The Hindenburg Line
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CHAPTER XX THE HINDENBURG LINE HAIGhad been warned from London on September 1st that the War Cabinet, disturbed by industrial troubles,l would be rendered very anxious if he incurred heavy loss in attacking the Hindenburg Line ~eritkoid success. As in such warfare no commander could attack with certainty of success this meant that he must attack, if at all, at his own risk. He was careful not to authorise action till his army commanders were fully confident of success, but he himself felt certain that now, if ever, was the time to overcome this great obstacle. He, first of all the Allied leaders, believed that by sufficient effort now the war could be won in 1918.~Consequently, on the day following the warning he attacked the junction of the Hinden- burg and Drocourt-QuCant lines in the north. This, for the time being, was his main thrust and was pushed towards Cam- brai. Next, on September 15th, when facing or approaching the Hindenburg Line along the Scheldt and Nord Canals3 hc decided- After Rawlinson’s attack (probably on the 18th) we should know more about the nature of the Hindenburg Line Defences and how they are held. My present view is that the main attack will be made by Rawlinson against the canal tunnel with the object of reaching Busigny. Apart from Eaig’s statements the student can always tell which operations he regarded as the main ones by noting to what sector he directed the cavalry, which, as ever since the Somme offensive in 1916, he was still hoping to “put through.” Rawlinson had begun to plan provisionally the attack on the Hindenburg main line even before his army assaulted the ‘The London police strike occurred on Aug. 30 and the railway strike on Sep. a4. ’On Aug. 21 and Sep. 8 he told this to Winston Churchill. ‘At Goureaucourt on Third Army’s front the Hindenburg Line crossed from the Scheldt Canal to the Nord Canal. 941 942 THE A.I.F. IN FRANCE [Sept., 1918 Hindenburg Outpost-Line on September 18th. Unquestionably he wished to make the main attack with the Australian Corps. But Monash told him that the battle of the 18th would be the last that the 1st and 4th Divisions would be fit to undertake before being given the period of rest that was obviously their due.' The 3rd and 5th Divisions had been relieved only a week ago and required at least another week to fit them for a big attack. As for the 2nd, after the capture of Mont St. Quentin Monash had promised to rest it until late in September. Thus when the 1st and 4th Divisions were with- drawn soon after September 18th there must elapse about a week before the 3rd and 5th Divisions, or the 2nd behind them, would be ready to attack. Monash told Rawlinson that if the Australian Corps was to hold the front and then attack the main defences in the tunnel sector-where, as all authorities agreed, they had been specially strengthened because of the absence of the canal obstacle and the consequent probability of attack there-he must ask for the loan of two strong divisions to replace the 1st and 4th. To this suggestion Rawlinson made the highly interesting answer that he might be able to obtain, very soon, the I1 Ameri- can Corps of two divisions-27th and 30th. These were the only American divisions now remaining in the British zone. They had been training with the Second British Army and were now in G.H.Q. Reserve, their Corps being available for any service desired. They would have to be supplied with artillery as their own was training elsewhere; also they had never yet been engaged in a major battle. Would Monash accept the responsibility for taking them under his command and employing them to reinforce his corps for breaking through the Hindenburg Line? hlonash leapt at the proposal. I had no reason to hesitate (he writes). My experience of the quality of the American troops, both at the Battle of Hamel and on the Chipilly spur, had been eminently satisfactory. Measures were possible to supply them with any technical guidance which they might lack. I therefore accepted the suggestion, and Rawlinson then asked me to submit a proposal for a joint operation to take place towards the end of the month by these two American and the remaining three Australian AAccordlng to a note in an unofficial diary Monash himself thought the 4th Dlv. might be in a position to continue fighting after a short rest. Sept ,19181 HINDENBURG LINE 943 divisions, with the object of completing the task, so well begun, of breaklng through the Hindenburg defences.6 Everyone else felt equally confident. Compared with the Australian and most British divisions