Amiens in the First World War

Amiens, the capital of the Somme department, was above all a railway junction during the war. The line linking Paris with the north of France ran through the city, and the French and British armies met in its neighbourhood. In 1914 the Germans held it for less than two weeks; after that, for almost four years, it was a rear base for the front. In the spring of 1918 it became the goal of the great German offensive, and on 8 August the attack that began Germany’s defeat set off from Amiens.

Base and brief occupation (1914)

For part of August 1914 Amiens was the advanced base of the British Expeditionary Force, and the British 7th General Hospital worked in the city. On 13 August the first squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps, which had flown across the Channel, landed near it. At the end of the month, as the Allies fell back after the Battle of the Frontiers, a new French army, the future Sixth Army of Maunoury, began to assemble around Amiens.

But Alexander von Kluck’s German First Army was moving too fast. The French blew the bridges over the Somme and withdrew, and on 31 August soldiers of the IV Reserve Corps entered the city unopposed. They took hostages from the town council and demanded huge supplies, among them 100,000 cigars. After the defeat on the Marne the small garrison left on 11 September, and the next day French territorial divisions marched in. The British chronology records the recapture of the city under 13 September.

In the autumn the Race to the Sea passed through Amiens: troops sent by Joseph Joffre to outflank the Germans from the west detrained around it, and east of the city the First Battle of Picardy was fought. The front came to rest a short distance from Amiens, and German troops never entered it again.

A city behind the lines (1915–1917)

In the years that followed Amiens lived off the army. Soldiers filled the streets, shops, cafés and hotels, and hospitals worked in the city: in 1916 a British casualty clearing station, and from July 1916 to May 1917 a New Zealand stationary hospital. In the summer of 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Australian divisions were moved to the Amiens area, and they soon attacked at Pozières. The nearness of the front made supply difficult, and the inhabitants went short of basic goods. From 1915 bombs fell on the city regularly.

Amiens was also a natural meeting place for the commanders of the two armies. On 7 September 1917 Ferdinand Foch, Douglas Haig and Philippe Pétain conferred here.

Goal of the German offensive (spring 1918)

On 21 March 1918 the Germans launched Operation Michael and drove the British back on the Somme. Soon Erich Ludendorff concentrated his forces on Amiens, the junction through which the communications between the British and French armies ran. Haig wanted to cover the city at all costs, and on 26 March at the Doullens conference Foch argued that the fight must be made in front of Amiens. That day he was entrusted with coordinating the action of the Allied armies.

Panic broke out in the city. According to the account of a Red Cross nurse, 11,000 refugees from the areas near the front passed through Amiens on 22–27 March, the inhabitants besieged the police stations for safe-conducts, and the banks prepared to evacuate. In March the city emptied.

In April German shells and bombs destroyed many buildings. A Havas agency correspondent, returning to the city after two weeks away, saw tram wires torn down and a few collapsed houses in every street. The cathedral survived, although the shelling damaged its windows and masonry.

The Germans were stopped close to the city. On 4 April their attack on the Avre broke down in front of Villers-Bretonneux, and on 24 April they took the little town, but during the night the Australians retook it. According to the British official history the Germans then came to about 13 kilometres from the city, the closest they got in 1918. A few days earlier, on 21 April, Manfred von Richthofen was killed over the Somme valley, and the Allies buried him with honours at Bertangles near Amiens. All summer a German railway gun shelled the city.

The Battle of Amiens and the return of the inhabitants

On 8 August 1918 Canadians, Australians and British of Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, supported by the French First Army, attacked in fog with more than four hundred tanks. In the Battle of Amiens, which lasted until 11 August, they drove the Germans away from the city and freed the railway to Paris. Ludendorff called 8 August “the black day of the German army”, and the battle began the Hundred Days Offensive.

The inhabitants returned in August. In the middle of the month a British journalist described a Mass in the cathedral, its windows blown out, amid rubble and fragments of coloured glass, attended by a handful of returning refugees. After the war the Imperial War Graves Commission placed in the cathedral a tablet to the memory of the 600,000 soldiers from Great Britain and Ireland who fell in France and Belgium.