American History Hit - Battle of Amiens

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

In August 1918, the battle of Amiens brought the German army's 'black day' and the beginning of the end of the First World War.But what happened at Amiens? How were US troops involved in this battle? And how is the battle remembered today?In this episode, Don is joined by Dan Snow to talk about the American troops and their parts in the offensives at Hamel and Amiens.Produced by Sophie Gee and James Hickmann. Editing and sound design by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 5.30 p.m. on the 9th of August 1918. German forces are reeling from what will soon be known as the Black Day of the German Army.

Yesterday, they were taken by surprise by a creeping barrage of 2,000 guns and 500 tanks emerging through thick fog. The British, French, Australian, and Canadian troops had moved forward 200 yards every two minutes, their soldiers never far behind their own artillery barrage. Overall, they had advanced 8 kilometers along the front at Amiens. In one day, the Germans lost an estimated 30,000 men. But the Germans still hold Chippily spur.

They have a vantage point, a stronghold. They are raining artillery fire down on the 174th English Brigade, halting their advance. So here we are. It's 5.30 p.m. and a new Allied assault has begun. This time, it's the 131st Division. of the United States' 33rd Infantry Division, fresh from a 30-kilometer march to the front. Only this time, it's the impetuous Americans outstripping their allies to capture the machine guns of Chipply Spur. We're one day into the final 100 days of the First World War, and the doughboys, the Americans, are on the offensive.

Hey, it's Don Wildman. Welcome to American History Hit. World War I, the Great War in Europe, began in 1914. the result of an assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. Then the following dominoes of European treaties and alliances, eventually resulting in what amounted to a desperate stalemate of trench warfare between England and France and Germany. Millions would perish for little territorial or strategic gain. It was the war to end all wars that would drag on endlessly

and would ultimately lead to an even worse conflict two decades later. The United States entered the war reluctantly in 1917, and its forces would not see action until the summer of 1918, just six months before an armistice was negotiated. But the first battles our troops took part in in the summer of 1918 marked an advent of a new role for us, a global presence for the U.S. military in warfare that was redefining combat. And here to take us through the heat of battle is historian TV host podcaster Dan Snow, also a good friend of mine, and founder of history hit. Man, here you are, right where you belong. Thanks, Don, thanks for having me. Dan, America's role in World War I is often summed up in its simplest version. The second we joined up, Germany said enough, we're cooked.

But of course, the real history is way more interesting and our engagement way more involved. That's true. Although historians are going to shoot me, but there's an element of truth to that basic idea. Because you've got to imagine the effect. Europe is tottering. Russia has collapsed. Literally, they're thrust into kind of civil war. The French have had huge mutinies.

The Germans are eating turnips. They've got... They're making bread out of Ersatz materials that they're collapsing. The Brits have got industrial problems. You can imagine then what that was like in 1917 where suddenly this gigantic, well-funded, confident force enters the war. And I do think that the impact on the Americans arriving in Europe would have been devastating for the Germans.

And actually there's an expression from the French president, which is, you know what my plan is? I'm waiting for the tanks and the Americans. So the impact of America entering that war was huge. Yeah. It's important to realize for anybody who doesn't remember, remember that the first three years of this war, 14 to 17, is just a gradually shifting line of trenches in primarily the north of France, all these horrible battles that just takes so many lives

and they don't do anything. And largely, that's because there isn't a new factor involved. I mean, they have machine guns and so forth. But in the latter part of the year, new technology in the shape of tanks come from England, primarily. But it's the manpower of America that comes over that really tips the balance, the potential of the American powerhouse entering into this war. Why hadn't America come in earlier? The Americans, quite rightly, did not want to get involved in someone else's quarrel. This is a guy shot with ostrich feathers in his hat a long way away from the USA. And so it only was dragged into the war when the Germans made the incredible decision to sink American ships approaching British ports. Previously, if shipping would

be flying an American flag, the German submarines were directly let it pass. They want to to starve, they wanted to break Britain fast, because Germany was breaking. So when you break Britain fast, the quickest way to do that is to cut all supplies off. Oil, food, everything. That means sinking American ships, bring the American to the war. The German commander said, you know what, this will be over by the time the Americans could do anything about it. Classic. You see that in Ukraine at the moment. I'll knock them out before anyone else can do anything about it, right? And so the Americans reluctantly joined the world. When they did join it, they joined in force. Two million Americans were in France by the end of 1918.

