Hundred Days : The Campaign That Ended World War I (9780465074907) Read online

  Hundred Days

  By the same author

  Loos 1915

  The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day

  Copyright © 2014 by Nick Lloyd

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Published in 2013 in the United Kingdom by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013953022

  e-book ISBN: 978-0-465-07490-7

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to the memory of Private G. T. Cotterill, killed in action at Gouzeaucourt, 27 September 1918

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Glossary

  Preface: Death at Gouzeaucourt

  Prologue: ‘Surprise was complete’

  1. Decision on the Marne

  2. ‘Neglect nothing’

  3. ‘Death will have a rich harvest’

  4. ‘Another black day’

  5. ‘The incredible roar of massed guns’

  6. ‘The whole thing was simply magnificent’

  7. Enter the Americans

  8. ‘A country of horror and desolation’

  9. Return to the Wilderness

  10. ‘Just one panorama of hell’

  11. The Tomb of the German World Empire

  12. ‘The most desperate battle of our history’

  13. ‘A last struggle of despair’

  14. ‘Cowards die many times’

  15. Armistice at Compiègne

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  References

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  (NA = National Archives at College Park, MD; IWM = Imperial War Museum)

  1.Tom Cotterill, the author’s great-uncle (Author’s collection)

  2.The telegram announcing Tom Cotterill’s death (Author’s collection)

  3.Dead Man’s Corner, Gouzeaucourt (Author’s collection)

  4.Headstone of Private Tom Cotterill (Author’s collection)

  5.The Kaiser at the Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgium, June 1918 (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 12, 12395)

  6.Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the Grand Place, Brussels (IWM: Q240101)

  7.Captured French soldiers, Soissons, July 1918 (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 12, 10218)

  8.German troops in action, 8 August 1918 (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 11, 10596)

  9.Front cover of Le Petit Journal showing Allied commanders (Getty Images: 144845446)

  10.Crown Prince Rupprecht (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 5, 4481)

  11.Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie (IWM: CO 2120)

  12.Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash (IWM: E(AUS) 2350)

  13.Men of Ernst Kielmayer’s battery (World War I Veterans Survey, Foreign Military, German, Kielmayer, Ernst (SC862). The US Army Military History Institute)

  14.German prisoners carrying a casualty along the Amiens–Roye road (19930012–421, George Metcalf Archival Collection © Canadian War Museum)

  15.A German field gun in action (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 13, 12899)

  16.General John J. Pershing (NA: War and Conflict, 490)

  17.Lieutenant-Colonel R. D. Garrett at Saint-Mihiel (NA: War and Conflict, 617)

  18.15-inch naval gun captured by Australian troops (IWM: Q 8289)

  19.Foch and Mangin conversing outside the French War Ministry (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 213, 30035)

  20.General Georg von der Marwitz (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 3, 2491)

  21.German supply column, Gouzeaucourt (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 11, 11878)

  22.A selection of captured German guns captured (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 214, 30083)

  23.Men of 89th US Division encamped in mud at Epionville (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 187, 30014)

  24.An American tank company undergoing repairs (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 213, 30012)

  25.Major Charles Whittlesey of the ‘Lost Battalion’ (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 331, 42754)

  26.Soldiers of 116/Canadian Infantry Battalion at Canal du Nord (IWM: CO 3289)

  27.A horse team of the Royal Artillery pulls an 18-pounder up the bank of the Canal du Nord (Getty Images: 154419630)

  28.The Kaiser on a visit to Kiel (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 12, 12608)

  29.Soldiers of 27th US Division return to Corbie (NA: Record Group 111, Box 213, 30045)

  30.Men of the North Lancashire Regiment enter Cambrai, October 1918 (Akg-images 105393)

  31.German infantry camping west of Le Cateau (NA: Record Group GB, Box 12, 12249)

  32.German dismounted cavalry on the march (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 12, 12395)

  33.German reserves move up to the front (NA: Record Group 165 GB, 12797)

  34.The cathedral of St Quentin, October 1918 (NA: War and Conflict, 699)

  35.Lens in the final days of the war (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 13, 13514)

  36.Effects of shellfire on Champigneulle (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 331, 42767)

  37.Second-Lieutenant Wilfred Owen (IWM: Q101783)

  38.Second-Lieutenant James Kirk, VC (Trustees of the Manchester Regiment and Archive: MR00712).

  39.German infantry dug in at Valenciennes, November 1918 (NA: Record Group 165 GB, Box 13, 13325).

