Who won the Battle of Amiens?
The Allies did. On 8 August 1918 Canadian, Australian, British and French troops broke through the German Second Army east of Amiens, advancing about eight miles in a day and taking more than 15,000 prisoners. The Germans stopped the advance within four days, but Ludendorff called 8 August the black day of the German Army.1
At 4:20 on the morning of 8 August 1918, in thick fog and with no warning bombardment, more than 2,000 British guns opened fire east of Amiens and the Canadian and Australian Corps walked forward behind the shells, with hundreds of tanks among them. By the afternoon they had overrun the German front and were deep among the German gun lines. Four years after the war began, a single day had changed its course. Our 8 August page gives the day in brief; this is the full story.2
Amiens was the opening battle of the Hundred Days Offensive, the last campaign on the Western Front in World War I. It is ranked among the greatest battles of World War I. For the armies behind it, see the military histories of Britain, France and Germany. This page is about 1918; an earlier battle of Amiens was fought on 27 November 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War, when Moltke records that General von Manteuffel's German First Army defeated General Farre's French troops east of the city.3
Why did the Allies attack at Amiens?
Amiens was where the great German spring offensive of 1918 had run out of breath. Operation Michael, launched on 21 March, ended on 5 April short of the city, and it left the German Second Army of General Georg von der Marwitz holding an overstretched salient to its east. From there German guns could reach Amiens and its railway junction, the hinge between the British and French armies and the main line from Paris to the north.4
In July the tide turned on the Marne. On 24 July the Allied commander in chief, Ferdinand Foch, set out his plan to free the railways the Germans threatened. The second of them was the Paris to Amiens line, to be cleared by a combined attack of the British Fourth Army and the French First Army in front of Amiens. Foch put the whole French First Army under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig for the operation, so that one commander ran the battle.5
The method came from a small battle. On 4 July Lieutenant General John Monash's Australian Corps had taken Le Hamel, east of Amiens with infantry, tanks, artillery and aircraft working to one timetable. General Sir Henry Rawlinson of the Fourth Army proposed to repeat Hamel on a far larger scale: nine divisions and about 400 tanks instead of ten battalions and 60 tanks.6
Nobody expected Amiens to end the war. In London the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, sent Haig a long memorandum dated 25 July that set 1 July 1919 as the date for opening the main offensive; Haig wrote on his copy “Words! words! words!”. Stephen Badsey notes that Foch and most other senior Allied commanders still expected the war to go on well into 1919.7
The German side: why was the line so weak?
For the German high command, the summer of 1918 was a time to stand on the defensive and rebuild. General Erich Ludendorff, the First Quartermaster General who ran the German war effort, believed in early August that the Allies had been too badly hurt on the Marne to make a full attack soon. He expected later blows in Lorraine, at St Mihiel, near Reims, between the Oise and the Somme, or in Flanders; according to the official history, the Amiens front itself barely figured in that list, although he sent General von Kuhl to check its defenses, and two tired divisions there were relieved by fresh ones.8
The Second Army's position was little more than a front zone, dug where the spring offensive had stopped. South of the Somme there were three poorly wired trenches without good dugouts, and behind them only scattered machine-gun posts. Marwitz himself reported on 3 August that only two of his divisions were fully fit for battle. Badsey counts ten weak German divisions, with four in reserve, on a front of about 30 kilometers.9
German intelligence read the signs wrongly. According to the British official history, which drew on the German monograph of the battle, Crown Prince Rupprecht's last diary entry before the attack recorded prisoners' talk of a great British offensive in Flanders. Troops near Villers-Bretonneux heard engine noise and reported a possible tank attack, but no special measures followed. On 4 August Ludendorff told his armies in an order of the day that there was no reason to fear an enemy offensive if the troops were vigilant.10
How did the Allies keep the attack a secret?
