Introduction

For a year which ended in victory, 1918 did not begin very well for the Allies. On 1 January they were stuck in trench lines which had not moved very much, in a strategic sense, in three years. Every great push designed to bring a breakthrough had ended in a welter of blood and disillusion. True, the Germans had suffered as badly, but they were still there and, despite the promised arrival of large numbers of Americans, the Allies knew that large numbers of Germans, from the now defunct Eastern Front, would be arriving soon, flushed with victory over Russia.

Things got much worse on 21 March when the Germans launched a great push of their own and this, unlike its Allied counterparts, seemed to have a real chance of ending the war. A huge hammer blow fell on General Gough's Fifth Army which was pushed aside with ease and sent tumbling back towards distant Amiens. Why did this happen? In part it was the wish of Prime Minister David Lloyd George to prevent the generals killing more men in their own, failed, offensives. He deliberately withheld reinforcements from the armies in the field, which resulted in the strength of each division being reduced by a quarter from twelve battalions to nine, each brigade comprising just three battalions (89th Brigade lost the 20th Battalion, King's (Liverpool) Regiment, which was disbanded, and 2nd Bedfords moved to 90th Brigade, which had lost both 17th and 18th Battalions, Manchester Regiment). Nevertheless, Fifth Army were still expected to hold the same amount of the front line as previously. Worse, they had to take over more of the line from the French on their right, which left them dangerously stretched. Another reason for the German breakthrough was that it came in an area in which barely more than a scraped front line trench and a bit of wire existed. To absorb a determined attack at least three lines of trenches were needed, spread over a depth of three miles or more, but these were lacking; they were being built but only really existed in the minds of the planners. The third reason for their success was the use of new tactics by the Germans – infiltration by fast-moving storm troopers and the element of surprise; there were no week-long bombardments which signalled, inevitably, that an assault was near.