After relatively unsuccessful attacks on the Somme and the Lys, General Ludendorff sought a new sector in which to continue the heavy assaults of his 1918 Spring offensive. He chose the thinly held Aisne front between Soissons and Reims.
The German advance here was the furthest ever made, on one day, on the Western Front since the advent of trench warfare in late 1914. On the first day of the battle the German army advanced fifteen miles, opening up a salient twenty-five miles wide and taking almost 25,000 prisoners. The British Army’s IX Corps was virtually wiped out.
The Third Battle of the Aisne was the last successful German offensive of the war; thereafter the British and the French took the initiative on the Western Front.
This talk by David Blanchard considers how the German’s tactical success proved their strategic failure. Although the initial offensive was a brilliant set piece, it lost momentum in subsequent days due to poor planning and overreaching ambition.
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3 Comments
I've been saying that Blitzkreig was just storm trooper tactics, but with tanks, for years.
To add perspective, the later German Doctrine (called Bewegungskrieg by the Germans, Blitzkrieg was never used by either German troops or in German military literature) kind of naturally grew out of the assault tactics developed and used by the Stormtroopers. So in a very real sense you could indeed argue that Aisne was a foreshadowing of later tactical and Operational developments by the German army in the interwar years.
You can see the similarities with a less cursory glance. true the German assault troops of WWI were unmotorized, but the core principles remained the same.. The assault troops infiltrated, they avoided direct attacks on strongpoints, instead isolating them, flowing around them, leaving them for follow up formations to reduce. In that way they maintained the operational and tactical flow. Retaining the Operational tempo and more importantly, keeping the initiative.
The Armoured Divisions were utilised in exactly the same way in 1939 and 1940. Punch the hole then drive through, ignore isolated pockets of resistance, leave them for the leg infantry following behind.
The idea that some have of the German WWII Tactical and Operational Doctrine being somehow 'new' and 'unseen' is so much hogwash. The reality is rather different. While there were innovations, on the whole the bewegungskrieg was an evolution of tactical and operational doctrines, not a revolution.
This has been another fascinating talk. Somehow 1918 on the Western Front FEELS underrepresented in memoir yet it is the year when the allies felt nearly the whole strength of the enemy. By then the Boche had refined their tactics to the limit of the technology avaliable and severely strained the allies and even achieved break throughs. Am I right in saying though that while Germany for a brief period achieved tactical dominance they failed to achieve the operational dominance achieved by the Allies in the 100 days?