The Kaiser's Battle

Martin Middlebrook

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781844154982
• eBook ISBN: 9781473819429
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

The author of The First Day on the Somme details what it was like during the 1918 Spring Offensive during World War I, which led to Germany's defeat.
At 9:30 AM on March 21, 1918, the last great battle of the First World War commenced when three German armies struck a massive blow against the weak divisions of the British Third and Fifth Armies. It was the first day of what the Germans called the Kaiserschlacht (the Kaiser's Battle), the series of attacks that were intended to break the deadlock on the Western Front, knock the British Army out of the war, and finally bring victory to Germany…
In the event, the cost of the gamble was so heavy that once the assault faltered, it remained for the Allies to push the exhausted German armies back and the war was at last over.
Praise for The Kaiser's Battle
"The clever blending of written and oral accounts from some 650 surviving British and German soldiers makes the book an extremely convincing reconstruction." — The Sunday Times (UK)
"Mr. Middlebrook's industry and patience are displayed in his amazing collection of eyewitness accounts, the compassion in his commentary, the good sense in his analysis." — Daily Telegraphy (UK)

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	Contents
	Maps and Diagrams
	Introduction
1	Winter Quarters
2	The Attackers
3	The Defenders
4	Before the Storm
5	The Last Day of Trench Warfare
6	All Hell Let Loose
7	The Fight for the Forward Zone
8	Review at 11 a.m.
9	The Fight for the Battle Zone
10	The Fall of the Redoubts
11	The Second Review
12	The Evening
13	An Analysis
14	The Aftermath
	Soldiers’ Tales
	Appendices:
1	German Ranks
2	Order of Battle of German Divisions
3	Order of Battle of British Divisions
4	British Artillery Strength
5	Royal Flying Corps Order of Battle
6	German Bombardment Timetable
7	Victoria Cross Awards
8	Senior Officer Casualties
9	‘The Three-Week Subaltern’
	Acknowledgements to the British and German Armies
	Personal Acknowledgements
	Bibliography
	Index

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	Maps
1.	The Western Front, March 1918
2.	The German Plan of Attack
3.	The British Zone
4.	The Redoubts of the Fifth Army, noon, 21 March
5.	The Flesquières Salient, 21 March
6.	Situation at 5.0 p.m., 21 March
7.	German gains to 5 April

	Diagrams
1.	British Divisional Defences
2.	Manchester Hill Redoubt
	Maps and diagrams by Illustra Design Ltd from preliminary drawings by Edward Sylvester.

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Introduction

Several years ago I wrote a book describing in detail the opening day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. On this day, divisions of the British and French armies made a carefully prepared attack on the German positions astride the River Somme. This book will describe in similar manner another one-day set-piece attack, but this time by the Germans against the British positions. The day was 21 March 1918 and the field of battle was also ‘on the Somme’, as the soldier put it, but farther east than the area of the 1916 fighting. Like the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 21 March 1918 was one of the great turning points of the First World War and, in the number of men involved, was probably the greatest battle of that war.

Every German soldier of 1914–18 had a Military Service Book in which were recorded details of the battles in which he had fought and of the quieter periods of trench warfare in which he had served. Those who survived the battle of 21 March 1918 had this simple title stamped in their books: ‘Grosse Schlacht in Frankreich’ – ‘The Great Battle in France’.

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Many sound books have described what British historians later called ‘The March Offensive’ or ‘The March Retreat’. All of these earlier works treat the first and subsequent days as one battle, and there is no reason why they should not, although it was the nature and the results of the first day’s fighting which set the seal on what was to follow. Most of these books deal with events in a conventional military-history manner by describing them from the top of the military hierarchy downwards and, although they usually pay tribute to the front-line soldiers en masse, they never really tell the reader what Private Brown or Musketier Schmidt experienced or thought while in the battle. Other books which do give personal accounts of the battle provide understandably narrow views of it or, if intended to be comprehensive, fall into the trap of taking too much note of British regimental histories published after the war. As will be shown later, these often presented a distorted and over-heroic version of events.

I make no apology for devoting a complete book to just the first day of this battle, and I will be concentrating on the experiences of the individuals involved and on the nature of the fighting at small-unit level, although as much of what the senior commanders and the politicians were doing as will enable the reader to set the battlefield scenes in context will also be included.

