The Results of the German Offensive of March 21.
The great German attack was over. The roads to the south-west were barred, as those to the south, at Noyon, had been, and Gen. Debeney was able to address the following order to his troops:
Soldiers of the 1st Army,
You have carried out your arduous task well.Your tenacious resistance and vigorous counter-attacks have broken the onrush of the invader, and ensured the liaison with our brave Allies, the British. The great battle has begun. At this solemn hour, the whole country is with us. The soul of the Mother-land uplifts our hearts.
On April 4, the great battle—of which the battles for Amiens, Montdidier and Compiègne were only episodes—came virtually to an end.
For ten days, after breaking the Allies' front, the Germans were able to change the war of positions into one of movement, but by a tremendous effort the French Army threw itself across their path and, as at Verdun in 1916, checkmated them.
This warfare in the open did not give the results expected by the enemy, who failed either to separate the Allies, or to rout them. On the contrary, by bringing about Allied unity of command, they strengthened the hands of their adversaries, to their own undoing.
Although the Germans captured Montdidier, they failed to reach either Amiens or Compiègne, and whereas the British, at first severely shaken, fully recovered, whilst only a portion of the French reserves were engaged, the enemy used up a considerable part of their finest troops and shock divisions, mown down in tens of thousands along the road to Paris, by the Allies' machine-guns and field artillery.
By March 31, ninety enemy divisions had been engaged, twenty-five of which had to be withdrawn on account of excessive casualties, some of them (e. g. the 45th Reserve, certain units of the 2nd Guards and 5th Infantry) having lost 50% of their effective strength. The casualties of the 6th, 195th, 4th, and 119th divisions attained 75%. At the very lowest estimation, the Germans lost at least 250,000 men.
The Kronprinz had promised his men that the Easter bells would ring in the long-expected peace, but Easter Sunday found the Allies more closely united than ever, awaiting with confidence the end of the battle, and determined to win through to victory.
The check of April 4 saw the end of von Hutier's reserves. All the divisions of the XVIIIth Army had been engaged, most of them with heavy casualties. Unwilling to take any of the divisions from the army group under the Bavarian Crown Prince—reserved for the proposed offensive in Flanders—or the inferior and less trained troops on the Champagne and Lorraine fronts, the German High Command, realising that the struggle must develop into one of attrition, like the first battle of the Somme, gave up for the time being all idea of an offensive on the Somme-Oise front.
A document of the German XVIIIth Army refers to the operations prior to April 6 under the name of "The Battle of Disruption" and to those which followed, under the name of "The Fighting on the Avre and in the region of Montdidier-Noyon."
The divisions forming von Hutier's shock troops were withdrawn fairly quickly. By the end of May, only two out of the twenty-three divisions which, on March 21, had formed the XVIIIth Army, were still in line on the Moreuil-Oise front.
British Batteries in action in the open.
(Photo Imperial War Museum).
British troops going up the line near Albert.
(Photo Imperial War Museum).
Amiens. Shell bursting in the Rue de Beauvais.
(Photo Imperial War Museum).