![]() ![]() A formidable obstacle, the canal served as a moat in front of the German defensive position. Quentin Canal in the southern sector of the Siegfried Stellung. On 29 September, the British 4th Army launched an offensive at the St. Combat engineers followed to improvise bridges, while guns were moved forward to support hte infantry advancing on the other side. Masterminded by Canadian General Arthur Currie, the assault used massed artillery and machine gun fire to suppress enemy defenses, enabling troops to cross the canal. This half-built waterway was dry along part of its length, but was still a major obstacle, impassable to tanks and dominated by German forces on higher ground. The Canadian corps was given the unenviable task of crossing the Canal du Nord. The following day, the British Third and First Armies attacked at the northern end of the Siegfried Stellung in the direction of Cambrai. On 26 September, the launch of the Meuse-Argonne operation showed how hard the fighting was going to be, as inexperienced US troops became bogged down in a brutal attritional struggle. Above all, the Allies had developed a skill in coordinating artillery and infantry that made a successful assault feasible even against the best organized defenses - as long as everything went according to plan. They had thousands of tanks and trucks, whereas the Germans had few motor vehicles of any kind. The Allies did not have vastly more troops, but theri soldiers were better fed and supplied than their opponents. In the southeast, the US First Army was entrusted with leading the Franco-American Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The British were to lead an assault on the Siegfried Stellung, the strongest sector of the line, between Cambrai and St. In the northern sector of the front, Belgian King Albert I was given command of an Allied army group to launch an offensive in Flanders. In September, however, under the leadership of Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies Ferdinand Foch, the decision was taken to mount simultaneous offensives along the entire length of the German line.įoch adopted the slogan "Tout le monde a la bataille" ("Everyone into battle"). Allied commanders feared a repeat of battles such as the Somme or Third Ypres - stalled offensives with appalling casualty lists. By late summer 1918, the line offered a fallback position for German forces battered by Allied offensives and desperate to stop foreign troops from reaching German soil.Īttacking the Hindenburg Line was a daunting prospect. They incorporated existing features of the landscape, such as ridges, rivers, and canals to improve their defenses. Under construction from late 1916, the Wotan, Siegfried, Alberich, Brunhilde, and Kriemhilde Stellungs (positions) were systems of trenches, strongpoints, barbed wire, machine gun emplacements, and artillery batteries, often 10 miles in depth. The Hindenbrg Line was a collective name for a series of linked German defensive positions that stretched from the coast of Belgium to Verdun in northeastern France. With the help of the French, they captured the St. Meanwhile, in mid-September, the US First Army went into action. ![]() Further attacks pushed the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line. A French-led counterattack at the Marne in July and a successful offensive by British and Commonwealth forces at the Amiens in August initiated a series of Allied advances. From summer 1918, the balance of forces on the Western Front shifted in favor of the Allies with the arrival of large numbers of US troops. ![]()
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