From the Benner Collection
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Toronto Globe Newspaper, 1931

 

Most Effective Blow of the War Was Conducted by the Canadians Whose Magnificent Victory Over the Germans Made Further Advances Possible.

 

Without doubt one of the most gripping stories told about the Great War is contained in an exclusive interview obtained at Montreal by the Toronto Globe from General Sir Arthur Currie.  It is the inside story of the strategy displayed in the Battle of Amiens, in which General Currie tells how the elaborate secret preparations not only kept the Germans completely in the dark, but fooled the Canadian participants right up to the zero hour of attack. The story of the great battle follows in part:

Eleven years ago Wednesday evening Sir Arthur Currie stood on the doorstep of his Dury headquarters and watched his Canadians go swinging up the road, through the gathering dust, to battle.

Pound of feet!  Rattle of limber!   Grind of lorry! At intervals, from the dimming skyline - from beyond Boyes Wood and Cachy and Gentelles Wood, "ere the first pale star-shells were lifting from a dreaming, unsuspecting German line - the blatting of howitzers in a counter-battery grudge-fight.  And high above all the pound and rattle and grind and distant blatting the voices of troops, going singing into battle.

 

"Nothing Will Stop Those Boys!"

"It was my first experience of this sort in years,"  Sir Arthur told his interviewer. "They were singing, mind you - singing!  Our fellows sang on the march when first they went to France, but it was only a short while when song died out of them. So imagine how I felt when I heard these troops moving through Dury to the assembly area.  Really, I got a thrill from it that I shall never forget. I remember turning to 'Ox' Webber, my B.G.G.S., and saying: 'Do you hear that singing, Ox?  Well, we are going to win a wonderful victory tomorrow.  Nothing will stop those boys."

Nothing did either. From a material point of view, this Battle of Amiens, in which the Canadians formed the spearhead of an attack that had the "Aussies" on the left and the French on the right, was exactly what Sir Arthur predicted - a wonderful victory.  Between its jump-off on Aug. 8, and its withdrawal from the scene of operations on the twenty-second, the Canadian Corps fought against fifteen German divisions, directly engaging and thoroughly defeating ten of them, and partially engaging five others that were fighting astride its flanks, captured 9,131 prisoners, 190 guns of all calibers, and more than 1,000 machine guns and trench mortars, and penetrated enemy territory to an approximate depth of 14 miles, liberating an area of more than 67 square miles, containing 27 towns and villages.

 

Threefold Objective.

Its moral effect was even greater.  Launched with a threefold objective - to lessen the possibility of a German breakthrough at Amiens; the freeing of the Amiens-Paris railway, and the preservation of the City of Arras, to the north - it ended, not only with all goals attained, but with the conviction, deeply rooted with the Allied High Command, that it no longer would be necessary to wait until spring, and for the great American contribution in men and material which then would be available, but that the war could be waged to a successful conclusion before the end of 1918.

The Germans were shoved back from the very doorstep of Amiens and the wedge that they earlier had driven there between the English and the French was obliterated.  No longer had the British Army to face the option of separating from the French, and defending the Channel, or joining the French and leaving the seaports to their fate.  The Amiens-Paris railway, invaluable artery of communication crossing the entire allied rear area, was freed form the German gun-threat.  And Arras, the old cathedral city, where kiddies, they say, were wont to lay among the ruins between bombardments, enjoyed a respite from the terrible hammering that had been its lot ever since March 21 when the green-gray freshet was loosed upon the Western front, and stubborn defences, - British and French alike - were drowned out like so much spring wheat. 

 

German's Blackest Day

Amiens painted for Germany - as Ludendorff states in his memoirs - "the blackest day in the German history of the war."  To Haig, who stood for Britain, it brought tears - but tears of thankfulness and pride."

"I know that our victory fulfilled the fondest hopes of Haig," General Currie admitted to the Globe. He afterwards came and had lunch with me at Pernes.   We went out into the backyard and eat in the shade of a tent and he talked most confidentially to me of what had transpired since the spring.  It was the only time that I ever saw him visibly affected.  There were tears running down his cheeks and he talked of the dark days, and 'God knows,' he told me, 'they were dark enough.'  He said that his one comforting thought in those times was that he still had the Canadian Corps - that the British Army could not be defeated so long as the Canadian Corps was undefeated.  On many occasions, he told me, he was tempted to throw us in against the oncoming  Boches, but something always whispered 'No' to him, and so he saved us for the counter-blow."

"And the moral effect of this great counter-blow upon your fellows," The Globe asked.

Our fellows - every one, in fact," returned Sir Arthur, seriously, "saw that this great German army which had been relentlessly successful in its every attack since March, was not so relentless, after all - that, it could be beaten, and beaten badly. 

"And so we stopped looking over our shoulder to the sea, and once more looked ahead to the Rhine."

 

Surprise Was Complete

The Battle of Amiens was a surprise "Show" if ever there was one and the steps taken by the Canadians to maintain the element of surprise right down to the zero tick- in fact, until the barrage was down, were as guarded as Midas's gold.

During the afternoon of Aug. 8 the chief medical officer of a German division among other prisoners, walked into a large field hospital which "Old Hindenburg" Ross, chief M.O. of the Canadians, had established at Gentelles Wood.

"I cannot refrain," said the German medical officer, in perfect English, "from complimenting you, sir, on your staff work."

How is that?" asked Ross.

"Our information was that you Canadians were up around Ypres.  It fairly knocked us dizzy to find you coming at us this morning."

