Second Battle of Albert begins

On 21 August 1918, at 4.55 a.m., General Julian Byng’s British Third Army went into the attack on a front about 14 km long, from Miraumont on the river Ancre to Moyenneville south of Arras. Two of its corps, IV and VI, advanced behind a barrage, without any preliminary bombardment, with more than a hundred tanks, in fog so thick that according to some accounts one could see barely a few metres. By noon they had taken the German forward zone, captured Bucquoy, Puisieux, Achiet-le-Petit, Courcelles and Moyenneville and come up against the embankment of the Albert–Arras railway, on which the Germans had their main line of resistance. There, when the fog lifted, the attack stopped. It was the first day of the Battle of Albert and the start of the second great British blow after the victory at Amiens on 8 August.

Why Albert

After three days of the Battle of Amiens the British Fourth Army and the French First Army had stalled in front of the old trenches of 1916. Marshal Ferdinand Foch wanted them to keep attacking regardless, but on 15 August Douglas Haig refused and won him over to a different plan. The offensive was to shift north of the Somme, to the front of the Third Army, where the ground was less devastated, good for tanks, and the Germans did not expect an attack. A blow from this sector to the south-east could outflank the German defences on the Somme. On 19 August Haig rebuked Byng for an over-cautious plan and told him to think of a rapid advance to Bapaume, and on 20 August Foch wrote that he was counting on an attack by the Third Army “carried out with violence”. It was agreed that on 21 August the Third Army would take the railway line, on 22 August the Fourth Army would retake Albert, and on 23 August both armies would strike together.

The preparations were kept secret. Byng’s orders were known only to staff officers and a few engineers. The Germans seemed to suspect nothing, but on the night of 20–21 August they shelled the rear areas with their ordinary, routine fire, including gas shells. The 23rd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, which had to cross contaminated ground on its way to the front, lost nearly four hundred men gassed. At Beaumont-Hamel the 2nd Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, two hours before the attack, endured a mustard-gas bombardment that put about a hundred men out of action.

The fog

From the night onwards a thick fog lay over the whole battlefield, made thicker still by the smoke of the British barrage. It helped the infantry, because the German machine-gunners could not see their targets and fired blind, while the attackers got to within a few paces of their nests. It hampered the tanks, however. Many of them lost their way: of the 18 machines allotted to the two leading Guards battalions at the start of the attack only six reached them, and the men of the 3rd Division neither saw nor heard a single one. The infantry also lost direction. In the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, the leading companies found themselves behind the support companies, and the first to reach the railway was the platoon of Lieutenant Duff Cooper, later Secretary of State for War, with one tank. According to the citation for the Distinguished Service Order he received for this, Cooper on his own forced eighteen Germans with two machine guns to surrender after four of his men had been shot down, and then with a six-man patrol took another 89 prisoner.

According to the German official history, at 5 a.m. “a powerful barrage in thick fog” opened the battle between Hamel and Moyenneville, and the German units, as planned, abandoned the forward zone, about 3 km deep. The order did not reach everyone, however. The 4th Bavarian Division had been in the line for only three days, and its forward battalions stood and fought west of Achiet-le-Petit, where they were cut off in the fog.

VI Corps

On the left flank, General Aylmer Haldane’s VI Corps attacked with the 2nd Division and the Guards. The first objective, the village of Moyenneville and the ridge south-west of it, was taken without difficulty, against the resistance of only isolated machine-gun nests. At 5.40 a.m. two brigades of the 3rd Division passed through the lines of the 2nd Division, and a battalion of Grenadiers through the lines of the Guards. The 7th Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, and the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers reached the railway at 8.45 a.m. On the corps’ right flank the 1st Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers, met strong resistance on an open slope and did not reach the line. The Guards stood on the embankment at about 11.30 a.m. The corps took some 1,200 prisoners. When the fog lifted, its line came under continuous artillery and machine-gun fire, and there was no sign of a German collapse that tanks and cavalry could have exploited. A patrol of Whippets drove round the village of Gomiecourt and came back, losing two tanks to hits after they had already returned behind the British lines. Two cavalry regiments, the 8th Hussars and the 4th Dragoon Guards, waited all day near Courcelles for a chance to pursue. At 7 p.m. the brigade was withdrawn. It had lost 98 men and 163 horses without achieving anything.