The plan depended on surprise, and the British went to unusual lengths to keep it. Every soldier had a notice headed “KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT” pasted into his pay book. Troops, guns and tanks moved only at night, and new units were forbidden to open wireless stations before zero hour.11
The Canadian Corps was the hardest secret to keep, because the Germans read its arrival anywhere as a sign of attack. Two Canadian battalions, casualty clearing stations and a wireless section were sent north to Flanders, opposite Kemmel Hill, to suggest an offensive there, while the rest of the corps moved south to Amiens. The German side noticed the Canadians at Kemmel but not the move south.12
The force assembled for the blow was large. The Fourth Army was nearly doubled to 14 infantry divisions, with the Canadian, Australian and British III Corps in line and the Cavalry Corps behind. It had more than 2,000 guns and the bulk of the Tank Corps: 342 Mark V and Mark V* heavy tanks, 72 Medium A “Whippets” and 120 supply tanks. Some 1,904 British and French aircraft faced about 365 German ones.13
General Marie-Eugène Debeney's French First Army attacked on the Canadian right. It received only two battalions of light tanks, too few in Debeney's view to lead the assault, so his infantry went in after a short bombardment instead of a silent start.14
What happened on 8 August 1918?
Zero hour was 4:20 a.m. The guns opened all at once and the infantry and tanks advanced behind a creeping barrage, with no preliminary bombardment to warn the defenders. Thick mist, made heavier by smoke, hid the attackers until they were on the German trenches. The French XXXI Corps followed at 5:05 a.m.15
In the center the Canadian and Australian Corps broke straight through. The German front line was overrun by about 7:30 a.m., and Whippet tanks, armored cars and cavalry then pushed ahead to the old Amiens outer defense line. The Australians, attacking from around Villers-Bretonneux and Hamel, took Harbonnières and advanced about 11 kilometers; the Canadians advanced nearly 13. The Imperial War Museums give about eight miles on the main front for the day.16
For Monash it was the first battle in which all five Australian divisions fought together in one corps. “For the first time in the history of this Corps,” he told his men on 7 August, “all five Australian Divisions will to-morrow engage in the largest and most important battle operation ever undertaken by the Corps.”17
Eight Canadians won the Victoria Cross for actions on 8 and 9 August: Private John Croak, Corporal Herman Good, Corporal Harry Miner, Lieutenant James Tait, Lance Corporal Alexander Brereton, Lieutenant Jean Brillant, Corporal Frederick Coppins and Sergeant Raphael Zengel.18
On the flanks the attack went less well. North of the Somme, the British III Corps had been thrown off balance on 6 August, when the fresh 27th (Württemberg) Division struck it near Morlancourt, and on 8 August it was stopped short of the Chipilly spur. In the south the French took their first objectives and then made slower progress.19
By evening the corps cages held 281 German officers and 12,134 other ranks, and the French had taken some 3,350 more. Nearly 300 guns had been captured. The Australian War Memorial describes it as the first time a large British advance had reached as far as the German artillery.20
The day had costs and failures too. Tanks and cavalry did not work well together, and the Royal Air Force, instead of supporting the troops on the ground, spent the afternoon bombing the Somme bridges behind the Germans. The British official history records 44 aircraft lost and 52 more wrecked or damaged, and no bridge put out of action. The Fourth Army's own losses that day were, by the same history's estimate, under 9,000.21
What happened at Chipilly, and did Americans fight at Amiens?
The second day showed how quickly an attack lost its edge. Orders reached the corps late, the advance went in piecemeal, and of 415 tanks in action on 8 August only 145 were fit to fight on the 9th. The Canadians still gained about five kilometers, but German reserves were arriving by rail and by truck.22
North of the Somme the Chipilly spur, which had held up III Corps, fell on 9 August. Londoners of the 58th Division and an Australian patrol took the village that evening, and K Company of the U.S. 131st Infantry Regiment, a regiment of the American 33rd Division attached to the British, joined in. That evening the 131st's 1st and 2nd Battalions also fought their way into Gressaire Wood beyond the spur, and on 10 August the regiment, now under the Australian Corps, reached the old Amiens defense line. The Imperial War Museums describe Chipilly as taken by the 58th Division aided by a regiment of the 33rd Division of the American Army.23
To the south, the French First Army entered Montdidier on 10 August and found it destroyed; the Germans had pulled back in the night. The Eighteenth Army had swung its line back toward Roye, a move Ludendorff later described as one on which much depended: had it failed, he wrote, a great enemy victory was possible.24
Why did the Battle of Amiens end after four days?
By 11 August the advance had reached the wasteland of the 1916 Somme battlefield, old trenches and wire that slowed every movement, and the Germans had brought up about eight more divisions. Badsey notes that losses and breakdowns had left the British with only six working tanks by 12 August. Rawlinson, unwilling to burst through regardless of cost, stopped the general attack with Haig's approval, and the Battle of Amiens officially ended on 11 August.25
Foch wanted the attack pressed toward Roye and Chaulnes. The men on the spot did not. Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie of the Canadian Corps wrote that capturing the German position there would be “a very costly matter” and that he was opposed to attempting it, and Rawlinson showed Haig aerial photographs of the new German defenses. Haig postponed the attack, argued the point with Foch, and switched the weight of the offensive north to his Third Army, which attacked on 21 August.26
How many casualties were there at the Battle of Amiens?
