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Updated: June 27, 2025
The trench deadlock in northern France and Belgium was broken by Ludendorff's fatuous drive in March, 1918. After the allies had stopped it and inaugurated their counter-offensive all Europe made a startling discovery. The Germans were tenacious enough in trench warfare; in open fighting, known as war of maneouvre, they could not stand before American and the allied troops.
In other words, it appeared to be an experiment in tactics which might with good fortune develop into a strategical means of achieving from the south of Douai and Lille what the Flanders campaign had failed to secure to the north of them. The German line was thin, and, had it been made of the stuff of the Italian line at Caporetto, Haig might have repeated Ludendorff's unexpected success.
In discussing this and the other Wilson notes, Ludendorff says that they had dealt a vital blow at the heart of militaristic Germans and finally loosed the grip they held on the German people. This entire situation is best expressed in Ludendorff's own words: On October 23rd or 24th Wilson's answer arrived. It was a strong answer to our cowardly note.
Defeat to the north of those points, even though it cost us the coast as far as Calais, would not entail retreat from the Artois hills between Arras and Gris Nez or threaten our liaison with the French which had been Ludendorff's first objective.
In view of the circumstances, I might perhaps say: an act of super-courtesy. I do not dispute General Ludendorff's statement that I had expressed the wish to see him; for if I had not had the wish, I should have left Kreuznach without paying him a visit.
Prunay, Prosnes, Auberive, and Tahure were yielded at first, but recovered by counter-attacks; the French lost no guns, and their casualties were insignificant. Gouraud more than anyone else had frustrated Ludendorff's last offensive. South-west of Reims the Germans were rather more successful.
Ludendorff's object was to widen his front towards Paris, for the lure of the capital had already diverted him from his original plan of breaking the liaison between the French and British armies in front of Amiens.
There can hardly have been much hope in Ludendorff's mind of decisive victory in a strategy which after April left the British front almost immune from attack, while American reinforcements were pouring in at the rate of hundreds of thousands a month.
Time was of the essence of Ludendorff's strategy; he could not afford, with the American peril in prospect, to prolong the war by fighting in trenches and merely defending the Hindenburg lines.
In the region to the south of the Ancre a relief was going on, so that there was double the usual number of Germans in the trenches. The relieving division, the Two Hundred and Twenty-third, one of the Ludendorff's new formations and going into action for the first time as a division, was caught within a few minutes after getting to the trenches.
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