Battle of Arras (1917)

Background

By the winter of 1916–17 the Somme and Verdun had bled both sides without breaking the Western Front. The new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, promised that a sudden, massive blow on the Aisne would break the German line within 48 hours. At the London Convention of 16 January 1917 the British agreed to attack first, about a week earlier and some 50 miles to the north, to draw German reserves away from the French front. Lloyd George, prime minister since December 1916, backed the plan.

Arras was the obvious place. The British held the town and the line north of it facing Vimy Ridge, which the Germans had held since 1914 and which overlooked the Douai plain beyond. In March the Germans upset Nivelle's assumptions by withdrawing from the Noyon salient to the new Hindenburg Line (Siegfriedstellung) in Operation Alberich. The new line joined the old one near Arras, so the southern end of the British front now faced fresh, deep defences at Bullecourt.

The BEF had learnt from the Somme. New training manuals (SS 135, SS 143 and SS 144) standardised tactics from division and corps down to the platoon, and the artillery had the instantaneous No. 106 fuze, which cut wire without cratering the ground, and a far better counter-battery system. Under Arras itself, tunnellers, the New Zealand Tunnelling Company prominent among them, joined the medieval chalk quarries and the Crinchon sewer into an underground barracks for some 24,000 men At Vimy, engineers dug twelve subways, some over a kilometre long, to bring troops up to the line unseen.

The armies

Three British armies attacked under Haig. Allenby's Third Army made the main effort east of Arras, astride the Scarpe and the Cambrai road, with about 40 tanks of the 1st Tank Brigade spread among its corps. To the north Horne's First Army attacked Vimy Ridge with the Canadian Corps under Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng: all four Canadian divisions fighting together for the first time, with a British brigade of the 5th Division attached, about 170,000 men in all, 97,184 of them Canadian. Their artillery was about three times the usual corps allotment. In the south Gough's Fifth Army, with I Anzac Corps, faced the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt. On 9 April 14 divisions attacked, with nine in reserve. The bombardment, begun on 20 March at Vimy and 4 April elsewhere, fired about 2.7 million shells, over a million more than before the Somme.

Opposite stood General Ludwig von Falkenhausen's 6th Army: 12 divisions in line and five in reserve. OHL had issued a new doctrine of defence in depth in December 1916, but Falkenhausen held his relief divisions behind Douai, some 15 miles back, too far to counter-attack in time; a later inquiry found he had misunderstood the doctrine. In the air the Royal Flying Corps kept up an offensive posture with largely outclassed machines against the new Albatros D.III fighters of the German Jagdstaffeln, Manfred von Richthofen's Jasta 11 among them.

The battle

CDB90 records the opening phase, 9–24 April, as a single engagement, 316 (ARRAS): Vimy Ridge, the First Battle of the Scarpe, First Bullecourt and the Second Battle of the Scarpe. The later fighting, to 16 May, falls outside it.

9 April: the first day. After a 24-hour postponement at French request, the infantry went over at 05:30 on Easter Monday in sleet and snow driven into the German defenders' faces, behind a creeping barrage. Many came up from the tunnels and caves close to the German line. East of Arras the 12th (Eastern) and 3rd Divisions stormed Observation Ridge and the ground astride the Cambrai road towards Tilloy, while British counter-battery fire neutralised over 80 per cent of the German heavy guns in the sector. Germans were captured in their dugouts in large numbers. The Third Army advanced up to 3.5 miles, further than any British attack since trench warfare began at the end of 1914. Cyril Falls, the official historian, later called it 'the most formidable and at the same time most successful British offensive hitherto launched'.

Vimy Ridge, 9–12 April. On the left the Canadians' 1st, 2nd and 3rd Divisions reached their first objective, the Black Line, by about 06:25 and took most of their objectives by midday. The 4th Division was held up below Hill 145, the summit, and by the Pimple at the northern end. On 10 April Thélus and the Blue and Brown Lines fell and the crest was cleared by about 13:00; once outflanked, the Germans fell back to the Oppy–Méricourt line on the plain. The 10th Canadian Brigade took the Pimple on 12 April. The Canadians lost 10,602 men, 3,598 of them killed, and took about 4,000 prisoners.