  40.Place de la Concorde, 9 November 1918 (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 214, 30105)

  41.Allied flags on the Rue Royale, Paris, 11 November 1918 (NA: Record Group 111 SC, Box 214, 30123)

  List of Maps

  1. The Western Front, July 1918

  2. Second Battle of the Marne: The Allied Counter-Attack, 18 July 1918

  3. The Battles of Amiens and Montdidier, 8 August 1918

  4. Saint-Mihiel Offensive, 12–16 September 1918

  5. Battle of the Meuse–Argonne, 26 September 1918

  6. The Allied Advance, August–November 1918

  7. Operations on 27 September 1918

  8. The Attack on Gouzeaucourt, 27 September 1918

  9. The Assault on the Hindenburg Line, 29 September 1918

  Glossary

  AEF: American Expeditionary Force

  Army: Collection of corps (usually between two and seven)

  Army Group: Collection of armies (usually consisting of two or three)

  Battalion: Unit of infantry (nominally up to 1,000 strong)

  Battery: Organization of artillery pieces (usually containing between four and six guns)

  BEF: British Expeditionary Force

  Brigade: Major tactical formation. Three brigades made up a British division (each brigade containing three battalions). French and German brigades operated on a different system, each with two regiments

  Chauchat: Unpopular French light machine-gun (extensively used by the Americans) prone to jamming in the field

  Corps: A group of divisions (usually between two and five)
r />   Creeping or rolling barrage: Moving wall of shellfire that swept across the battlefield at a predetermined pace

  Division: Basic tactical unit on the battlefield employing between 15,000 and 18,000 men (although they rarely contained this number by 1918), with supporting medical, engineering and artillery arms. Owing to a lack of trained staff officers, American divisions were up to twice the size of Allied or German divisions, containing 28,000 men

  Doughboy: Slang term for an American soldier

  Frontschwein: Literally ‘front hog’. Slang for a German soldier

  GHQ: General Headquarters (British Expeditionary Force)

  GOC: General Officer Commanding

  GQG: Grand Quartier Général (French High Command)

  Hindenburg Line: Major German defensive system constructed during 1916 and 1917

  Jagdstaffel: German Air Force fighter squadron

  Jäger: Elite German light infantry

  Landwehr: German reserve units intended for garrison duties, often containing older men

  Lewis gun: American-designed light machine-gun first introduced in 1915 and widely used in the BEF

  Minenwerfer: German heavy trench mortar much feared by Allied soldiers

  NCO: Non-Commissioned Officer

  OHL: Oberheeresleitung (German Supreme Command)

  Poilu: Literally ‘hairy one’. Slang for a French soldier

  RAF: Royal Air Force

  Regiment: Organization of infantry battalions. French and German divisions contained four regiments (each of three battalions). The British regimental system differed from continental use and regarded the regiment as a permanent organizational unit for its battalions

  Siegfried Stellung: Siegfried Line. This was the main section of the Hindenburg Line and ran from Arras to Saint-Quentin

  Spartacist: Revolutionary Marxist organization founded in Germany and dedicated to ending the war

  Preface: Death at Gouzeaucourt

  There war’s holiday seemed, nor though at known times

  Gusts of flame and jingling steel descended

  On the bare tracks, would you

  Picture death there.

  Edmund Blunden, ‘Gouzeaucourt: The Deceitful Calm’1

  Gouzeaucourt lies nine miles southwest of the town of Cambrai. Like many villages in this part of northern France, it consists of one main street, lined by small brick buildings, and is surrounded by farmland. It sits in a flat landscape of fields, occasional copses and low slopes, which may be marked as ‘ridges’ on local maps, but are, in reality, barely noticeable. In the years 1914–18 this village found itself in the zone of conflict known as the Western Front; the sliver of land that was fought over repeatedly between the Allies (the French, Belgian, British and Imperial troops, and later the Americans) and the invading German forces. It had been occupied in 1914, but, given its small size, it was generally left to itself. Then, during the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, it was fought over between British and German troops, which left it shattered, its buildings pounded into the ground and its fields pockmarked by shellfire. By the following year it was a ruin, with just clumps of shattered buildings and mounds of rubble; the home of crows and foxes, but little else.

  The war poet Edmund Blunden served at Gouzeaucourt in the cold spring of 1918. ‘At first the whole area was deathly still,’ he wrote:

  as though no war ever happened here. The civilians had not yet attempted to resume their properties and all the farms for miles were only shells of brick. It was truly a devastated area, apart from all question of the cutting down of orchards and the dynamiting of churches or cross-roads. Upon our arrival (in open trucks on a light railway) a heavy hoar-frost was loading the trees and telegraph wires and all projections and points with beards of greyish crystal – a singular sight, and the air’s near whiteness thickened into the impenetrable at a few yards’ distance.

  No-man’s-land may have been particularly wide here, with both sides remaining out of sight, but on closer inspection Blunden began to see how vicious the fighting had been. ‘Strewn about this sector were relics of the Cambrai fight of the previous November,’ he wrote, ‘cavalry lances, guns with crumpled barrels, tanks burnt out, German machine-gun belts and carriers, and a few dead, preserved by the cold weather.’2