I must add a few words on sources. Before any use can be made of personal contributions, it is always essential to establish a reliable framework of the orders of battle of units, of the plans and orders of leaders, and of the main events in the battle itself. In preparing this framework I have relied heavily upon the following sources: Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, The German March Offensive and its Preliminaries, compiled by Brigadier-General J. E. Edmonds and published in 1935 (this is referred to henceforth as ‘the British Official History’);^* Der Weltkrieg 1914–18, Volume 14, published by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in 1944 (to be referred to as ‘the German Official History’); and the War Diaries of the British Army units involved which became available at the Public Record Office in 1965. Unfortunately there are drawbacks to the use of all these sources. Because of the results of the fighting on the first day, the War Diaries of the front-line British battalions are in parlous state, as the British Official Historian acknowledges, and this work suffers accordingly, there being huge gaps in the descriptions of events at battalion level although it is perfectly sound when describing the plans and preparations of both sides. The German Official History turned out to be only a very general work and contains little detail below corps level. I have studied only the most original and reliable of the non-official published works; ‘new’ books based purely on library research do not appeal to me. The Fifth Army by General Gough, Godspeed’s Ludendorff and The Private Papers of Douglas Haig are all useful, as is the more recently published biography, Goughie, by Anthony Farrar-Hockley; and my thoughts have been stimulated by some of the essays in John Terraine’s The Western Front 1914–18 and his book Impacts of War 1914 and 1918.

One unusual prime source of material has been the registers of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries and Memorials to the Missing in France. These list all fatal casualties, and a study and analysis of those registers covering the area of this battlefield provided an unexpected research bonus.

My appeals, in 1975, for men involved in the battle brought an almost overwhelming response, and I now have the results of interviews or correspondence with 518 Britons and 129 Germans who were involved in the battle on 21 March 1918, the highest positions held being battalion commanders on the British side and company commanders on the German side. The sceptical reader will, with some justification, query the value of old men’s memories. But it was a day that most of the survivors would never forget and the material available from them has been dealt with in a very careful manner. All offerings were judged against the background of the known activities of the man’s unit, and the general rule was that if any one part of an individual account was found seriously incorrect no other part of it was used. Another sieve was the sixth sense that one develops on reading so many accounts or after many hours’ interviewing; this soon tells when a man is going astray. A serious drawback in these personal accounts is the forgivable tendency for a man to present his own actions in the best possible light, while the man who has every reason to conceal his actions, such as the soldier who threw away his rifle and hid in a shell hole until the fighting was over or the one who may have been involved in a battlefield atrocity, rarely volunteers to help at all. I have tried to make allowances for such distortions.

Despite these limitations, sufficient remains to present a worthwhile account of the fighting on the first day of the German offensive. No one will ever be able to present a completely comprehensive view which is accurate to the last detail and, even if one could do so, the result would probably be so tedious as to be unreadable. What I am attempting to do is to dip into a variety of sources, select material that is considered to be reliable, and then give the reader a series of impressions of the experiences and emotions of the men who were involved and the nature of the fighting on what was one of the more important days of the First World War.

^* Most of the work on this particular volume of the Official History was carried out by Major-General H. R. Davies, who was commanding the 11th Division on the River Lys sector in March 1918, and Lieutenant-Colonel R. G. B. Maxwell-Hyslop, an officer in the Dorsetshire Regiment who was badly wounded and taken prisoner near Mons in August 1914, exchanged back to England in a paralysed state in 1916, but, following medical treatment, was able to perform a useful duty at G.H.Q. in France in 1918.

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Winter Quarters

Soldiers who had first come to the trenches of the Western Front in the summer or autumn of 1917 say that the winter that followed was the coldest of the war. But such expressions as ‘the coldest winter’ or ‘the wettest summer’ are often used by men who for the first time in their lives have to campaign and exist entirely in the open. These recent arrivals on the Western Front never had to spend a second winter in the trenches and so they had nothing with which to compare the winter of 1917–18. Men who had seen earlier winters on the Western Front say that this one was not too bad at all; it is true that there were some cold spells, but it was a very dry winter and, because of that, there were snug trenches, dry feet and much gratitude.

War was no new event in Europe. For centuries the traditional time for campaigning had been confined to the summer months and armies usually retired to spend the winter in as comfortable quarters as they could find. Winter was a time for rest and recuperation, the gathering-together of fresh supplies, weapons and men, and the making of plans for the next campaigning season. The First World War armies could not go entirely into winter quarters and a certain strength had always to be left posted in the trenches. But the old tradition of using winter as a time for renewal and for planning the next round of operations was still valid, and even before the last struggles of the 1917 battles had petered out the leaders of both sides were hard at it, trying to decide what they could do in 1918 to secure success and, if possible, complete victory for their armies.

The situation and hopes of most of these leaders were more confused in the winter of 1917–18 than at any of their previous times of reassessment. 1917 had seen great changes in strengths and alliances and there were unprecedented pressures on some of the leaders; there was particular dissension in the British camp. The way ahead was clear to no one. Many thousands of words have since been written concerning the ideas that were under consideration at that time and the plans eventually made out of them. Although there will always be differences in opinion over the merits of the arguments deployed and the decisions ultimately taken, there are few gaps remaining in the factual elements of the story. Because the decisio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents