At 4.40 in the morning of 21 March 1918 German guns opened one of the heaviest bombardments of the First World War against the British front between Arras and St Quentin. It was the start of Operation Michael, the first blow of the spring offensive that Germans called the Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser's Battle. General Erich Ludendorff wanted to win the war in the west before the American army in France reached full strength. On the first day alone the British lost about 38,500 men, more than half of them taken prisoner.
Ludendorff's last chance
Russia's exit from the war let Germany move tens of thousands of fresh troops from the Eastern Front to the west. Ludendorff chose to strike at the British Expeditionary Force before the Americans could tip the balance. It was the first of several German offensives that spring: Operation Georgette followed in Flanders in April, and another attack fell on the Chemin des Dames in late May. Its aim, as the Kildare County Council history of the battle puts it, was to drive a wedge between the British and French armies and push on toward Amiens.1
The blow fell hardest on General Hubert Gough's Fifth Army. It held a front of about 42 miles, much of it recently taken over from the French, and its defenses were unfinished. Kildare Libraries notes that only the Forward Zone had been completed when the attack came, while the rear defenses were still being dug.2
Guns, gas and fog
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) counts more than 6,600 German guns firing more than 3.5 million shells in five hours. The bombardment mixed high explosive with gas and fell on rear positions as well as the front line. Then German infantry went forward behind storm troop detachments armed with grenades and flamethrowers, urged to keep close to their own barrage and, above all, to push on.3
The weather helped them. A thick mist lay over the battlefield, and the CWGC notes that it covered the German advance across no man's land. In some sectors whole battalions in the forward positions were overrun. Where the Fifth Army gave ground, the Third Army further north largely held.4
The worst day
The CWGC counts 65 German divisions in the first attacks against 26 British divisions; the Kildare history gives 66 German divisions, 43 of them against the Fifth Army. Sources also differ on the length of front attacked: the CWGC gives 46 miles of British front and the Kildare account about seventy miles.5
Both the CWGC and the Kildare history put British casualties on 21 March at about 38,500, including some 21,000 prisoners. German losses that day were of the same order, nearer 40,000 according to Kildare Libraries and the French history site Hérodote.net. The CWGC calls it the second worst day in the history of the British Army, surpassed only by the first day of the Somme in 1916.6
Sixteen days and after
Alarmed Allied leaders met at Doullens on 26 March and, as the French encyclopedia Larousse records, entrusted General Ferdinand Foch with coordinating the Allied armies on the Western Front. Ludendorff called off Michael on 5 April, with Amiens still in Allied hands, after a German advance of some 40 miles and, according to the CWGC, 1,200 square miles of ground taken.7
The losses were enormous on both sides. The CWGC gives about 240,000 German and 250,000 British and French casualties; the Kildare history gives 239,000 German and nearly 255,000 Allied. The German army could not replace its best storm troops, while American soldiers kept arriving under John J. Pershing. Further German attacks followed through the spring and summer, but in August the Allies struck back in the Hundred Days Offensive that led to the armistice of 11 November 1918.8
