between 29 April and 20 May. They mutinied not against the war, but against futile
offensives conducted without apparent care for soldiers’ lives. In addition, the soldiers
protested about their poor terms of service (pay, rations, leave). For the remainder of the
year, the French Army would hold its ground to defend the country, but it would not take
the offensive. The Americans were coming, but they were not coming with large numbers
of well-trained and well-equipped combat-ready troops in 1917.
That only left the BEF, now grown to some sixty divisions, still in the field as a
formidable offensive fighting force. At the third Battle of Ypres, 31 July–10 November,
Haig’s BEF took the strain for the whole Alliance, and continued to batter the Germans
in what became, in effect, a continuation of the protracted attritional battles of 1916. Haig
continued to delude himself with dreams of a dramatic breakthrough, but such a happy
result was no more feasible in 1917 than it had been the year before. There was a brief
false dawn between 20 November and 3 December, when new artillery tactics, keyed to
predicted, un-preregistered firing, enabled a surprise assault by 200 tanks to take a 5-mile
bite into the Hindenburg Line along a 6-mile front. However, the attack was insufficiently
supported, the Germans promptly counter-attacked effectively, and the Cambrai miracle
faded instantly. It had, however, revived some long-absent hopes for success with a better
way in combined-arms warfare.
In taking the strain for the vanished Russians, the inactive French and the absent
Americans, the BEF weakened noticeably in 1917. At the third Battle of Ypres, for the
leading case, the BEF sustained 240,000 casualties. One strategic consequence of the
British disappointments of 1917 was that Haig’s failure to achieve notable progress
strengthened the hand of his adversary at home, Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
The latter was able to withhold reinforcements from joining the BEF, convinced that Haig
would only waste their lives. The result was that the BEF entered 191 8 seriously under
strength, both because of its losses in 1917 and because the soldiers of which it was in
desperate need were detained in Britain.
1918: the Allies were the ‘last men standing’
The grand finale to the Great War in 191 8 was high drama. The Germans had to find
an answer to their familiar strategic problem: how to win against the material odds.
This time, however, thanks to the demise of the Russian Army as an effective com-
batant, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were granted a brief window of opportunity to
achieve and exploit numerical superiority on the Western Front. Forty-eight divisions
were transferred from the Eastern to the Western Front, as well as eight from Italy.
Of Germany’s total of 243 divisions on 21 March 191 8 , 191 were in the West. The
Allied total was 175 (Zabecki, 2006: 8 9–90). By transferring divisions from the East and
Italy, Germany gambled on winning the war by a great offensive. Actually, it was to be a
series of five offensives (Somme, 21 March–4 April; Lys, Flanders, 9–29 April; Aisne,
27 May–4 June; Noyon–Mondidier, 8 –12 June; and Champagne–Marne, 15–17 June).
Despite heroic sacrifice by the forty-seven newly formed ‘attack divisions’, especially
their stormtroop formations, the Germans failed in their bid for victory before the
Americans were in place and combat-ready in overwhelming numbers. They did, though,
break through the British defences and caused some panic and heavy losses. Moreover,
it seemed for a while as if the Germans might succeed in unhinging the Allied front by
World War I: modern warfare 89