Prior to this, the Americans had only had the Spanish-American war as far as foreign conflicts go. And that was a pretty local war for us for the most part, except for the Philippines. Becoming enmeshed in a foreign soil war was brand new territory for Americans. We'd never taken orders from other soldiers. We'd never figured out how to operate with them. That's what this really marks this summer. It's not just French. It's the Australians.

It's all these different allied forces going on there. They've been killing themselves quite literally for years. when the Americans come in, they have to catch up to this whole thing. They have to be trained up, primarily by Australians. Well, they did a lot of training with various people. And as you say, I'm going to talk about a guy later on, an American who served in the Spanish War. So there was some experience, but they were raising these new units full of young men who hadn't served. And the couple of battles, I think we talk about today are the ones in which small number of American troops are involved.

They saw what war was like, how it's being waged. The Americans, a month or two later, were able to go and fight huge battles. In fact, some of the largest battles in American history to this day, under their own steam. The big thing you mentioned already that's really important for people to understand is that Russia capitulates to Germany.

I mean, the revolution has happened. Suddenly all that manpower that's on the eastern front fighting the Russians can now leave and go to the Western Front. And this all happens in the 17 to 18 period of time. And that's a big signal

to the French and the British. Uh-oh, we're in trouble. What are we going to do? And that has a lot to do with America coming into the war, not just the Lusitania. That's right. It's always important to remember.

People always talk about Russian Winter and Napoleon and Hitler. In the First World War, Germany catastrophically defeats Russia in 1917 and confiscates gigantic swathes of Russia and the Ukraine to be incorporated in the German Empire, freeing up one million men to get on their railways and head back across to the Western Front, where it's now a race in time.

Can these one million battle-hardened veterans of the Eastern Front defeat the staggering, weak French and British armies before all these American doughboys come in and are ready for action. So the Americans start to arrive in the ports of France. They're coming in, but they need training. They need to get up and running. And the German side lord, a gigantic offensive, the so-called Kaiser Schlacht, which I love that name.

The spring offensive. Yeah, the Kaiser's battle, the spring offensive. And the Americans caught up in that because some of the most battle-ready units are thrown into the front line to defend Paris, for example. They play a key role in a couple of big moments. People have heard of Bello Wood when they're U.S. Marines. arrive and help to support the French, the famous expression.

The French staff officer drives past, wheel spinning, smoke coming out the back of his car, saying the Germans are in the woods, retreat, retreat, retreat. This American guy just goes, retreat, hell. We just arrived. And that's the famous retreat hell line that many people will have heard of. They play a part in some big defensive battles. But their first big offensive action, and by the way, it's also the first time American troops ever served alongside British troops since the Revolutionary War.

So it's an important bit of history there was. in a battle called Amel, a very small battle, but a very perfectly executed battle. And then a bigger battle on the 8th of August, which is seen as the beginning of the end of the First World War. It was the Americans, the Australians, Canadians, the Brits and the French working together. And these Americans are part of this revolution in military affairs that leads to the breaking of the trench stalemate. And it's involving aircraft and involving artillery, involving tanks and armoured vehicles

and radios and all sorts of crazy new. inventions. You see that first at the Battle of Amel, as a smaller battle, but on the 8th of August, 1918, one of the most important battles of the First World War, possibly in the whole of history, a forgotten battle now when the Americans, the Brits, the Australians, the French, the Canadians, fight a stunning battle that smashes through German lines and is seen really as the beginning of the end. This is the Battle of Amiens. It's the Battle of Amier. It's the Battle of Amier. And they put together all the learning. They put together everything. Surprise is key. Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was Amy Dudley pushed down a flight of stairs to her death? Was it a quarrel, or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe actually murdered? And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman who allegedly killed hundreds of young women. Join me for not just the tutors from history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm interested the fact is there's a new kind of fighting going on. We hear that generally spoken up with World War I,

mechanized warfare, but it actually breaks down to a lot of different chapters. And this big chapter that's happening right now is the appearance of the tank, which really doesn't happen until the late part of World War I. Talk about that moment when those first tanks rolled out. There were some 500 available for the Battle of Mien. So the tank had been used. used before. And there have been a couple of successes, but they'd never really achieved the big strategic breakthroughs that people were hoping. And so what they do is they get 500 tanks and they assemble them in complete secret. They put hay on the roads. They only move them at night. They camouflage them. They fly aircraft around to drown out the noise of the tank engines because they

realize that surprise is so important. The tanks are ready. But they also assemble 2,000 guns. And they do that by, again, all the same techniques. Rather than getting the gun all warmed up, having a ranging shot, which tells the enemy you're coming. Geez, all these guns are just firing off. They do it behind the lines. Then they do the math, and they'd do it silently. They'd allow for barrelware.

