Final Offensive
American Expeditionary Force soldiers moving into the line, 1918.
NAM 1995-03-88-16
Having cleared the salients, Marshal Foch now decided to launch a three-pronged attack against the weakened German lines. In the north, King Albert of Belgium, with a force of British, French and Belgian troops, would attack through Flanders. In the south the French and Americans would attack on the front between Reims and Verdun.
Finally, in the centre of the line, Haig would command three British armies and one French in an attack between Cambrai and St. Quentin. The southern attack made good progress but was then slowed up by supply problems. Nevertheless, by November 1918 the French and Americans had reached Sedan and had cut the Sedan-Metz railway line, one of the main supply lines to the whole German front.
Success at Ypres
German prisoners bringing in the wounded during the advance across the Lys in Flanders, 1918.
NAM 1997-12-75-101
The northern attack began on 28 September 1918 and was also a dramatic success. The British and Belgian armies advanced across the Ypres battlefield and recaptured all the ground lost the previous April. In three days the Allies advanced 16 kilometres (10 miles), reaching the Menin-Roulers road. Bad weather and inadequate planning then delayed the continuation of the offensive, but on 17 October Lille, Ostend and Douai were liberated. The Belgians reached Zeebrugge and Bruges two days later. By the end of the month the Allies were at the Schelde and by the time of the Armistice they had advanced over 80 kilometres (50 miles).
Breaking the Hindenburg Line
British troops crossing the Crozat Canal, September 1918. NAM 1972-08-67-2-144
In the central sector, 40 British and Empire divisions supported by the American II Corps faced 57 German divisions protected by the Hindenburg Line, a series of formidable defensive fortifications stretching from Cerny on the River Aisne to Arras. The line had resisted several Allied attacks the previous year and took advantage of a series of wide canals that ran though deep cuttings. The offensive began on 27 September with an attack on the Canal du Nord by the First and Third British Armies that succeeded in overrunning two lines of the defences near Cambrai.
On 30 September the Allies attacked on the St Quentin Canal. Australian and American troops assaulted a strongly defended sector at Bellicourt with tanks, artillery and aircraft once again being used in a co-ordinated attack. Two days later, a British division made an amphibious crossing of the canal to the south. During the following days the Allied attacks met with more success and all the lines were fully breached.
‘The great thing now is to get ahead. We had got on to a lovely main road, ahead we can see a railway cutting with a lovely stone bridge crossing it. When we get within a quarter of a mile or so up goes the bridge in the air, with the result that we have to carry the cycles down a very step embankment, follow the railway lines which have been blown up every hundred yards or so, until we can find a place where we can climb up the embankment…We can now see that the Germans must be in full retreat. Trees are cut down, and have fallen across the road, bridges are blown up, all telegraph lines sawn down, canals dammed and roads mined’
Typescript memoir by Second Lieutenant Edwin Blomfield, MC, The New Zealand Cyclist Battalion, 1918. NAM 2006-11-38
