The Great War
Published on 13 Sep 2018The American First Army joins the fray on the Western Front with the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. All along the Western Front, the Allies are attacking or planning new attacks. The situation for the Germans looks dire even as the first war reparations from Russia arrive.
September 14, 2018
The Battle of Saint-Mihiel I THE GREAT WAR – Week 216
Comments Off on The Battle of Saint-Mihiel I THE GREAT WAR – Week 216
September 11, 2018
Unleashing The Tank’s Full Potential – 1918/1919 Tank Tactics I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
The Great War
Published on 10 Sep 2018Support The Tank Museum: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Indy and David Willy from the Tank Museum sit inside a Mark V tank to talk about the evolution of tank tactics and how the Allies started to properly use tanks during and after the battle of Amiens.
Comments Off on Unleashing The Tank’s Full Potential – 1918/1919 Tank Tactics I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
September 7, 2018
Red Terror in Soviet Russia I THE GREAT WAR Week 215
The Great War
Published on 6 Sep 2018After an almost successful attempt on Lenin’s live, the Tscheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky responds with a terror campaign to consolidate Soviet power through fear. At the same time, a supposed Allied plot is unveiled that would get Russia back into the war.
Comments Off on Red Terror in Soviet Russia I THE GREAT WAR Week 215
August 31, 2018
The American First Army Gears Up – Germany Retreats I THE GREAT WAR – Week 214
The Great War
Published on 30 Aug 2018As the German Army withdraws along the Western Front, the Entente prepares for ever more offensives. This includes the newly founded American First Army which will have the task to attack the Germans in the Meuse-Argonnes area.
Comments Off on The American First Army Gears Up – Germany Retreats I THE GREAT WAR – Week 214
August 28, 2018
Inside the Medium Mark A “Whippet” Tank I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
The Great War
Published on 27 Aug 2018Check out the Tank Museum’s YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/thetankmuseum
The Medium Mark A “Whippet” Tank was a new kind of tank design for exploiting breakthroughs and wrecking havoc in the rear of enemy positions. It could could reach a, for the time pretty fast, top speed of 8 miles per hour. When looking at the tanks of the First World War it is often overlooked.
Comments Off on Inside the Medium Mark A “Whippet” Tank I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
August 24, 2018
Over By Christmas? – Growing Allied Confidence I THE GREAT WAR Week 213
The Great War
Published on 23 Aug 2018Get David Zabecki’s Book about the German 1918 Offensives: http://bit.ly/Zabecki1918
With the recent “Black Day of the German Army” and the success of the new strategy of Allied attacks along the Western Front and with the renewed offensives in Palestine, British Commander Sir Douglas Haig is confident the war can be won by the end of the year. Entente Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch is a bit more cautious but also thinks the war can be won by 1919.
Comments Off on Over By Christmas? – Growing Allied Confidence I THE GREAT WAR Week 213
August 17, 2018
Assassination attempt on Lenin – German morale plummets I THE GREAT WAR Week 212
The Great War
Published on 16 Aug 2018As the Battle of Amiens is coming to an end, the Germans are desperately trying to stem the Allied advance and fortify new positions. But morale is crumbling and German High Command is running out of time to find a new strategy. Meanwhile in Russia, the struggle between Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries reaches a violent climax, as assassins prey on Lenin’s life. The Dunsterforce finally arrives in Baku to help defend the city from the Ottoman advance. But this is not the mighty British force the inhabitants had hoped for. Will Lenin survive? Does Ludendorff choose to abandon all the gains the German army made over the spring? And what about the attack on the Wookies? Find out this and more in the new episode of The Great War.
Comments Off on Assassination attempt on Lenin – German morale plummets I THE GREAT WAR Week 212
August 10, 2018
The Black Day Of The German Army – The Battle of Amiens I THE GREAT WAR Week 211
The Great War
Published on 9 Aug 2018Ludendorff and his generals didn’t think the Allies had it in them, but this week they attack with the might off several hundred tanks near Amiens, the Black Day of the German Army.
Comments Off on The Black Day Of The German Army – The Battle of Amiens I THE GREAT WAR Week 211
August 6, 2018
The Battle of Amiens
At Samizdata, Patrick Crozier explains why the Battle of Amiens should be far better known than it is:
On 8 August 1918 in Northern France, a mainly British force attacked on a 15 mile front and advanced to a depth of 7 miles.
In so doing it inflicted 70,000 casualties on the Germans capturing 500 guns while suffering 44,000 casualties of its own. The Battle of Amiens as it became known, was the first clearly-successful, large-scale, Allied offensive operation on the Western Front. Ludendorff, the German commander, famously called it the “Black day of the German army”. But then again he was always a bit of a flibbertygibbet.
