Post-battle conclusions and comments are drawn from the Official History and from Haig’s report of 12th May 1918 (WO 32/5097)

Haigh’s comments 12 May 1918

There are a number of comments in the Official History in the section headed “General Remarks on the 21st March”, and I will extract and summarize some of these.  It will also be worth reading the report of the C.O. of the 2nd Battalion York & Lancaster Regiment for his comments on how it had gone for his men.

The first telling comment is that “... the weight of the attack did not come as a surprise; nor, finally, did the place or date of the assault.” So they knew what was coming, the issue was, were they sufficiently prepared.  “The main reason for the failure of the defence as a whole on the 21st March is to be found in the fact that the British Army was extended over too great a length of front for its strength.  Never before had the British line been held with so few men and so few guns to the mile; and the reserves were wholly insignificant.” Haig had been pushed to extend his line to take over part of the French line, and as has been outlined elsewhere, there had been much prevaricating at a high level on whether or not the Western front should be the focus in 1918, or whether there should be offensives elsewhere.  This all helped to weaken the line. Also, units had been depleted, we have seen that the army was reorganized with the disbandment of some battalions to strengthen others, and many good men had been lost.  “The losses of the previous year had not been made good, and the presence of too large a proportion of untrained and unseasoned officers and men further weakened the units - since no less than 19 out of the 21 divisions in the front line of the Fifth and Third Armies had been engaged in the Passchendaele battles, in which they lost a large proportion of their best soldiers whose places had been filled, if filled at all, by raw drafts and transfers.”

Not only was the line stretched thin, but the reserves were inadequate; “... lost ground could therefore rarely be regained, and if regained could not be held.”

A feature of the battlefield that morning was fog.  “Like the obscurity of night, it rendered nearly useless the machine gun, that weapon which, given opportunity, can in a few moments destroy any balance of numbers with which an attack may start, as we had experienced on the Somme in 1916.”

The defence of the British front was built on three zones, described elsewhere, a system derived from a German plan, but these were not completed properly, there simply was not the time and the resource; “The three zones existed, but practically only on the Staff maps.....Thus the root principle of the German defence, which, based upon the counter-attack, was to be ‘active and mobile, not tied to the trench system’, could not be observed. As so often in its history, the British Army had been called on to undertake a task beyond the power of its numbers.”

The British in this war had not been trained to fight a defensive war, they had continually tried, often without real success, to be offensive.  They also liked to fight in line, each unit covering the flank of that next to it, the idea of fighting in ‘blobs’ scattered through the Forward Zone was not ‘their way’.  The Official History has an old N.C.O. of 1914 summing up the new defensive system for an officer; “It don’t suit us.  The British Army fights in line and won’t do any good in these bird cages.” There were too many inexperienced young officers and too many untrained young soldiers to ensure a reliable garrison for every post, even without the special trial to which the fog subjected them.  The platoon commanders were unable to exercise control over more than the posts in which they had selected to be, the section posts were unaware whether those on the flank were holding out or had been captured, with the result that there was a lack of confidence on the part of small and, on account of weather conditions, isolated garrisons.”

Haig’s report.

In a report drawn up on the 12th May 1918, Haig put a lot of the cause for the German success down to the issue of the British Reserves. He had constantly asked for more than he had been given.  He said that the success achieved by the Germans was largely due to “Faulty distribution of the Allied reserves, which was due in great part to the absence of a Supreme Commander responsible for the safety of the Allied front as a whole.”  In consequence of this “...the Germans were successful in breaking through the British defensive system by massing overwhelming strength against the weakest portion of it.”