IV Corps

In the centre General George Harper’s IV Corps attacked on a broad front before Bucquoy, Puisieux and Miraumont. The 37th Division, with tanks keeping close behind the barrage, took Bucquoy despite the stubbornness of a few machine-gun nests, and captured 362 prisoners for a loss of 194 men. New Zealanders of the 3rd Rifle Brigade took Puisieux, outflanking the village from north and south, and then, guided in the fog by the sound of firing, attacked the German positions beyond the village and were on their objective by 6 a.m. On the right flank the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division formed a front above the Ancre valley.

At 6.25 a.m. the 5th Division and the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, made up largely of sailors fighting on land, passed through the lines of the 37th Division. The fog was now even thicker, and from 7.37 a.m. the infantry advanced without a barrage, because the field guns that were to move forward had been held up by shelling and German air attacks. After fighting in Logeast Wood the brigades of the 63rd Division came under fire from Achiet-le-Grand and its cemetery. Only one company of the Anson Battalion and the Hood Battalion reached the railway, and the rest, losing many men and several tanks knocked out at close range by German artillery, had to fall back. In the 5th Division the 15th Brigade with six tanks took Achiet-le-Petit at about 8.30 a.m., helped by a battery of German 150 mm howitzers captured along the way. Its battalions, the 1st Cheshires and the 16th Royal Warwicks, crossed the railway and at about 9.30 a.m. reported by carrier pigeon that they were on the third objective, a kilometre further on.

At about 11 a.m., when the fog lifted, the tanks that had come out onto the line found themselves under direct fire from German guns and were knocked out. German companies from the artillery protection line near Achiet-le-Grand counter-attacked and pushed the British back towards Achiet-le-Petit, taking about a hundred prisoners. According to the history of the German 91st Reserve Infantry Regiment, its mortars and an anti-aircraft gun knocked out seven tanks on the ridge beyond Achiet-le-Petit, and by evening its III Battalion was down to thirty men. By evening IV Corps had advanced about 5 km and taken some 1,400 prisoners, but nowhere had it held on to the railway.

On the Ancre

On the right flank General Cameron Shute’s V Corps was only to support its neighbours and attempt a crossing. Here the Ancre was more an obstacle than a river. Its canalised, shell-damaged channel had flooded the valley floor to a width of about 300 metres, turning it into a swamp full of fallen trees, branches and reeds, interlaced with barbed wire as well. The 21st Division, after a short, accurate bombardment, took the village of Beaucourt-sur-l’Ancre with 93 prisoners, losing thirty men. Further south the crossings failed. Two companies of the Northumberland Fusiliers crossed the river only at 3.30 p.m., and companies of the Leicestershire Regiment that had slipped across to the far bank in the fog had to withdraw when it cleared. Patrols of the 38th (Welsh) Division searched in vain all day for a crossing. In the afternoon Byng decided that the Welsh would cross the Ancre only through Albert, once the town had been taken by the Fourth Army the next day.

Evening

By evening the Third Army had advanced several kilometres and, according to Haig’s dispatch, taken more than 2,000 prisoners. Before it lay the intact main German line of resistance on the railway, which the British had breached only in places. The British official history nevertheless judged the day a success: the fog had allowed the infantry to approach the German machine guns and outflank them at far lower cost than in good visibility. It was surprising, too, that the success had been won by soldiers half of whom were eighteen and nineteen years old, untrained in open warfare. The Germans considered the day their victory. According to their official history the attack “exhausted itself in the first wave” and stalled on the Miraumont–Courcelles railway and on the Ancre without the main reserves having been used. As a precaution, however, the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division was ordered to march to Sapignies, and the 52nd Division, one of the best German divisions, which by chance had already been entrained in Flanders on 20 August, arrived near Cambrai.

The commander of the 17th Army, General Otto von Below, convinced that the British had attempted a breakthrough and failed, hastily ordered a counter-attack on a broad front for the following day. On the morning of 22 August German troops struck at the 21st, 42nd, 5th and 63rd Divisions and were everywhere repulsed, leaving many prisoners behind. In the 5th Division’s sector two scouts of the Devonshire Regiment captured 242 Germans who had stumbled into their trench in the fog and could not see how few their opponents were. Lance Corporal George Onions received the Victoria Cross for this. That same day the Fourth Army joined the battle south of the Ancre, and on 23 August the attack already covered the whole front from the Somme to Arras.