the American ones were completely fresh, and in man-power each nearly equalled two British divisions. Each had twelve strong battalions of infan- try and three times as many machine-gun companies as a British division and twice as many engineers. Their men had much the same physique and bold, free, aggressive appearance that marked the Australians; indeed their obvious affinity made this a particularly suitable combination. Most Australians felt as Monash did, that the fresh spirit and numerical strength of the Americans would make up for their lack of experience, and that in combination they and the Australians would strike a very formidable blow. Monash set to work on his plan, apparently, on the day of the Outpost-Line battle. The task of developing it, he says, “proved at once the most arduous, the most responsible, and the most dificult” that he undertook during the war. On this occasion, much more than on August 8th, Rawlinson relied upon him to shape the plan on which Fourth Army ulti- mately fought. Events that followed make it unnecessary here to explain the scheme in great detail. Briefly it was as follows. Monash assumed-it proved a most dangerous assumption -that opposite the tunnel the Hindenburg Outpost-Line would be captured either on the 18th or soon after. This would give him a straight starting line, with the main Hindenburg Line from half a mile to a mile ahead. The tunnel must be considered as a bridge, 6,000 yards wide, over the canal. Here the Hindenburg Line, elsewhere behind the canal, bulged forward 400-1,200 yards west of the canal’s alignment, but the line of the tunnel was actually marked on the surface by the ragged green mound of spoil-about ten feet high and as wide as a road-that had been hauled to the surface through shafts when it was dug in the time of the great Napoleon. The canal, coming from the south up a branch of the Omignon valley, plunges first into a wide, deep cutting and then tunnels into the higher land forming the upper course 8 Australiau Victmier, )). 235-6. 944 THE A.I.F. IN FRANCE [Sept., 1918 of the valley. Half a mile up this valley sprawls Bellicourt, with the tunnel directly below it. The tunnel continues IOO- 130 feet below two spurs and an intervening valley, and opens again into the valley of the Scheldt which here runs obliquely from south-east to north-west. Just east of the tunnel mouth, in the Scheldt valley, lie the villages of Gouy and le Catelet; a mile north-west of the mouth is Vendhuille.6 The spoil- mound running across country might furnish an obstacle, but a more serious one was the support line of the Hindenburg system, the le Catelet Line, a single well wired trench running across the spurs, from Nauroy village a mile east of Bellicourt to le Catelet, and far to north and south beyond those limits. Two or three miles in rear of this again ran the reserve line, with Beaurevoir and Montbrehain villages on high, open land a mile beyond it. This was then the Germans’ last continuous defence system though there were trenches at PrCmont three miles beyond and work had been begun on a continuous system (the Hermann Line) behind the Selle River at le Cateau, eleven miles farther still. Monash envisaged the piercing of the Hindenburg Line OIn the available records and maps the spelling varies between Vendhuillc and Vendhuile. Sept., 19181 HINDENBURG LINE 945 at the tunnel sector only. To cross the canal unaided, he held would involve great loss of life; he would not have committed the Australian troops to the attempt, and did not suggest the task for others. He proposed to attack over the “bridge” in two stages: first under a creeping artillery barrage to seize the Hindenburg Line, the tunnel mound, and the support (le Catelet) line-an advance of 4,~yards; then to pass other troops through to seize by “open warfare” the Beaurevoir Line and village, about the same distance beyond. To protect his flanks and also to help the British corps north-and south of him to cross the canal, additional forces would in the first stage follow each flank, to thrust out a short distance south- ward and northward after the line of the canal had been passed. In the second stage other reserves would pass through to extend the flanks farther, increasing the opportunity for the British and enlarging the (‘bridgehead.” For the straightforward advance in the first stage, behind a creeping barrage, Monash allotted the two American divisions, and for the ‘‘exploit a ti o n ” in the second phase the 5th and 3rd Australian Divi- sions. The Ameri- cans would be helped by tk tanks and a creeping bar- rage from 17 field artillery brigades .