SYMHC Classics: Battle of Amiens

This 2018 episode covers the Battle of Amiens, near the end of World War I. It was the start of what came to be known as the 100 Days Offensive, which was the Allies’ final push to win the war. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Battle of Amya started on August eighth,
nineteen eighteen, or one hundred and eight years ago today.
Our episode on that battle came out eight years ago
on August eighth, twenty eighteen. For its one hundredth anniversary,
we are bringing it out today as a Saturday Classic.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a

(00:27):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are coming
up on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Amion,
which started what came to be known as one hundred

(00:47):
Days Offensive. That was the ally's final push to win
World War One, and this particular battle and the one
hundred Days Offensive aren't really talked about as frequently as
some of the other big moments in World War All
of our other World War One related episodes are from
much earlier in the war a lot of the time
because it was the hundredth anniversary of that thing. So

(01:10):
we're gonna set the stage a little bit in this
episode before we get to the battle itself, especially with
how events that played out in nineteen seventeen led to
all of this and how the Battle of Ambian ultimately
led to the end of the war. Also, World War
One was massive. There was a lot going on in
other parts of the world during the time period that

(01:32):
we're talking about, So we are really just focused on
Europe here, particularly the Western Front, with the key players
being the British Empire, France, the United States, and Germany.
It is much too large to also talk about all
of the other battles going on in all of the
other places, with all of the other countries in nineteen

(01:52):
seventeen and nineteen eighteen. So World War One started, of
course in nineteen fourteen. Although international tensions had been in
Europe for years before this point, things shifted with the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. They
were shot to death in Sarajevo on June twenty eighth,
nineteen fourteen, by Serbian nationalists Gavrilo Prinzip. The arch Duke

(02:15):
had been the heir to the throne of the Austro
Hungarian Empire. The Empire suspected that the Serbian government was
involved in the assassination, so Austria Hungary declared war on Serbia,
and soon much of Europe was involved in this conflict.
Within two weeks, the Allies of Russia, Belgium, France, and
Great Britain had all sided with Serbia. Germany had sided

(02:39):
with the Austro Hungarian Empire as part of what would
be called the Central Powers, and more declarations of war
followed from there. This quickly became a war of attrition,
with the war on land in Europe being fought primarily
along the Eastern and Western fronts. Battles went on for months,
with millions of casualties and catastrophic effects for the civilian population,

(03:01):
including famines and food shortages all over Europe. For most
of it, the situation between the Allies and the Central
Powers was essentially a stalemate. This was especially true along
the Western Front, which ran from the English Channel to Switzerland,
primarily through France. Something started to shift at the end
of nineteen seventeen, though Russian involvement in the war had

(03:24):
never been popular there and the war had compounded ongoing
economic problems and food shortages in Russia. The February Revolution
started on March eighth of nineteen seventeen. It's called the
February Revolution because Russia was still on the Julian calendar,
so from the Russian point of view, that was February.
The February Revolution started with strikes and riots, and it

(03:47):
led to the abdication of Sir Nicholas. The Second Unrest
continued after the February Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution followed in
November of nineteen seventeen, and that was followed by the
Russian Civil War. With all of this going on, Russian
involvement in World War I effectively ended, and Russia signed
an armistice with the Central Powers in December of nineteen seventeen.

(04:11):
A lot of the fighting along the Eastern Front at
this point had been between Russia and Germany, so with
Russia out of the picture, German forces were freed up
to move to the Western Front instead. More than forty
divisions of German troops prepared to do exactly that. After
Russia withdrew from the war. The United States had also

(04:31):
declared war on Germany in April of nineteen seventeen. Although
the US had avoided becoming directly involved in the war
until that point, it had been providing supplies and other
aid to the Allies for quite some time, so at first,
the United States declaration of war didn't do much to
shift the balance of power, but the US committed troops

(04:52):
to the war effort as well, and those troops started
arriving in June of nineteen seventeen and entered combat that October.
Terms of actual troops, the American presence in the war
was pretty small in nineteen seventeen. That first arrival of
troops was only fourteen thousand men. By July of nineteen eighteen, though,
there would be more than a million American troops in

(05:14):
France alone, and unlike their counterparts who were already there,
these American troops weren't necessarily experienced, but they were fresh.
Most of the Allied troops who were already in Europe
were exhausted after months or years of fighting. So in
late nineteen seventeen, with Russia out of the war and
the United States ramping up to join it, Germany recognized

(05:36):
that it had a limited window of opportunity. The German
military was running out of everything, including people, but with
a quick decisive action, it might be able to force
the Allies to negotiate for peace before so many American
reinforcements arrived, or failing that, Germany might be able to
level the playing field, putting it on more equal footing

