Third Battle of the Scarpe begins

At 3.45 a.m. on 3 May 1917, more than an hour and a half before sunrise, the British infantry attacked on a broad front at Arras for the last time in this battle. On a front more than 14 miles (over 22 km) long, from the valley of the Sensée stream past Monchy-le-Preux and the river Scarpe to the village of Fresnoy, the divisions of General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army and General Henry Horne’s First Army went forward. At the same time, on the right flank, General Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army attacked the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt. By evening it was clear that the attack on the Scarpe had failed almost everywhere. The British official history (Cyril Falls) called it “nothing less than a disaster”, and the capture of Fresnoy by the Canadians the one bright spot of a day that many witnesses regarded as the blackest of the whole war. The British chronology of the war gives 2 May as the start of the battle, but the attack went in early on 3 May, as the official history and other accounts confirm.

Why attack again

When the orders for the attack were issued, the French were still fighting on the Aisne and the British were to support them by tying down German reserves at Arras. At the end of April the situation changed. The Nivelle Offensive had not brought a breakthrough, and on 29 April Philippe Pétain became chief of the general staff, which looked like the first step towards removing General Nivelle from command. On 30 April Field Marshal Douglas Haig told his army commanders that the hope of linking up with the French near Cambrai had gone, and set them a more modest objective: by the middle of May to take a convenient defensive line from Lens through Fresnoy to Riencourt. After that he intended to shift the main effort to Flanders. The attack was not called off, because the French were announcing further attacks for 4 and 5 May, and Haig wanted to urge them to keep fighting and could not break off the battle himself. After the Battle of Arleux on 28 April, which had yielded only one village, the command also believed that general attacks on a broad front succeeded better than local ones.

Haig himself was not with his armies on the day of the battle. On the evening of 2 May, after a final conversation with Allenby and Gough, he left for Paris for an Allied conference. On the morning of 3 May he discussed with Pétain the handing over of part of the front to the French, and in the evening he spoke with the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who promised to back before the French any plan agreed by Haig and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Falls observes that times had changed greatly since the Calais conference in February.

Attack in the dark

The trouble began with a compromise over the hour of the attack. The Australians at Bullecourt wanted to go in under cover of darkness, while the Third and First Armies needed light to attack. Haig ordered all the armies to go over simultaneously, at 3.45. The news reached brigade commanders only on the afternoon of 2 May, in some cases at dusk, so there was no time to prepare a night attack. The commander of XVII Corps, General Charles Fergusson, whose divisions were once again to attack the ruins of Rœux, protested in vain. The moon, near full, set 16 minutes before zero hour. On many sectors the soldiers waiting in the assembly trenches stood out against it, and the Germans, who were expecting an attack, smothered them with fire. At Monchy-le-Preux gas and high-explosive shells fell on the British lines even before the attack, and many infantrymen went forward in their masks.

In the darkness chaos set in. Battalions lost direction, became mixed up with their neighbours and lost the creeping barrage. In the 9th Division part of one battalion took the British front line for the German one and began firing at it. In the 18th Division a tank reversed through the ranks of the attackers, and when someone shouted “Retire!”, the leading companies turned back. Units that passed through the German front line often failed to notice Germans hidden in dugouts and shell holes and were then fired on from behind. The same complaint recurred in reports after the battle. One of the Scottish battalions of the 9th Division wrote that everyone had been confident of success, the men rested and fit, and that they would have taken their objectives but for the “fatal mistake” of fixing zero hour 25 minutes before dawn.

Counter-attacks

At first light it turned out that many units had taken the German front line and some had got far ahead. In the south the 55th Brigade of the 18th Division took Chérisy, and parties from two of its battalions reached the final objective beyond the Sensée stream. Londoners of the 56th Division took the buildings of Cavalry Farm on the Cambrai road. North of the Scarpe isolated parties from the 4th Division broke through beyond Rœux, and one of the wounded later said he had seen “a large village” below, probably Plouvain. Then the German counter-attacks came. The Germans gave up their front line easily but at once struck at the advanced parties, often with no more than one or two companies. According to German accounts, three platoons were enough to retake Chérisy. A counter-attack concealed in the mist over the Sensée valley drove back the men of the 18th Division, and by about 10.30 a.m. many of them were back in their starting positions. British observers saw whole groups of infantry surrendering in the valley.

