official history
Military Operations, France and Belgium 1918, vol. 2
James E. Edmonds, 1937
Named on the page for Battle of Arras (1917).
machine-read Machine-read (OCR) from a scanned book at the Internet Archive: expect misread words and names. The scan itself is at the library.
draft Matched to the battle automatically; not yet reviewed.
Passages that name the battle; the whole book is at Internet Archive.
9 April – 16 May 1917
Battle of Arras (1917)
CHAPTER III
The German Offensive in Picardy (continued), 28th March 1918, The Battle of Arras Notes : I. General Foch’s Directives of the 28th March . II. The Germans on the 28th March
CHAPTER III
Symptoms of the slowing up of the German offensive clearly manifest on the 27th March grew more marked on the 28th. The great effort bearing the code name of “ Mars ”, and called by us “ First Battle of Arras 1918 ”, made with a view to breaking through on both sides of the Scarpe in front of Arras at the junction of the Third and First Armies, and to giving a new impulse to the waning offensive power of the Second and Seventeenth Annies, failed to accomplish more than a slight gain of ground. The attacks against the rest of the front of the Third Army were entirely unsuccessful. It was only south of the Somme, at the junction of the Allied Armies, which was still a weak spot owing to the exhaustion of the Fifth Army and the unavoidably slow arrival of French reinforcements, that the situation gave any cause for alarm.
FOCH’S DIRECTIVES
In the Arras battle the German divisions were fresh, as the assaulting divisions had been on the 21st ; elsewhere on the 28th, their failure is easily accounted for hy the exhaustion of the infantry, the breakdown of supply and transport across the devastated area, and the absence of the usual excellent artillery support.
FLANDERS. APRIL
(2) by intervening in the battle of Arras with French “ forces.”
Public domain. Text from Internet Archive.