(05:58):
with the Allies during negotiations later on, rather than being
at a clear disadvantage. The Allies also recognized that Germany
had this one last opportunity to try to break out
of the stalemate. So at the start of nineteen eighteen,
Allied leaders were confident that a major German attack was
on the way and soon, but they weren't really sure

(06:19):
exactly when or where it came. On the first day
of Spring, that was March twenty first, nineteen eighteen, German
forces attacked a stretch of the Western Front south of
the French city of Arras. This was at a point
where French and British forces met on the Western Front,
and it was the weakest point along that line. Part

(06:39):
of the German objective was to cut these two forces
off from one another and then at least in theory,
Germany could fight French and British forces separately, overcoming both
of them. The German attack incorporated air strikes, a massive
artillery of bombardment and gas, including tear gas, chlorine and phosterene,
and this attempt to break through the Allied line and

(07:01):
they were immediately successful. The morning they attacked was foggy
and the Allies were caught by surprise. The British third
and fifth Armies were forced to retreat, and on March
twenty first alone, the British military saw thirty eight thousand,
five hundred casualties that included twenty one thousand soldiers taken prisoner.

(07:21):
Germany was able to advance about four miles or six
and a half kilometers, reclaiming in one day all the
ground that they had lost over the previous two years.
This March twenty first assault was the start of what
came to be known as the Spring Offensive or the
Ludendorf Offensive, that was named after Quartermaster General Eric Ludendorf,

(07:42):
who was leading the German military with Field Marshal Paul
von Hindenberg. In Germany, it was called Kaiserschlacht or Kaiser's Battle,
and the first phase was codenamed Operation Michael because it
covered some of the same territory as the Battle of
the Somme in nineteen sixteen. Sometimes it is also called
the Set and Battle of the Somme. Operation Michael ended

(08:03):
on April fifth, and by that point the German army
had captured about twelve thousand square miles of territory It's
about thirty one thousand square kilometers. This had come at
a great cost, though, with about two hundred and forty
thousand casualties that the German Army just had no good
way to replace. Together, French and British forces, including those

(08:23):
from Canada, Australia and other parts of the British Empire,
had suffered nearly two hundred and fifty thousand casualties. Just
to be clear, casualty numbers include everyone killed, wounded, or captured.
That initial goal of splitting the British and French troops
didn't ultimately work out because Germany didn't have the manpower
to really divide and fight against both armies. The Allies

(08:47):
also quickly realized the threat and united the Allied troops
under the command of French General Ferdinand Foche to better
coordinate their efforts. So, rather than facing an army that
was divided and left in chaos, Germany instead faced a
force that was united under one command. The overall Spring
Offensive ended on July fifteenth, nineteen eighteen, with the Second

(09:09):
Battle of the Marne. General Ludendorff tried to capture the
city of Rem, hoping to divide the French forces and
set a stage for an assault on Flanders. But unlike
on March twenty first, General Fouche anticipated this attack. He
and the Allies mounted a counter attack, and by July eighteenth,
German forces were retreating. Germany could not afford this loss,

(09:32):
especially since American troops were now arriving in France at
a rate of about three hundred thousand per month. The
nineteen eighteen flu pandemic was also sweeping across the globe
at this point, including through all of the armies involved
in the war. But the war was not over yet,
which brings us to Ammia, and we're first gonna pause
and have a sponsor break before we dig into that.

(10:03):
The Spring Offensive and the Allied counter attacks at the
Second Battle of the Marn were a shift in how
the war was being fought on the Western Front for
years that had been defined by the trenches. Trenches had
been used during battles in one way or another for centuries,
and they continued to be a part of warfare after
this point, but in World War One they were a

(10:24):
side effect of evolving military technologies, specifically machine guns and
artillery trenches were away for troops to gain some measure
of protection from these devastating weapons, even though it meant
that they couldn't really move once they were dug in.
During those years of stalemate, an attack on the enemy's
trench had usually combined a preliminary bombardment called a creeping

(10:47):
barrage with an advancing infantry. The barrage was supposed to
lay down artillery just ahead of the soldier's advance, providing
cover and clearing out the opposition, but a lot of
the time this did work. Barrages got too far ahead
of the troops, effectively serving as an advance warning for
the opposite side, or they tore up the terrain so

(11:09):
much that the soldiers had trouble crossing to get to
the enemy. Or barrages might move too slowly or fall short,
and the advancing infantry were killed as a result. Regardless, though,
armies wound up facing huge casualties in exchange for a
few yards of territory or none at all. By the
spring and summer of nineteen eighteen, though World War Ones,

(11:32):
opposing armies were starting to make better use of all
the available military technology to effectively assault the other side's trenches,
and the ally's first truly effective use of all that
technology was at the Battle of Homel, led by Australian
Core commander Lieutenant General John Monash. Monash planned the early
morning attack in absolute secrecy. He added smoke shells to

