Forced by the oppression of Ludendorff's position and the atmosphere of joy that pervaded the German army, Ruprecht had to put aside his worries for the time being and discuss with Kuhl how to make the next plan.
In order to fulfill Ludendorff's ambitions, it first required a huge change of posture on the left wing of the German army. The task of the 2nd Army was no longer merely to cross the north bank of the Somme, but to extend the front to the other side of the Somme and march towards Amiens. The task of the 17th Army was now to march northwest to pursue the British 3rd Army and capture Arras. The 18th Army was no longer acting as a cover force, but needed to cross the Somme and the Crozat Canal to the southwest to attack the French. To this end, the OHR drew out 3 divisions of the 7th Army to support the unit.
So far, the Germans have committed 59 divisions to the Battle of the Emperors. It is also important to note here that although Amiens is now designated as the direction of the 2nd Army's advance, the note here is still an important railway hub rather than a strategic goal. In the afternoon, the French commander-in-chief Pétain and Haig met in Douri. The latter, frightened by the german large-scale offensive, opened his mouth to demand that 20 French divisions be concentrated near Amiens. Pétain comforted Haig and promised to support him, but could only come up with 6 divisions, after all, the French army's priority at this time was to hold the champagne. At the same time, Pétain reminded the Hagsom line that it could not be easily abandoned, and Hagrid reluctantly ordered at about 17 o'clock that the 5th Army must hold the Somme line at all costs, and that there was no way back.
Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force Douglas. Haig
On 24 March, the Germans began a new offensive. As the 18th Army turned around and moved south, the 2nd Army now had to extend its front south to protect its flank. The 2nd and 17th Armies did make some progress that day, but they were dismayed to find that although they had crushed the British defenses, the British did not collapse, but formed "island" positions "like lions" to fight the Germans, which made the progress of the two parts of the day only 5-6 kilometers. Hutil's 18th Army crossed the Somme and continued to advance. The British 5th Army tried to hold back the Germans after receiving Hager's orders, but was overwhelmed by its own weakness, and the British 3rd and 18th Armies were broken up by the Germans on this day, but Houttier also received an ominous report that his forward troops had engaged the French army.
The French were almost immediately on the train and into battle. Although they were almost beaten by the Germans when they went into battle without heavy weapon support, the presence of the formed French army was enough to make Houtil sweat. In fact, this was just the vanguard of reinforcements from the French High Command (GQG) in support of the British allies, and the 12 infantry divisions, 5 cavalry divisions and 12 artillery regiments of the French 1st and 3rd Armies were constantly pouring into Noyon. It is worth mentioning that Pétain has repeatedly emphasized his strategic principles to these two armies:
Priority must be given to keeping one's (French) formation cut off (voice-over: the survival of the British 5th Army is a secondary consideration).
Priority must be given to ensuring the safety of the Champagne front to prevent the Germans from taking advantage of the situation to enter Paris (voice-over: the British side has nothing to do with you).
Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, Philippe. Pétain
Although the British and French armies were defeated by Hutil in the battle on the 24th, they forced the 18th Army to advance only 4 kilometers instead of the scheduled 12 kilometers. Of course, this is also related to the fact that the 18th Army is already poor and has difficulty in supplying. Despite Hutil's report that the French army was massing at Noyon, Ludendorff ordered the 18th Army to continue crossing the Oise River and the 7th Army to attack Champagne with confidence in victory.
In the early morning of the 25th, OHL held another meeting in Evans. At the beginning of the meeting, Kuhl reminded Ludendorff that it was time to prepare for Operation George One. For this, THE OHL had to come up with 3-4 divisions, but Ludendorff was more devoted to "Mars", and if "Mars" succeeded, "George I" would no longer be needed. To this end, Ludendorff temporarily revised Kuhl's plan, ordering the 4th Army to stand by and the 6th Army to go south to cooperate with the 17th Army in attacking the Arras front; at the same time, since Hutil had already engaged the French, Ludendorff reinforced it with an army (the 25th Reserve Army).
March 25 was the bloody day of the 18th Army. With most of the men still on the road, Hutil could only throw in five assault divisions, including six Storm Assault Battalions, to attack Noyon, and they were going to take a disadvantage against the French Georges. 7 divisions of Humbert's 3rd Army and 2-3 divisions of the remnants of the British 5th Army. Due to the strong French resistance on the front, the German army was difficult to make progress for a while, but Houtil saw that the 7th Reserve Division, which had strengthened a Storm Assault Battalion, encircled the French flank from the northeast, the division met a French cavalry division that had just arrived in Nouyon after an hour of rapid march, and after a fierce battle this cavalry division was defeated, Hutil took advantage of the situation and ordered the nearby Prussian 1st Janissary Division to turn the direction of attack and seize the Station of Nouyon, cutting the Allied front, and in the evening the French Marie. Debeni's 6 divisions of the 1st Army arrived before they barely managed to help the 3rd Army stabilize the line.
