![]() ![]() The Spring Offensive had depended on bringing troops westwards after the peace had been signed with Bolshevik Russia. Under his supreme campaign the Western Front could now be treated as one front, with the main effort being switched from one point of attack to another, and with the Germans constantly transferring their reserves, often to little effect. Judging the moment, Foch summoned Haig, Pétain, and Pershing to Château Bombon on 24 July, where he unveiled a plan for a series of surprise attacks in different places at regular intervals. Then he aimed directly at Paris, but the French knew of his plan and acted effectively to parry the blow. Ludendorff then attacked in Flanders, but he failed to break through to the sea. ![]() ![]() The immediate crisis ended when Ludendorff changed the thrust of attack, dispersing his forces, and the Germans overran their supply lines. The British and French governments intervened, calling a conference where Foch was appointed supreme commander of the Allied armies, thus ensuring that from then on the whole Western Front was under one command. The first attack, aimed at the vital rail junction of Amiens, had led Haig to envisage a retreat to the Channel Ports and a Dunkirk-style evacuation and the French general Philippe Pétain to withdrawing southwards to cover Paris. The Hundred Days flowed from the eventual failure of General Erich Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive of early 1918, when he took the gamble of committing the German Army to an all-out effort with the aim of knocking Britain and France out of the war before American troops entered the field in substantial numbers. Retreating but unbroken: German troops fall back over the Marne in autumn 1918. There is much here which could be debated, but I wish to concentrate on the Hundred Days and the claim that the British Army defeated Imperial Germany in what might be considered its greatest ever victory. Haig is credited with ensuring that Britain’s main war-effort was concentrated on the Western Front, while the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, looked to ‘get rich quick’ schemes in Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine.ĭespite having to accept the overall command of the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Haig, we are told, insisted on his own plans, winning the Frenchman over. That victory, revisionist historians maintain, grew out of his previous attrition strategy of 1916-1917, when, at the Somme and Passchendaele, while not achieving a breakthrough, he had substantially weakened the enemy. ![]() The crisis in French morale revealed by the mutinies of spring 1917 following the debacle of the Chemin des Dames Offensive, and the fact that the newly arrived American units were not yet combat-experienced and battle-hardened, left the British Expeditionary Force as the only army capable of defeating Germany.įurther, while it is admitted that Haig was no genius, the argument runs that by 1918 he was able to co-ordinate successfully all elements of military force – artillery, armour, airpower, and infantry – to achieve a decisive victory in the series of operations known collectively as ‘The Hundred Days’. The argument is that the British Army followed a learning curve during the war, which meant that, by 1918, it was in prime position. Whereas histories of the First World War were once dominated, in Britain at least, by the ‘lions led by donkeys’ stereotypes of Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder, the pendulum has today swung back, behind what was once regarded as the ‘revisionist’ school. Materiel: motorised British machine-gunners move forwards during the Hundred Days Offensive. ![]()
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