Although no one knew it at the time the Battle of Amiens heralded the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive in which Allied success followed Allied success. By November the Germans realised that the game was up and sued for peace.
Amiens did not take place in a vacuum. At the Second Battle of the Marne which took place a few weeks earlier the Germans had attacked and the French and Americans had successfully counter-attacked. This brought to an end German hopes of a quick victory.
[…]
So why have so few heard of Amiens? Why doesn’t it occupy a similar position to Agincourt, Waterloo and El Alamein? Quite simply because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The lazy story we’ve all heard a million times tells us that the Western Front was all about incompetent generals and stalemate. Amiens and the Hundred Days Offensive show this to be nonsense.
A more accurate narrative might be that winning on the Western Front was never going to be easy but they got there in the end.
The battle also saw the Australian Corps and the Canadian Corps reprising their roles as “shock troops” of the British army (including an elaborate scheme to hide the presence of the Canadians from the German commanders):
Purists will be offended by Terraine’s failure to explain the role of the French army at Amiens (which extended the attack to the south), but more intriguing is the sidelining of Sir Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps. Indeed, Terraine’s focus on generals Rawlinson and Monash (although not incorrect in itself) seems to miss how important the Canadians were to the battle; it would be true to say that they made the Battle of Amiens. Their four divisions in line, deployed in the centre along the Amiens-Roye Road, formed the spearhead of the assault. At the end of the day they had driven eight miles into the position of the German Second Army.
Notwithstanding these quibbles, Terraine’s article, with its focus on training and planning and the coordination of firepower and manoeuvre, prefigures much of the debates that would take place in the 1990s and beyond about the nature of change and development in the British Expeditionary Force (the ‘learning curve’). While the military effort of the ‘white dominions’ – Australia, New Zealand and Canada – has been widely praised (with Canadians being justifiably proud of their tag as the ‘shock army of the British Empire’), the humble British Tommy has often been left behind. Since Terraine wrote his article, however, much work has been done to rectify this imbalance.
August 3, 2018
The obscure, almost-forgotten campaign that ended the First World War
It’s often called the “Hundred Days”, but even for people who stayed awake in their high school history classes, that’s often taken to refer to the last hurrah of Napoleon between his escape from Elba and his ultimate defeat at Waterloo. The WW1’s Hundred Days began with the Allied victory at the battle of Amiens and ended with the Armistice on 11 November, 1918. On Twitter, Engaging Strategy shared a series of tweets about this campaign and how little is generally remembered about it:
Comments Off on The obscure, almost-forgotten campaign that ended the First World War
May 21, 2015
John Monash – Australia’s greatest general
Strategy Page reviews a new biography of Australia’s General John Monash:
The centennial of the First World War has brought forth renewed public interest and additional scholarly study of that still controversial conflict, variously the last 19th century imperial war and the first modern war. When its great generals are enumerated, one named by relatively few outside the Antipodes is Australian Army Corps commander John Monash (1865-1931), this despite Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery’s declaration half a century after the Armistice that Monash was “the best general on the Western Front in Europe,” and historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s even stronger accolade as “the greatest general of World War I by far.” Yet in the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War, there is not one mention of him.
Monash, it must be said, has not been entirely overlooked. He was knighted in the field by George V (as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath) and subsequently given the title Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, and in his homeland his name graces a university (indeed, the publisher of the book under review), a scholarship, a town and even a freeway. Nevertheless, in Maestro John Monash, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer argues that Sir John has been wronged by history and not given his due. In a breezy hagiography (Fischer vehemently denies that characterization, protesting that his biography is “warts and all,” however, he downplays or dismisses most of the “warts” cited, e.g., other generals also had mistresses, and while he made mistakes at Gallipoli, he learned from them) and advocacy piece, he makes a justifiable case for Monash’s posthumous promotion to field marshal (backdated to 1930). Had he been promptly promoted postwar, rather than in 1929, to general (that is, full or four-star general), Fischer points out logically, he likely would have been promoted by the king one step up in rank to field marshal.
In his account of Monash’s life and military career, Fischer details the many obstacles faced and surmounted by “the most innovative general” of the war. His sobriquet for Monash, “maestro,” comes from Sir John’s comparison of a “perfected modern battle plan” to a “score for an orchestral composition.” Indeed, while some British and French generals were still thinking in terms of cavalry charges, sabers and bayonets, drawing on his engineering background, Monash made concerted use of infantry, artillery, tanks, aircraft and radio in (to quote him) “comprehensive holistic battle plan[s].” His strategy’s success became evident in thwarting Germany’s final westward push and smashing through the Hindenburg Line, in the 93-minute Battle of Hamel and the second Battle of Amiens, which German General Ludendorff later called “the black day of the German Army in the war,” victories achieved while Monash was still a lieutenant general (three stars). “Never has a general who did so much to help win a world war … been so unacknowledged,” affirms Fischer, returning to his theme.