The numbers depend on the source and the dates counted. The British official history gives 22,202 casualties for the Fourth Army, most of them counted from 8 to 15 August: 9,074 in the Canadian Corps for 8 to 11 August, 5,991 in the Australian Corps, 6,250 in III Corps and 887 in the Cavalry Corps. The Canadian Encyclopedia puts Canadian losses at more than 11,800. Badsey gives about 20,000 British and 24,000 French casualties for the battle.27
German losses were far heavier, and a large share were prisoners. Badsey estimates about 30,000 German surrenders; the Australian War Memorial counts 29,144 prisoners and 338 guns. The British official history reckons total German losses at about 75,000, and Marwitz is quoted there as saying the Second Army lost about 700 officers and 27,000 men on 8 August alone.28
Why did Ludendorff call 8 August the black day of the German Army?
By German standards the losses were not unprecedented, and the British official historian wondered whether the day deserved its label. What shook Ludendorff was the behavior of the troops. He summoned divisional commanders and front officers to his headquarters at Avesnes and heard, he wrote, of whole bodies of men surrendering to single troopers. Retiring soldiers had shouted “Black-leg” and “You're prolonging the war” at a fresh division going into action.29
“August 8 put the decline of that fighting power beyond all doubt,” Ludendorff wrote, and a few lines later: “The war must be ended.” On 11 August, at a meeting at Avesnes, he offered his resignation, which was refused. The Kaiser concluded, in the words recorded by an officer in attendance, “We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended.”30
Badsey sums up the German reading: the German high command accepted soon after Amiens that it had lost the war on the Western Front, something most Allied commanders did not see until early October. The Imperial War Museums put it the same way: from this point the senior German commanders, Kaiser Wilhelm II among them, knew the war was lost.31
Who won the Battle of Amiens?
The Allies won clearly. In four days they freed the Paris to Amiens railway, drove the Germans back across the Santerre plateau and took tens of thousands of prisoners, while their own casualties, in the official history's words, were light in comparison to the number of prisoners taken. The victory belonged to a coalition: the Canadian and Australian Corps led the main attack, but the Imperial War Museums warn that the French part is almost completely ignored and the British infantry, tank crews, gunners, engineers and airmen are often marginalized.32
It was not a breakthrough to open country. As at so many earlier battles, the advance slowed once the attackers outran their guns and the defenders brought up reserves. What made Amiens decisive was what came next: instead of battering on, the Allies switched their blows from one sector to another, giving the Germans no time to recover.33
Why does the Battle of Amiens matter?
Amiens began the Hundred Days, the run of Allied offensives from 8 August to the Armistice of 11 November 1918. Nicholas Lloyd writes that the campaign was not at first meant to win the war, but the success at Amiens led Foch to plan a far more ambitious series of attacks. Within weeks the British were across the Somme, the Americans had taken the St Mihiel salient, and on 26 September the great converging offensive began, the Meuse-Argonne among it.34
For the British army it was also a measure of how far it had come. Badsey contrasts Rawlinson's Fourth Army at Amiens with the same commander and army on the Somme in 1916, a sign of better tactics, technology, staff work and leadership. In Canada and Australia, Amiens is remembered as the start of their own hundred days; according to Veterans Affairs Canada, the Canadian Corps alone captured more than 9,000 prisoners in two weeks there, and the official history counts 9,203 between 8 and 19 August.35
The victory was not cheap, and the hardest fighting was still ahead. The Imperial War Museums stress that the same technology that won on 8 August helped make casualties in the final months so high.36
Where was the Battle of Amiens fought?
The battle was fought astride the River Somme east and southeast of Amiens, in the Somme department of northern France. Most of it took place on the Santerre, a rolling plateau between the Somme and the Avre, cut by the marshy valley of the Luce, which the official history calls good country for tanks. The front ran from near Albert and Morlancourt in the north, through Villers-Bretonneux and Hangard, to Moreuil and Montdidier in the south, where the French fought what they call the Battle of Montdidier.37
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