilometres beyond the outposts without drawing fire. In the afternoon the brigade sent a whole battalion forward. When Gough, visiting the brigadier’s dugout, heard that the battalion had advanced almost a kilometre, his first thought was that the brigadier had lost his mind. The news of Serre did not reach V Corps headquarters until 4 p.m. Its commander, General Edward Fanshawe, at once ordered strong patrols to be sent out, and advanced guards to move off at dawn on 25 February.

25 February

On the morning of 25 February the troops of the Fifth Army advanced in fog. At 8.20 a.m. a battalion of the Buffs of the 18th Division occupied Pys, taking seven prisoners. One of its patrols entered Irles, but was driven out by fire. It turned out that a German rearguard was sitting in the village cellars. North of the river, units of the 63rd Division reached the brickworks near Miraumont. A brigade of the 7th Division occupied Serre, and one of the brigades of the 62nd Division, under fire for the first time, spent the whole day beyond the village, although its neighbours thought it was somewhere behind them. A Gloucestershire battalion of the 19th Division lost its way in the fog and had to be reassembled at midday. According to the dispatch of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, by the evening of 25 February the whole first German position from Gueudecourt to Serre was in British hands, with Warlencourt, Pys, Miraumont and Serre. The Germans defended themselves only with machine guns at selected points and shelled the abandoned ground.

The Australians of I ANZAC Corps paid the highest price that day. During the night, on the orders of General William Birdwood, they unhesitatingly occupied the abandoned trenches and set up posts around Warlencourt. In the morning the 2nd Australian Division, believing that Malt Trench, the last position before Riegel I, was weakly held, attacked it without artillery support. The leading companies were pinned down by machine-gun fire, and the few soldiers who got past the wire had to withdraw. The division lost about 170 men in twenty-four hours. On the right flank, near Le Transloy, the Australians ran into a strong and alert garrison. It was clear that for the time being the Germans were not falling back further than Riegel I.

What next

Among the soldiers, the first surprise gave way to elation at the thought that they would at last leave the muddy desert of the battlefield. The commanders understood, however, that if the Germans fell back all the way to the new position, they would shorten their front and gain reserves, which would affect the plans for the Allied spring offensive being prepared by the French commander-in-chief, General Robert Nivelle. There were even fears that the retreat was a trap heralding a German counter-attack. On 25 February itself, the day after the retreat on the Ancre was discovered, British airmen managed for the first time to trace the course of the new line along the entire length of the British front, as far as Saint-Quentin. That day they also reported numerous fires behind the German front, stretching all the way to the new fortifications. Gough ordered his corps only to regain contact with the enemy as quickly as possible.

The pursuit was slow. The roads across the old battlefield, softened by the thaw, could barely be made out, and guns had to be hauled along wooden troughs. In the following days the British took Puisieux, Gommecourt and the villages in front of Loupart Wood, and in mid-March the Germans began to withdraw along the whole front from Arras to Soissons. On 17 March the Australians entered Bapaume, the objective over which the Battle of the Somme had been fought, and within a few days the Allies stood before the Hindenburg Line. They were gaining ground for which a year earlier they would have paid with tens of thousands of casualties. This time, however, they found a devastated country, with destroyed villages, felled trees and filled-in wells.