  The British would return to Gouzeaucourt in the final months of 1918 as the Allied armies, now advancing on a broad front, began to approach the main German defensive position, the so-called Hindenburg Line, which lay along the Saint-Quentin canal to the east. Around this area the small villages that dotted the landscape – Villers-Plouich, Beaucamp, Trescault and Gouzeaucourt – had been turned into veritable fortresses, ringed with support trenches and dug-outs, and bristling with machine-guns. On the morning of 27 September 1918, Private George Thomas Cotterill (known as Tom) of the 15th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, serving with 5th British Division, was killed in action here. Cotterill was, in many ways, typical of what the British Army had become after four years of war. He was just nineteen years old and had been conscripted in 1917. He arrived on the Western Front determined to do his bit in a war that had lasted longer and cost so much more than anyone had imagined. And again, like thousands of his comrades, he would never return home or live to see the Armistice six weeks later. Taken on its own Cotterill’s death was hardly unique in a war that would kill over 700,000 British soldiers and take the lives of millions more, from every corner of Europe and every continent in the world. But it was unique in the grief that his death caused to the family who had lost a son and a brother. Private Cotterill was my great-uncle.

  This book is, in part, inspired by Tom’s story. The memory of his tragic loss, barely six weeks before the Armistice, has always haunted my family. His portrait, taken while on leave in 1918, shows an earnest young man dressed in his best suit; sitting in a chair in a photographer’s studio, waiting no doubt to return to the front. As a historian, I have always been fascinated by Tom’s life and death, and this book was born of a desire to learn more about how he was killed. He grew up in the village of Sealand, near Shotton, in Flintshire in northeast Wales; a thin strip of coastal land on the Dee estuary, perhaps best known as the home of John Summer’s steel mill. In 1914 the steel mill at Shotton was the largest producer of galvanized steel in the country, and I imagine, like many in his family, Tom would have been destined to spend his life working there had the Great War not intervened. But in June 1914 Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, thus sparking off a fatal chain of events that brought Europe to war the following month. Because of his age Tom did not join the colours until late 1917, and it was only the following January that he found himself in the front line. He had been sent, not to France, but to one of the least known British deployments of the war, stiffening the Italian Army against the Austrians on the northern Italian border, where they had the novel and somewhat unique task of regularly patrolling no-man’s-land in collapsible canvas boats (their front lying along the River Piave).

  A letter from this period of Tom’s life has survived the passage of time and offers a poignant insight into his character. It is dated 7 January 1918, and although it does not reveal his location, battalion records confirm that they were stationed in the village of Sant’Anna Morosina, northwest of Venice, over that Christmas period. The regimental history noted that ‘Billets were good in barns and houses, rations were plentiful and could always be supplemented with specialities of the country, such as spaghetti and polenta.’ The local ‘vina rosso’ was also ‘very popular and cheap’.3

  My dear Mum, Dad and all.

  First a few lines in answer to your most welcome letter and parcel which I received today Monday. Hoping you are all in the best of health as I am still in the pink. Well dear Mum, I was very sorry to hear of my uncle Fred being so ill, hoping he will soon get better and also have better luck this year than last . . . I think Maud will keep on hoping for her fur till I come on leave
again. We got half a quid this week, but it seems to go almost as quick as before. I think the rumour about us going away from here is cancelled at least – that is the latest – I hope it’s not true, there are no signs of the boys going on leave yet . . . We have just had a little fall of snow here but it freezes as it fell [sic]. It is very cold. Hoping you are getting better weather at home . . . I am on guard tomorrow. I could do with a good pair of mittens as you can do drill better with those than with gloves and almost as warm. Hoping you are going on well with the socks. Well dear Mum, I think I have said all this time so please excuse [my] last letter, [I] will now close with fondest love to yourself, Dad and all, Bill, Maud, and all at home. Glad to hear Harry is a lot better.

  From your ever loving son Tom XX

  This letter, in jagged handwriting, allows us a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of a youthful British conscript in the final year of the Great War. His thoughts, perhaps inevitably, concentrate on home: how the family are doing; his sister, Maud, and her long-desired fur coat; his Uncle Fred, who had not been well. The letter also gives us an insight into daily life in snowy Italy: the drills (which would be so much easier with mittens than gloves!); the eternal need for new socks; how his pay disappears very quickly; and the rumours of leave or where they may be sent next.

  Tom’s battalion, 15/Royal Warwicks, was better known as the Second Birmingham ‘Pals’ and had been raised in the frantic days of August and September 1914.4 After leaving for France in November of the following year, the battalion had first seen action along the trenches of the Western Front around Arras in the cold spring of 1916. It was during this time that the battalion first experienced the realities of trench warfare: the biting cold of a winter in the open; the long marches to and from the front; the intermittent shellfire; the sight of dead French soldiers buried in the parapet; the occasional strafes from enemy aeroplanes.5 Although it was one of the few British units to take part in the famous storming of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 (when 13 Brigade was ‘lent’ to 2nd Canadian Division), there was little to distinguish the second Birmingham battalion from many other British units on the Western Front. It had a sprinkling of regular officers, including the pipe-smoking Captain Charles Bill, who would write the battalion history, but the experience of soldiering would have to be learnt in the trenches for the majority of the battalion, including most of the junior officers. It was in places like the Somme and Ypres, names that have come to define the British memory of the conflict, that they would learn the meaning of war.