They'd allow for wind direction. They allowed for all the kind of shells so that all of these guns can be assembled in complete silence without them having a few practice pot shots at the enemy. Same thing with the troops. The Americans moved in. The Canadians, who are obviously half Canadians, I have to say. say this, but it happens to be true. We'll regard at that point as the kind of absolute tip of the spear of the British imperial forces in France. Some of them were left up near

Yipra in Belgium, and they did a lot of radioing. Hey, where the Canadians here, right? And the Germans thought that's where the next defensive would be. Wherever the Canadians were, that's where the trouble would be. So the Germans start building airfields and moving reinforcements up there. The Canadians under cover of darkness, marching down, hiding in hedges and ditches during the day, marching at night, into the front line, ready for the jump off. They managed to assemble this gigantic force. And it means that when those guns fire at 420 in the morning on the 8th of August, it's a near total surprise for the Germans. And the effect is devastating.

It's a creeping barrage. They don't do the normal just blasting them out thing. They just stay right ahead of the army that's attacking. I know. It's such an interesting idea this one. Previously in the first world, they thought, you know what you got to do? You've got to turn the enemy lines into a moonscape. You've got to spend a week smashing it to pieces.

Any living thing destroyed. It never quite worked because you could stay out. It was horrific for the people involved, but you could stay underground. And when those guns lifted, you pulled your machine gun out, you got back in your trench, even if it was pretty smashed up, and you could still be devastating and effective. What they do now have no preliminary barrage. When the guns go, 2,000 guns start raining down, high explosives,

poison gas, shrapnel, super-solic shards of steel on these German trenches, the infantry are right behind them. They're moving straight ahead. This mad thing, it's like a moving curtain of steel and fire. The guns fired just in front of the infantry. Every two minutes, you go 200 yards forward. So they land two minutes, pound, pound, pound, pound. Then they lift and they move forward, 200 yards.

The infantry just crawl behind them. The Australians had an expression, if you're not taking casualties from your own creeping barrage, you're not close enough. Wow. So you're on the heels of this barrage. It's like this invisible but lethal shield advancing in front of you. And then behind that, you've got the tanks.

Behind that you've got infantry, not just marching in straight lines now, but in long snakes behind the tank. tanks trying to take shelter. Some tanks got little bells on them. You ring a little bell. You say, we've got a machine gun over there. You've got to deal with. The tank would go and sometimes crush it with its tracks or shoot it with its own machine guns and its own armament. Meanwhile, up above in the sky for the first time ever really. You've got planes that are reporting back. They've got radio sets and they're talking to the artillery saying, hey, left a bit, right a bit,

that was good. You up the sum there, which again is brand new. You've got planes occasionally, even dropping supply to some Australians. It's some spare ammunition. You know, again, with very modern warfare, but at the time brand new. Plains dropping smoke to make it more obscure on the battlefields. The Germans couldn't see what was going on. So it's all marrying together, all the technology that's been developing since the American Civil War, long-range rifles, repeating rifles, explosive shells, vehicles, all of these technologies suddenly coming together. So the Battle of Hamill is fought kind of like wars are being fought today. Whereas only a couple years earlier, a battle in the first world, we fought kind of like the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of Yorktown.

The innovations, these terrifying innovations of World War I, what's the chicken and the egg? Was it an industry? Was it a military industrial complex that was creating new weaponry and saying, hey, guys, this is a good way to do it. Or was it the military thinking of new ways to do it and asking for the manufacture? A possible question to ask. No, I think it's a bit of both. The Brits pioneer, because what is Britain good at?

We're a bit of building big old steel ships. Royal Navy's biggest in the world. So it starts as an Admiralty, a naval project called land ships. Can you get basically a ship and stick it on? some tracks. Now that starts very early north, so you're right. You've got people on the front saying, this is what we need. And then you've got people in industry going, we can make some money here by selling this stuff. So it's a kind of synthesis, the two things happening. As it is today. I think the tanks of World War I are more terrifying than the ones today. I mean, they're just scary sci-fi creatures

that were crawling around the battlefield. Well, it's funny you say that the German reports after the battle. I've read lots of German reports of battle. They say that the tanks terrified the men the Germans in the trenches. Actually, the weird thing about tanks is they could travel very slow. They could travel about four miles and out. They're pretty vulnerable. If Germans held their nerve and brought artillery to bear on these tanks, they could knock them out.