Monchy-le-Preux, 10–14 April. Feuchy fell by the evening of 10 April, but the guns could not keep up across the shattered ground and German reserves arrived. On 11 April, in a snowstorm, the 15th (Scottish) and 37th Divisions fought into Monchy, the hill village dominating the Scarpe valley, by about 07:30. The 8th Cavalry Brigade's 10th Hussars and Essex Yeomanry rode in under intact German artillery; their brigadier, Bulkeley-Johnson, was killed by a sniper, and the yeomen had to shoot wounded horses in the streets. On 14 April the Newfoundland Regiment and 1st Essex attacked Infantry Hill beyond Monchy and were thrown back by counter-attacks; the Newfoundlanders lost 460 men, and for about four hours ten men of their battalion headquarters held the village edge.

First Bullecourt, 11 April. In the south the 4th Australian Division attacked the Hindenburg Line supported by 11 serviceable tanks. Only four reached the start line on time and most were knocked out; the Australians broke into the German trenches but were driven out, losing 3,289 men, 1,166 of them captured, against 749 German. On 15 April a German spoiling attack at Lagnicourt was thrown back.

Second Scarpe, 23–24 April. With Nivelle's offensive launched on 16 April and failing, Haig kept attacking. VI and VII Corps went in on a nine-mile front; the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division took Gavrelle and the 50th Division Guémappe, while the fight for Roeux was indecisive. This is the end of CDB90's engagement.

To 16 May. The Canadians took Arleux on 28 April. The Third Battle of the Scarpe on 3 May gained nothing. At Second Bullecourt, from 03:45 on 3 May, the 2nd Australian and 62nd Divisions broke into the Hindenburg Line and held on until the Germans gave up the ruins after a last counter-attack on 15 May. The offensive was closed down by 17 May.

Aftermath

The British had taken Vimy Ridge and advanced several miles east of Arras, but after the first days they gained little. Their losses were 158,660 in the official return, a daily average of about 4,000 over 39 days that Nicholls and Barton both put above the Somme and Passchendaele, which makes Arras by that measure the costliest British offensive of the war. German losses were probably 120,000–130,000. In the air, 'Bloody April' cost the RFC at least 245 aircraft and 211 aircrew killed or missing, against 66 German aircraft lost to air combat; Jasta 11 alone claimed 89. The French attack on the Aisne failed, mutinies broke out from 3 May, and Pétain replaced Nivelle on 16 May.

On the German side Ludendorff sacked Falkenhausen's chief of staff on 11 April, and Falkenhausen himself was removed after an inquiry. Allenby, criticised by his subordinates for the attritional phase, was sent to Palestine, which he took as a badge of failure.

The Arras Memorial lists nearly 35,000 missing of the sector from 1916 to August 1918. In Canada Vimy became a national symbol, the subject of the great memorial unveiled in 1936. Historians such as Tim Cook of the Canadian War Museum call it a real tactical victory, but argue that the 'birth of a nation' story grew over the following decades, largely around the monument, and that Vimy was one part of a larger British battle.

Wargaming it

Arras offers three quite different games. Vimy Ridge is the model set-piece attack: a corps-level game with divisions advancing through coloured objective lines behind a timed barrage, where the defender's question is whether to hold forward or fall back to the reverse slope and plain. At company or battalion scale, a Canadian brigade against Hill 145 or the Pimple tests whether the attacker can keep pace with the barrage in mud and snow.

East of Arras the 10–11 April fighting around Monchy-le-Preux is the rare Western Front scenario with exploitation in it: tired infantry, a handful of tanks and a cavalry brigade against German reserves arriving by the hour. Model the delay in moving guns forward and the cavalry's distance behind the line, and the 'what if' is obvious: could Monchy have fallen on 10 April with the cavalry close at hand?

First Bullecourt is a sharp, small scenario for a battalion or brigade: Australians attacking the Hindenburg Line wire with only a few unreliable tanks and no proper bombardment, with the player deciding whether to call it off. A campaign game over the five weeks should score casualties and German divisions drawn from the Aisne, not ground, and test Falkenhausen's distant reserves against Loßberg's forward counter-attack divisions. An air sub-game of 'Bloody April', Albatros fighters against outclassed British machines, runs alongside naturally.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.