The German artillery fired all day, chiefly at the infantry. Veterans said they had never been through such heavy shelling, which according to the official history went on almost without a break for about fifteen hours. On the 56th Division’s sector one brigade was shattered by fire from a German trench that had survived the bombardment, its garrison firing while standing shoulder to shoulder. At Rœux the German 25th Infantry Regiment, earlier withdrawn as exhausted, counter-attacked along the river, took 358 prisoners and freed a company of sappers that was still holding out in the village. In the afternoon about a hundred men from four battalions of the 4th Division, without officers, were still clinging to the first objective. After dark those who had not been taken prisoner crept back to their own lines. At Oppy the 31st Division broke in the dark into a wood choked with felled trees, but its men were driven out or captured. The Germans even took the windmill at Gavrelle, which was, however, retaken by a company of a Durham Light Infantry battalion.

Evening attempts to renew the attack, made mainly to rescue cut-off parties, for the most part failed. On the whole front of the Third Army the only gain proved to be a strip of the German front line, about 500 yards deep on a front of 1,000 yards, taken by the 36th Brigade of the 12th Division south of the Scarpe. After dark its men cleared the captured dugouts. In one of them the Germans were holding Corporal George Jarratt of the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, and several wounded men. When a grenade was thrown into the dugout, Jarratt stamped on it with both feet. The wounded were saved, while he himself lost his legs and died. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

The Canadians at Fresnoy

The fighting on the left flank of the First Army went differently. The Canadians, alone, treated the darkness as an ally. The Germans of the 15th Reserve Division were expecting an attack, but not before dawn, and in the gloom their rifle fire was ineffective. The 1st Canadian Brigade of General Arthur Currie’s division attacked with three battalions. The Toronto battalion seized the copse in front of the village, where 75 Germans surrendered in dugouts, and before sunrise took the trench behind it. The eastern Ontario battalion worked round three machine guns in the ruins, passed through the village and was on the final objective by about 4.30 a.m., taking more than 220 prisoners. On the left flank the 6th Brigade of the 2nd Canadian Division covered the attack from the direction of Acheville. The Winnipeg battalion took most of its allotted trench, and Lieutenant Robert Combe, the only surviving officer of his company, held the captured stretch with a handful of men, for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

At about 10.30 a.m. the Germans began to assemble for a counter-attack on the ridge in front of Fresnoy, and in the afternoon they struck once more, helped by a Guards battalion. Both attacks were broken up by Canadian machine-gun and artillery fire. On the neighbouring sector a composite brigade of the British 2nd Division, made up of the remnants of three brigades, bled heavily but, together with the Canadians, built a block in the trench, protecting their right flank against Germans advancing from Oppy. The Canadian Corps lost 1,474 men on 3 May and took 491 Germans prisoner. According to the history of the German regiment that was to retake the village a few days later, “a stone had fallen out” of the German defensive wall and had to be put back at once.

The day’s reckoning

By the evening of 3 May the divisions of the Third and First Armies were mostly back in their starting positions. The official history gives no total for the day’s losses, only figures for individual units. The 4th Division lost more than 2,000 men, the 31st Division about 1,900, and one of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers battalions of the 9th Division more than four hundred, practically ceasing to exist. In many battalions a large part of the losses were missing, in practice prisoners. Darkness was not the only cause of the defeat. Falls draws attention to the exhaustion of divisions that had been fighting since April, the poor training of the drafts, who were unable to beat off counter-attacks, and the new German tactics of defence in depth. Of the eleven divisions which, by his count, attacked on the Scarpe, only two were fresh. The Germans stopped the attack without using their reserve divisions.

The same day at Bullecourt the Australian 2nd Division broke into the Hindenburg Line and held a foothold that was fiercely fought over for the next two weeks. On the Scarpe, apart from Fresnoy, there was nothing left to hold or to develop. On 4 May the last parties were being withdrawn from no man’s land, and in Paris Haig was agreeing a new strategy with the French.