Hundred Days Offensive
The Allies attacked continuously from 8 August to 11 November 1918 and drove the German army out of France. The German spring offensives had come close to breaking the front and had exhausted the army doing it — half a million casualties, a salient with no railways in it, and troops who had seen the Allied supply dumps they overran and drawn conclusions. Amiens on 8 August was the turning point. Some 400 tanks, 2,000 guns firing without a preliminary bombardment on surveyed and sound-ranged targets, Australian and Canadian divisions leading, and an advance of eleven kilometres in a day; Ludendorff called it the black day of the German army, not for the ground but because whole units surrendered. What followed was different from anything earlier in the war. Foch, as generalissimo, ran a sequence of limited attacks on different parts of the front, stopping each when it lost momentum rather than feeding reserves into it, so the Germans could never concentrate. The Hindenburg Line was broken at the end of September, including the Saint-Quentin canal crossing. Meanwhile Bulgaria collapsed in September, the Ottomans in October and Austria-Hungary in early November. Ludendorff told the government on 29 September that an armistice was needed at once. The Allies took some 385,000 prisoners in three months. Germany was not invaded, which allowed the argument afterwards that the army had never been beaten in the field — a claim built on the fact that the fighting stopped on French and Belgian soil. The offensive also cost the Allies dearly. British Empire forces alone took some 300,000 casualties in those three months, and the Canadian and Australian corps that led the hardest attacks were worn to a fraction of their strength.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Military