And there were some terrible casualties among the tanks groups that day. But often they were just so terrifying, the way they were able to cross over trenches, able to crush barbed wire. And sometimes, I'm afraid, crushed actual Germans who would be in machine gunness. That was really scary. Coming out of that August, that mist, the smoke dropped by the aircraft. it seemed to have a profound effect on the Germans, and they surrendered in numbers that no one

had seen up to that point in the war. They surrendered huge numbers of Germans started surrendering as the day went on. So just back in up a second. So this is all, the summer of 1918 is really a reaction to the spring offensive that comes a few months earlier. But as the Americans enter into this, do they become an independent agent here, or are they just merely part of the British and French force? That's a very good point. At this stage, General Pershing was in charge the Americas. He'd been told, for goodness sake, don't let my American units get spread out. The French, like, yeah, we could use 10 healthy guys over here and just let them get minced by the French someone else. He'd been told, whatever you do, protect the American command and

control these units. However, the spring crisis, the spring offensive meant that he was happy to lend a few units out to people. But this case of the American 33rd division that was at Amiens, they were there, I think, partly to produce numbers, but also because they were ready to fight. They were fighting under their own commanders. They wanted to learn how to fight so that the Americans gone to fight in bigger and bigger units, eventually in core strength, and then eventually in army strength. They're operating under overall Allied command, I guess, but they definitely are fighting under their own officers.

It's not like little platoons are just divided up and given to Brits and Canadians as and win. Particularly the 131st Infantry Regiment of the American 33rd Division are absolutely fighting under their own command at Colonel Sanborn. They make a big impact on this battle as Americans. I mean, can they smell the end? Are the Germans surrendering in such forces? Yeah, this is 50,000 Germans are killed or surrender. And the German general, the key German general, Ludendorff, calls this the Black Day of the German Army.

He says the fighting power of the German army is broken. And there was a decision made, not really acted upon, but to send out peace feelers. This is it. Battle of Haminess, it's crazy. As it happens, there's kind of paralysis within the German high command. So they don't come to a negotiated peace at that point. They end up fighting for another 100 days, the so-called 100 days, from 8th, 3rd. of August right through till November 11th. And the Americans play a bigger and bigger role as those

months go by. But really, the writing is on the wall on the 8th of August. And it's tragic to say, but hundreds of thousands of men were killed, brutalized, and wounded after this battle, really for nothing, because it was clear from this point on that it was only going to go one way. Treaty of Versailles, we have to talk about this. I happen to know because we have a television passed together that you are related to a central member of that team who negotiated the that treaty. My great, great grandfather is David Lloyd George, the UK Prime Minister who was in Paris at that time, causing all sorts of trouble. We were standing together in the hall of mirrors about 10 years ago, and you were quite moved to be in there because that's where the Treaty

of Versailles was negotiated, and that would have been David Lloyd George in there. Yeah, he was there. Woodrow Wilson, president, was there as well? I think it was it the longest ever trip in American president's second one in office, I think, and they tried to reorder the world, and it didn't work out, but the question is, was it stupidity and foolishness, or Was the task too big? Was the world too broken after the cataclysm of the First World War? To put it back together, only to be rebroken 20 years later when Hitler rises. I mean, it's an incredible story. The movies that we're seeing these days are doing a good job of putting you in the middle

battle, but it's important to pull back from it and understand that the whole strategy was really very specific and very crafty. You know, they were figuring something new out and a new way of fighting a war. As miserable as this really was, it's set up modern warfare as we know it. So this is the weird thing about the First World War. First World Geeks will tell you, it's this strange thing. The reputation of the First World War is a time of stupidity and nothing changing and crazy old generals of big moustaches and shadows behind the lines, just sending young men to die for no reason. The first of all those four years, 14 to 18 and 17 to 18 for the Americans, they saw some of the most radical transformation in military technology and tactics of all time.

It is crazy how innovative that period was. Which was going to have implications for geopolitical eras to come. I mean, suddenly we were out there and we were doing this thing that was going to get more and more interesting as things going along. And we had a huge industrial powerhouse waiting to create new weapons. I mean, they were just tasting it at that point. Dan Snow, an Englishman who has seen the world and understands it better than most, thank you so much for coming on to American History Hit and making this all possible. Thank you, Don Wilman. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.