(11:56):
the creeping barrage to obscure the battlefield. He also used tanks,
which had been introduced in nineteen sixteen, to plow through
the Germans barbed wire and fortifications and to deliver supplies
from behind the infantry advance. Eighteen aircraft were involved as well,
including some older ones specifically chosen because their engines were

(12:17):
loud enough to cover up the sound of the tanks.
The planes dropped bombs and flares, providing covering fire, and
reported back with information about the Germans positions. The plan
also included faking troop movements in using dummy installations to
further disguise what they were doing, and sending messages back
and forth by pigeon. This battle was an enormous success

(12:39):
for the Allies. The Allied troops, including American and Australian forces,
attacked early in the morning on July fourth. Within two hours,
they had obtained all of their objectives. This was really
the first time that all of the available military technology
had been put into use at once in such a
coordinated way. It was so effective that all of the

(13:01):
commanders of the British Expeditionary Force got a report about
it detailing what had gone so well after the battle
was over. The Battle of Amia built off these same
strategies that Monash had put into place at Homel. The
city of Amia was a major junction for railroads and communications,
and Germany had repeatedly tried to take it during the

(13:22):
Spring offensive. Germany had not succeeded, but it had stretched
out its line in the attempt, creating a bulge that
it didn't have the manpower to thoroughly defend. The Allies
attack on the salient was as before planned in total secrecy.
Before it started, they used fake radio transmissions and phony

(13:43):
troop movements to disguise their activity during the day, while
putting the men into their real positions at night. The
assault combined air support, artillery, tanks, and infantry. In terms
of numbers, the Allies had seventy five thousand men, more
than five hundred tanks, and nearly two two thousand aircraft
that troops included British, Canadian, Australian and French infantry, tank brigades,

(14:06):
British cavalry divisions, the Royal Air Force and American troops
that were held in reserve. Australian and Canadian troops formed
the spearhead of the infantry attack at Amia. By this point,
Australia's military had distinguished itself as part of the Australian
and New Zealand Army Corps that's ANZAC in the Gallipoli Campaign,
and the Canadian units had developed a reputation as the

(14:29):
British Empire's shock troops. Germany was out everything in this battle.
Exact numbers are in dispute. It is difficult to track
down precise numbers in a conflict like this, but they
had a much smaller fighting force, with only about five
hundred thirty guns and three hundred and seventy aircraft. They
had three lines of trenches, but these trenches weren't well

(14:51):
fortified and the communication networks among them were really spotty.
When the attack started at four twenty in the morning
on August eighth, nineteen eighteen, it came as a total surprise.
Fighting at the Battle of Amia went on for three days.
By that point, the Allies had advanced eight miles it's
about thirteen kilometers. They had liberated more than one hundred

(15:11):
towns and villages from the Germans. They'd also captured a
two hundred and eighty millimeter or eleven inch Krupp naval
gun that had been used to shell Amia from about
twenty five kilometers or that's sixteen miles away. This gun
had been mounted on a railway carriage, and the Australian
thirty first Battalion, fifth Division captured it by commandeering the

(15:32):
carriage and driving it back into Allied territory. They're very
proud of capturing this gun. I mean, it's not surprising
that they were, but it comes up a lot in
accounts of this day. After this hugely effective first day,
the Allied advance slowed over August ninth through eleventh. The
German forces started to regroup and offer a stronger resistance,

(15:56):
and on the eleventh, Sir Arthur Curry of the Canadian
Corps con General Sir Henley Rowlinson of the British Fourth
Army that they should consolidate their gains instead of continuing
to try to push ahead against increasingly tougher resistance. But
before that decision, the battle had devastated the German army.
Ludendorf called August eighth the black day of the German

(16:18):
Army in the history of the war. He also said
that it quote put the decline of that fighting power
beyond all doubt, and in such a situation as regards reserves,
I had no hope of finding a strategic expedient whereby
to turn the situation to our advantage. This wasn't just
because of the tens of thousands of casualties that the

(16:38):
German army saw that day. It was also that it
revealed the terrifically terrible morale among the German troops. At
least twelve thousand of them were taken prisoner, with huge
numbers of soldiers surrendering at once. There were even stories
of whole groups of Germans surrendering to a single Allied soldier,
or surrendering even when they they had the Allies in

(17:01):
that particular spot vastly outnumbered. Altogether, this was the worst
German defeat since the start of the war. Until this point,
Allied leaders had thought the war would last at least
until nineteen nineteen but this was the start of the
final one hundred days offensive that finally ended it, and
we're going to talk more about that after we pause