 

How It Was Done

General Currie then told how the plans for this great attack were so secretly guarded; how false stories of proposed attacks were purposely circulated so that the Germans might learn of them; how the nurses were told, supposedly in confidence, of the plans and how they talked too much; how a German spy from Pittsburgh, among the Canadians gathered a false impression of what was to be done; how misleading instructions were scattered and finally, how 120,000 troops were moved secretly at night and the way in which the bombers purposely deadened the noise of the approaching Canadian tanks.  Everything was planned in an almost perfect way.

 

Artillery Helped Advance

"So well trained was our artillery, so well did the gunners know the shooting capacity of each gun; so well did they analyze the positions they assumed that they were able, without a single registration round, to open up and lay down a perfect barrage."

It was not the biggest barrage that the Canadians could have laid down.  The Canadians had something else up their sleeve of the show.  They kept a lot of their guns out of the actual barrage, but in close-up positions, so that they could hook up and gallop forward at the first opportunity and punish the enemy at close quarters.

"And they did get forward - so far forward, in fact," General Currie now reveals, "That many of the horses were shot down by machine-gun fire."

The attack moved very rapidly.  Many German batteries were captured with the covers still on their guns, and in pits, near-by, were discovered piles of ammunition that were to have been used - Sir Arthur states - in a show that the Boche contemplated staging about Aug. 11 or 12 against the very front from which the Canadians had "hopped off." 

So rapidly were the first-line enemy batteries overrun that the Canadian Corps' Pan-Germanic battery - an organization laid earlier in the war for taking over captured German artillery and turning it against its former owners - had a "regular picnic" here. 

 

First Day's Work Well Done

"By the afternoon, the official report of the first day reads, "the Canadian Corps had gained all it objectives, with the exception of a few hundred yards on the right in the vicinity of Le Quesnel, where stiff resistance was offered by unexpected reserves, but this was made good the following morning.  The day's operations in which the four Canadian divisions took part, represented a maximum penetration of the enemy's defenses of over eight miles, and included the capture of the following villages: Hangard, Demuin, Beaucourt, Aubercourt, Courcelles, Ignacort, Cayeux, Caix, Marcelcave, Wiencourt, l'Equipee and Guillaucourt.  In addition to these, the Canadian Independent Force assisted the French in the capture of Mezieres, which was holding up their advance."

Every time General Currie thinks of Mezieres and the C.I.F. he smiles broadly.  He was pressed for an explanation.

"Well", said he, "the French moved more slowly on our right.  They weren't keeping up with us.  At Mezieres they got held up.  We had in action a number of old lorries, slightly armored, with Newton bomb guns on them.  Well, when the French go stuck, one of these lorries dashed along the Amiens-Roye road to the outskirts of Mezieres, and sat tight there long enough to "pop off" a half-dozen Newton 'pippins' into the place.  The Germans promptly moved out and the French moved in - and ahead."

Canadian Corps orders for the Amiens "do" meant when boiled down to plain English, "get as far as you can."

"We had gone eight miles in a single day," said Sir Arthur "while at Passchendaele where the enemy defenses were stronger and the weather worse, we took three months to get six miles.  We were elated.  That night a staff officer from General Headquarters came up to tell me that our success was so great that it could hardly be appreciated. 

"He asked me: 'What are you going to do now?' I said 'Go on!'

"He said: 'All right.  We are leaving everything to you.' And so we went four miles farther on the ninth."

Up that morning of the ninth, on the very edge of the battle.  Sir Arthur had a picture he says  that he will not soon forget.  As far as the eye could see moving men - in khaki and French grey-panorama before him. Through one's glasses one could see the attacking waves close with the enemy strong points.

 

A Great Morning

"It was a great morning for me," Sir Arthur summed it up.  "There was confidence in the air everywhere.  By Aug.11 the advance had brought troops into the area of the trenches and defenses occupied prior to the Somme operation in 1916.  These trenches, while not in a good state of repair, were, nevertheless, protected by a considerable amount of wire and lent themselves readily to a very stubborn machine-gun defense. 

It was what Sir Arthur described as "sticky going."  "I did not believe," he added, "that it could be taken without a prepared assault on it.  We had lost the element of surprise.  I suggested to 'Rawlie'  that rather than expose the Canadians Corps to losses without adequate results it should be withdrawn from this front, rested for a few days, filled up with replacements, and used to make another surprise attack in the direction Bapaume." 

 

General Ormond's Suggestion  
Credit for the conception of this Bapaume show, which was staged on Aug 21 -24 by the Third Army, has been awarded by historians to Haig but the fact of the matter is - although Sir Arthur in his modesty, would not admit it, that it all originated within the Canadian Corps - from a suggestion by "Dangerous Dan" Ormond  (Brigadier-General) that was not as "rattle-brained," Sir Arthur states as it appeared at first glance. 

"Dangerous Dan" had often approached him, admitted Sir Arthur, when the corps was east of Arras, with the proposition that if the corps would advance its line and seize Monchy and Wancourt Spur, and hold them as a flank, he, Ormond, and his brigade, would go down the Bapaume Road and seize Bapaume.

"It was Dan's idea," said Sir Arthur "to go hell-for-leather down that road in busses, and create such consternation behind the German front that it would force the enemy to retire.  Talking to 'Rawlie,' I suggested that instead of a brigade we use the whole Corps; that with Moncy as our flank, we go right down behind the German front, between Albert and Arras.  'Rawlie' then ordered me to put it in writing." "and in the end," ventured his interviewer "it became the plan of the Third Army attack that met with such great success?"

"As soon as it began to be successful and the Boche began to be forced back to the Hindenburg line" smiled Sir Arthur, by way of reply, "we were quickly moved north."

"Where on Aug. 26, with three days' notice, you went over, astride the Arras-Cambrai Road in the first stage of the show that was to break the Drocourt-Queant line, and make possible the capture of the Canal du Nord, and the relief of Cambrai."

 

"That was another great battle," smiled Sir Arthur.