“Tactical success in war is generally achieved by pitting an
organised force against a disorganised one”.
J.F.C. Fuller
The Battle of
Amiens
Alphen,
Netherlands. 8 August. ‘Blitzkrieg’, a sudden and utterly irresistible military
attack that can strike anytime, anywhere leading to rapid collapse of defences and
quick defeat.
British Imperial forces called it the Battle of Amiens. The
French called it the Battle of Montdidier. In many ways what was happening one
hundred years ago today as I write just north of the French city of Amiens was
the birth of a new way of war that would span World War One, World War Two and
beyond. The unleashing of combined arms
warfare on German forces that wartime summer day would become the inspiration
for what Hans von Seeckt, Heinz Guderian and others would later dub
‘blitzkrieg’. The Allied victory that
day was so complete that German Commander-in-Chief Erich Ludendorff was moved
to call 8 August 1918, “a black day in the history of the German Army’. This is
the (brief) story of the Battle of Amiens?
At 0420 hours
the British Fourth Army, under the command of General Sir Henry Rawlinson and
the French First Army under General Marie-Eugene Debeney, unleashed a force of
over 100,000 men against over-extended and exhausted German forces. As part of
the plan the usual British and French practice of massed artillery barrages
prior to attack had been abandoned. German commanders were caught completely by
surprise. The first German front lines knew of the attack was the sight of some
400 massed British tanks rumbling forward supported by 800 aircraft of the then new Royal Air Force with an artillery
barrage provided by over 2000 guns creeping forward in front of the advancing
British, Australian, Canadian and French forces.
At 0710 hours
the Royal Tank Corps captured the first of the German strongholds, whilst at
0730 hours British III Corps captured another. Thereafter, the German front
rapidly began to collapse as the Allies advanced over a front of 4000
yards/3500 metres punching a large hole in German lines. By 1100 hours
Australian and Canadian forces had advanced over 3 miles/5 kilometres with
British forces capturing over 400 German guns and destroying half the enemy
force. Entire enemy formations began to
surrender en masse having been
completely de-stabilised by the force, pace and surprise of the attack. By 2100
hours Fourth Army had advanced a further 5 miles/8 kilometres.
Over the
ensuing three days the pace of the advance slowed but such damage had been done
to the German Army that whilst bloody the ensuing ‘Hundred Days Offensive’ did
not stop until the November 1918 Armistice. In March 1919 the newly-formed
British Army of the Rhine conducted a victory parade in Cologne. The death toll
was heavy. By the end of the Battle of Amiens the British and the French had
both lost 22,000 men. However, the by then resource-poor Germany Army had lost
75,000 men.
The Origins
of Amiens
What
eventually led to Ludendorff’s ‘black day’ had commenced on 21 March 1918 with
Imperial Germany’s last great gamble – Operation Michael. With the Royal Navy’s successful blockade of
Germany triggering starvation and industrial unrest in the Fatherland it was
clear to Berlin that unless the situation on the ground in France could be
changed radically Germany would be forced to accept unfavourable peace terms.
America’s 1917 entry into the war and the arrival of General Pershing’s American
Expeditionary Force all but ensured an Allied victory.
In March
German ‘Stormtroopers’ had made stunning advances pushing the British back over
the land they had gained at the Third Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Cambrai
in 1917. More poignantly the German Army had advanced rapidly over the old
Somme battlefield of 1916. Ludendorff’s
aim had been to split the Allied armies and force the British back to the
Channel. He failed. Critically, British Imperial forces did not break under the
German assault and by and large retreated in reasonably good order.
Innovation
and Retrenchment
Since the
charnel house of the Somme British tactics had been evolving led by innovative
thinkers such as Colonel J.F.C Fuller who wanted to break out of the stalemate
of trench warfare. They combined new thinking with industrial power and emerging
technologies to create new strategies, tactics and formations designed to
destroy an enemy with shock and surprise. Ironically, the ‘grab and hold’
tactics that replaced the full-on assaults that had killed so many to little
effect were copied from German ‘Stormtrooper’ tactics.
Fuller’s Plan 1919, had it been implemented would
have been the first truly strategic ‘blitzkrieg’. Twenty years later on 1 September 1939 a new ‘Amiens’
was inflicted on Poland, but on a grand strategic scale with improved command communications
between air and land power the key to victory. As part of a carefully
implemented information war the colloquial title given by the Germans to the
attack was ‘blitzkrieg’ – lightning war. In May 1940 Blitzkrieg was further inflicted
on Belgian, French, Dutch and British forces, all of which were over-stretched
and wrongly-deployed having been deceived into believing their own prejudices
about the Germans and each other. In 1943 at the Battle of Kursk Soviet forces
began to do the same to over-extended German forces as the British had done at
Amiens, albeit on an epic scale. The
massed forces of Marshals Rokossovsky and Zhukov did not stop advancing until
they sacked Berlin in May 1945.
Having gained
victory via a new way of offensive warfare the Western democracies did what
they have so often done in peacetime. They handed the concept and technology of
victory to illiberal enemies in the interbellum. It was ever thus. Innovative and disruptive thinkers were
marginalised whilst disarmament became a metaphor for a retreat from political
Realism. The likes of Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, Charles de Gaulle and Billy
Mitchell tried to keep the flame of military innovation alive in the West.
However, it was thinkers like Hans von Seeckt in Germany and Mikhail
Tuckachevsky in the then Soviet Union who really pushed forward innovation.
Shock and Awe: Lessons of
Amiens for today
The essence
of Amiens was ‘shock and awe’. Many iterations of such tactics have taken place
since, notably General Norman Schwarzkopf’s attack on Iraqi forces in 1991.
What links Rawlinson to Schwarzkopf and beyond is the ever-growing distance
between attacker and target and between intent and effect as technology has
enabled greatly more diverse ways and means of generating shock and awe.
With a
seismic shift again underway in the military balance of power away from the
Western democracies the conditions are again fast being created in which the
unthinkable could become the thinkable and in time the frighteningly plausible. The problem with the ‘unthinkable’ is that it
is normally the leaders of western democracies who refuse to think it. They prefer instead to believe the
unthinkable is the impossible, thus creating the perfect conditions something catastrophically nasty in Europe.
Today, ‘blitzkrieg’ would better be dubbed ‘blitz-crash’: sudden, overwhelming, co-ordinated impact on already vulnerable and under-protected civilian and military systems using mega-disinformation, mass disruption and targeted mass destruction designed to create panic amongst populations, decapitate national and multinational command authorities and prevent an organised defence and response.
Perhaps the
most fitting end to the story of Amiens came in 1952 when German General Heinz
Guderian published his book Panzer Leader.
It was Guderian who had almost pushed the British Army into the sea at Dunkirk
in June 1940. The Foreword to the book was
written by Basil Liddell Hart.
Julian
Lindley-French
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