1918 The Last Act by Pitt Barrie

Author:Pitt, Barrie.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2013-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps here lay the seeds of trouble. Gaiety may well be a good mood in which to launch an attack, but for the conduct of a resolute defence, grim determination would appear to be the desideratum.

Early the following morning, Bruchmüller’s artillery began once more its thunderous overture. The bombardment blotted out the picquets and the strong-points of the intermediate zone, and at its farthest limits rained down upon those positions inspected by Mr. Churchill a few hours before, to such effect that the seven French divisions holding them proved utterly inadequate to beat off the attack which followed. This was delivered by thirteen of von Hutier’s divisions (nine in the first wave), rested after their labours south of the Somme but still cock-a-hoop with success, who swept across the obliterated forward defences and fell upon the French with such ferocity that Storm Troops had broken through the first position and occupied seven miles of the second before 11 a.m. By the end of the day, von Hutier’s divisions on the left flank of the offensive had reached the north bank of the river Matz – over seven miles in front of their start line – and on June 10th the river was crossed in the centre of the attack front, which thus bulged slightly (but only slightly) towards Compiègne.

There the offensive was finally halted by the reserves which Pétain had held in the area, aided on their left by violent counterattacks launched on Foch’s orders and under the direction of the fieriest of the French generals, a short, dark, flamboyant Gascon named Mangin, who shared with the British General Deverell the dubious distinction of being nicknamed ‘Butcher’ by his troops. These counterattacks did not regain much ground, but they served to distract the attention of the German command from more vulnerable parts of the French defensive line, and affected an already despondent Ludendorff so much that on June 11th he called off the offensive, together with a secondary one which had been launched in its support by the German Seventh Army, westwards from a point just below Soissons.

‘The action of the Eighteenth Army’, he wrote, ‘had not altered the strategical situation … nor had it provided any fresh technical data.’

Possibly not: but the action in itself did provide one fact of arresting strategical importance. For the first time since the opening of the German 1918 Spring Offensive eleven weeks before, a German advance had been halted by factors other than its own exhaustion, and in one place the advance had been beaten back.

Of recent years there has been a great increase in the practice of entrusting the management of large business organizations to accountants, irrespective of their knowledge of the technicalities of the business itself. There is much evidence to support a contention that after 1915, the war on the Western Front resembled nothing so much as the activities of two vast and competing firms of civil engineers, whose staffs were generals, whose capital assets were guns and ammunition, and whose liquid assets were the unfortunate troops.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.