Comments Off on John Monash – Australia’s greatest general
May 28, 2014
The oddly neglected Battle of Amiens, 1918
In History Today, Nick Lloyd wonders why the allied victory at the Battle of Amiens does not have the same degree of recognition that the British disaster at the Battle of the Somme does:
For the historian John Terraine, who fought a long and lonely battle to rescue the reputation of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig – commonly caricatured as a ‘butcher and bungler’ – the Battle of Amiens was his vindication. In his article for History Today, written in 1958, Terraine revisited the scene of the infamous ‘black day’ of the German army on August 8th, 1918. As Terraine reminds us, this battle was a far cry from the barren, bloody results of the first day on the Somme, July 1st, 1916, when the British army suffered its worst day. According to Terraine, Amiens was a triumph of ‘planning and method … of co-ordination and cunning; of the valour and efficiency of the British artillery and tanks; and of the courage, initiative and dash of the infantry’.
Much of what Terraine wrote still stands. Amiens was a decisive moment, kicking off Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s ‘series of movements’ that would end with the German government appealing for peace negotiations on October 3rd (an essential prelude to the Armistice on November 11th). Amiens was a perfect demonstration of not only how effective British and Commonwealth forces had become by 1918 – developing an embryonic blitzkrieg – but also how the German army had no answer to this kind of combined, all-arms approach to warfare.
Purists will be offended by Terraine’s failure to explain the role of the French army at Amiens (which extended the attack to the south), but more intriguing is the sidelining of Sir Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps. Indeed, Terraine’s focus on generals Rawlinson and Monash (although not incorrect in itself) seems to miss how important the Canadians were to the battle; it would be true to say that they made the Battle of Amiens. Their four divisions in line, deployed in the centre along the Amiens-Roye Road, formed the spearhead of the assault. At the end of the day they had driven eight miles into the position of the German Second Army.
Comments Off on The oddly neglected Battle of Amiens, 1918
November 11, 2013
“The Canadian Corps … had beaten 47 German divisions since Aug. 8”
In the Globe and Mail, J.L. Granatstein wants us to remember the greatest military achievement of the Canadian Corps in World War One (and it isn’t the battle of Vimy Ridge):
On Aug. 8, 1918, the Canadian Corps had secretly moved into position in front of the French city of Amiens. The German army had been on the offensive since March, and the Amiens sector was rather lightly defended. The Canadians, British and Australians struck this sector a surprise hammer blow in the early morning, a hurricane of artillery fire clearing the way for the tanks and infantry that blasted through the defences. Thousands of Germans surrendered, more were killed and within a few hours, the Canadian advance was almost 15 kilometres. This, wrote the German army’s great strategist, General Erich Ludendorff, was “the black day” of the German Army.
Lt.-Gen. Currie’s troops then moved north to the Arras area, where, at the end of the month, they struck toward and then through the Drocourt-Quéant Line, an immensely strong extension of the Hindenburg Line defended by crack troops. In heavy fighting at high cost, the Corps broke the line, forcing the Germans back behind the Canal du Nord, their last position protecting the key supply point of Cambrai.
[…]
The Germans now were in full retreat, moving eastward as fast as they could go. The Canadians took Valenciennes, smashing the enemy defences with a massive artillery barrage, and then moved into Belgium. By Nov. 11, they were in Mons, the same small town where the men of the British Expeditionary Force had first faced the invading Germans in August, 1914.
The Canadian Corps, more than a hundred thousand strong, had fought its last battles. As Lt.-Gen. Currie noted proudly, it had beaten 47 German divisions since Aug. 8, a quarter of the German forces in the West. The Corps had accomplished this because of its great fighting spirit, its fine leadership at all levels and its effective reinforcement and logistics systems. The cost in lives and in wounded was terrible — 45,000 casualties, 20 per cent of the total of Canadian losses in the entire war — but for once, the campaign had achieved measurable gains on the ground. More than that, the Canadian shock troops had battered the enemy, forced them eastward and obliged them to seek an armistice that was a de facto capitulation. It had scored its greatest victory, the greatest battlefield triumph ever by Canadian troops.
Comments Off on “The Canadian Corps … had beaten 47 German divisions since Aug. 8”