(17:21):
for a little sponsor break. After the Battle of Amion,
both General Eric Ludendorf and Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, the
Emperor of Germany, agreed that there was no way for
the German army to recover. Their goal became to avoid

(17:43):
an outright surrender, and the German army continued to fight
even as it fell back toward Germany. The Allied forces
continued to press ahead in this final push to bring
the war to an end. The last major objective to
this end was the Hindenburg Line, which was Germany's last
large scale fortification. The Hindenburg Line was a set of

(18:04):
three well defended trenches that had been established in nineteen seventeen.
The Allies planned their assault on the Hindenburg Line for
a full month before actually attacking its forward outposts near Fe,
France on September eighteenth, nineteen eighteen. The Allied forces finally
breached the Hendenburg Line on September twenty ninth, after four

(18:24):
days of heavy fighting, including firing nearly a million artillery
shells and At that point, Paul von Hendenberg and Eric
Ludendorf told Kaiservilhelm that the war was lost. On October first,
at a meeting of representatives of all the major German
political parties, Ludendorf and Hendenberg told the assembled group the
reality of the situation. A lot of them were shocked

(18:47):
to learn that things were going so badly for Germany.
Germany requested peace negotiations on October third. Ludendorf revised his
opinion a little later in October, as Allied attack slowed
down to allow the supply lines to catch up to
the troops advance. But by that point word of the
dire condition of the German military had spread through its

(19:09):
civilian population. Like much of the rest of Europe, German
civilians had faced extreme hardship during the war, including near
starvation conditions thanks to an Allied blockade. In the face
of such grim news, the war just no longer had
the support of the German people, especially once he heard

(19:30):
the terms of the armistice, which involved making Germany completely
unable to renew hostilities. Ludendorff wanted to renew the fight,
but on October twenty sixth he was forced to resign.
By this point, there were rampant desertions going on all
over the German military. A massive mutiny also swept through
the Navy in late October and early November over orders

(19:54):
that they stayed an attack on the Royal Navy in
an attempt to derail the armistice negotiations. The art Armistice
was finally signed on November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, at five am,
and the war ended at eleven am that same day.
The Canadian Corps also liberated the city of malt France
that day, which was where the last shot of the
war was fired. It was also the site of one

(20:16):
of the war's earliest battles, and there's actually an episode
about that battle in our archive. By this point, Kaiservillhelm
the Second had been forced to abdicate and had gone
into exile, and German Chancellor Friedrich Ebert had started to
form a provisional government. During the last hundred days of
the war, French forces saw five hundred and thirty thousand casualties.

(20:39):
There were more than four hundred thousand casualties among the
British troops, including the troops from the rest of the
British Empire. That's not just from the UK. American forces
saw one hundred and twenty seven thousand casualties, and there
were seven hundred and eighty five thousand casualties just among
the Germans, with three hundred and sixty eight thousand taken prisoner.

(21:00):
The German army was also very clearly defeated after that
initial rally in the Spring Offensive, the tide of the
war had turned hard against it, and with millions of
American troops on the ground in Europe dramatically increasing the
ALLIS numbers, there was just no way that Germany could
have turned that around. But the false idea spread through

(21:21):
the German military that Germany had not been defeated. Instead,
this idea took route, didn't take root, as though it
came out of nowhere, like it was intentionally spread that
the German Army had been stabbed in the back by
civilian leaders who negotiated and signed the Armisis. According to
this mindset, which was spread by Ludendorf and other high

(21:42):
ranking officers intentionally, the officials who signed the armistice were traders.
Adolf Hitler would later brand them the November criminals. This
led to a whole conspiracy theory about a betrayal of
the German military at the hands of Jews, which became
part of Nazi propaganda the years after the war. The
terms of the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles that

(22:04):
ended the war also contributed to the run up to
World War II. Under that armistice, Germany had to surrender
territory and war materials, including thousands of pieces of artillery, guns, trains, aircraft, battleships, submarines, destroyers,
and other naval vessels. Germany was also to surrender its
prisoners of war immediately, but there were no reciprocal terms

(22:28):
for the other nations to return German prisoners. Under the
Treaty of Versailles, Germany was prohibited from joining the League
of Nations until nineteen twenty six. The treaty also drew
new borders that gave territory to Germany's neighbors, stripped Germany
of its colonies, and required Germany to pay reparations that
were economically disastrous. All of this ultimately contributed to Hitler's

(22:52):
rise of power, which we talk about in our episode
On the Night of the Long Knives is a really
bummer place to end an episode so if you were
listening to this and you were like, this reminds me
of Wonder Woman. Yes, obviously, Ludendorf in Wonder Woman is

(23:18):
a fictionalized version of this guy who we talked about
in this show. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,

(23:40):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.