On August 8, 1918, the Allies launched a series of offensive operations against German positions on the Western Front during World War I with a punitive attack at Amiens, on the Somme in northwestern France.
After suffering heavy losses during their ambitious offensive in the spring of 1918, the main body of the German army was exhausted and its morale rapidly disintegrating amid a lack of supplies and the spread of the influenza epidemic. Some of his commanders believed that the tide was irrevocably turning in favor of the enemies of Germany; as one of them, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wrote on July 20, “We are at the turn of the war: what I expected first for the fall, the need to go on the defensive, is already on us, and in addition all the gains that we made in the spring – as they were – have again been lost. Yet Erich Ludendorff, the German commander-in-chief, refused to accept this reality and rejected the advice of his senior commanders to withdraw or enter into negotiations.
Meanwhile, the Allies prepared for the war to extend into 1919, failing to realize that victory was possible so soon. Thus, at a conference of national army commanders on July 24, Allied Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch rejected the idea of a single decisive blow against the Germans, instead favoring a series of limited attacks in rapid succession aimed at to free the vital rail lines around Paris and to divert the enemy’s attention and resources quickly from one place to another. According to Foch: “These movements must be demanded with such rapidity that they inflict a succession of blows on the enemy … These actions must follow one another at short intervals, so as to embarrass the enemy in the use of his reserves and not allowing him enough time to refill his units. National commanders – John J. Pershing of the United States, Philippe Petain of France and Sir Douglas Haig of Great Britain – readily accepted this strategy, which effectively allowed each army to act as its own entity, striking blows smaller individuals to the Germans. instead of coming together in a massive coordinated attack.
Part of Haig’s plan called for an offensive limited to Amiens, on the Somme, aimed at countering a German victory there the previous March and capturing the Amiens railway line that stretched between Mericourt and Hangest. The British attack, which began on the morning of August 8, 1918, was led by the British 4th Army under the command of Sir Henry Rawlinson. The German defensive positions of Amiens were guarded by 20,000 men; they were six to one outnumbered in advancing the allied forces. The British, well aided by the Australian and Canadian divisions, used some 400 tanks, as well as over 2,000 artillery pieces and 800 aircraft.
By the end of August 8 – dubbed “the black day of the German army” by Ludendorff – the Allies had entered the German lines around the Somme with a gap of about 15 miles long. Of the 27,000 German casualties on August 8, an unprecedented proportion – 12,000 – surrendered to the enemy. Although the Allies at Amiens failed to continue their impressive success in the days following August 8, the damage was done. “We have reached the limits of our capacity,” Kaiser William II told Ludendorff on this “dark day”. “The war must be over.” The kaiser agreed, however, that that end could only come when Germany advanced again on the battlefield, so there would at least be some room for negotiation. Even in the face of the momentum of the Allied summer offensive – later known as the Hundred Days Offensive – the frontlines of the German army continued to fight during the last months of the war, despite the disorder and desertion within his troops and the rebellion. on the home front.