What many people did not expect was that Houtil's victory on the 25th, which in the eyes of the Germans, may have been a partial strategic success, but caused a great crisis in the upper echelons of the Coalition Forces. Later that day, when Hagrid saw that Noyon's front line had "been broken by the Germans", he quickly ordered the 3rd Army to retreat to the River Anchorage, away from the French army in Nouyon, and he "could no longer rely on the French, the British must fight on their own!" After Hager found Maxime Wegan, the chief of staff of Fouchy, who was in charge of coordinating the affairs of the Allied forces, in Abbeville, he was furious, and the British commander-in-chief was extremely arrogant in stressing that "at least 20 French divisions should be immediately concentrated in Amiens against the Germans." The contradictions piled up between the British and French armies since the 21st have erupted, and Haig angrily denounced the GQG, headed by Pétain, as "selfish and selfish, and watched his allies being annihilated", while the GQG believed that the British were stupid and short-sighted. FuXi commented after the war:
The Allies were forced to fight two very different battles: one for the BEF for its own port of transport, and the other for the French army for Paris. They drifted apart, the contradictions grew, and in a way this provided the Germans with an excellent opportunity.
Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces, Ferdinand. FuXi
On the morning of 26 March, the 2nd and 17th Armies began their march to Arras and Amiens after settling the troublesome "Island" position group. Given the success of the 25th and the fact that the left had finally begun a "movement war", Ruprecht, who had annoyed Ludendorff with "realism", seemed to have come to believe that the Germans might indeed cut through the British and drive them back into the sea. But reality immediately poured cold water on Ruprecht and the German top brass. At 5 p.m., after the 2nd Army had captured Albert, the railway hub of Amiens-Arras, the commanders lost control of their men: the hungry Germans found more than a dozen undoing supply depots filled with butter, bread and cured meat, a looting and that lasted half a day.
At 19:30 on the same day, Ludendorff called Ruprecht and said that he was considering replacing the chief of staff of the 2nd and 17th Armies. Ruprecht recalled that Ludendorff believed that the slow progress of the 2nd and 17th Armies was that their commanders were too stupid, at least not as clever as Hutil and Soberzweig. Their troops always maintained the offensive formation they had in 1914 rather than using new assault tactics.
German commandos who had just conquered the trenches for recuperation
These factors, which seemed less lethal at the time, now seem to be evidence of the decline of the German offensive. However, the left flank of the 17th Army crossed Miramont and approached Hebuttne. On the Southern Front, Houtil took advantage of yesterday's success at the Nuovayon railway station to widen the rift between the British and French armies to 16 miles, taking advantage of the situation to encircle the flank of the French 3rd Army. However, Hutier was depressed to find that he suddenly had more than 10 More Allied Divisions in front of him. The remnants of the French 3rd Army and the British 5th Army, which had been defeated yesterday, were re-fortified at Mondidir, south of Nouyon, with the support of the French 6th Army. They stood in the way of Hutier, and the French 1st Army arrived.
So far, the Germans have lost 90,000 people in the five days of Operation Michel. Faced with the fact that only 8 of the 37 divisions involved in the operation were actually engaged in combat (and 5 of them were part of the 18th Army), Ludendorff and OHL issued an order at 22:00 that was unbelievable to the Germans:
The 17th Army's task was still to attack forward with Arras as its goal, and it had to concentrate its forces from the right flank on the left flank to launch Mars with the 6th Army.
The task of the 2nd Army was to maintain its current marching position, with the right flank north of the Somme and the left flank south of the Somme, and the middle would reach Amiens, then turn southwest to join the 18th Army to attack the French.
The task of the 18th Army was still to attack the French near Champagne.
The Entente Defense Zone occupied by the Germans in the Battle of the Emperor
Ludendorff explained this order in his memoirs after the war: I concentrated my forces in the direction of Amiens, and our army has always followed the principle of concentrating forces. But because of the slow progress of the 17th Army, I had to adjust the posture of the 2nd and 18th Armies to capture Amiens.
Apparently, Ludendorff was talking nonsense. Because in this order issued on the evening of March 26, the OHL order placed more emphasis on the 2nd Army going south than on the capture of Amiens. The quartermaster general did not understand the importance of Amiens, and even Hindenburg, who was sitting in Berlin, called Ludendorff on the 26th to remind Ludendorff that attacking Amiens might lead to a decisive victory. Whatever happens afterwards, we can use Amiens to organize all action.
But Ludendorff disagreed, and still wanted to gamble. In his vision, the Germans would have the 2nd, 18th, and 7th Armies defeat the French in Champagne to the southwest through a massive corps movement, while the 17th and 6th Armies would wipe out the British forces in Arras.
Prepare to meet the British and French soldiers of the German army
Army Group Ruprecht once again questioned the quartermaster general's decision. Army Group Log commented: It all depends on a breakthrough in the direction of Alas-Amiens, but the risk is enormous. Cour bluntly believed that the Quartermaster General's new plan "seemed to be a two-pronged approach, but it was a fatal dispersion of the core offensive forces." According to Kuhl," Kuhl believed that according to Ludendorff's plan, the German army would face a new problem: the 2nd Army and the 17th Army would part ways, creating a gap of 20 kilometers; if Amiens was not taken, the two German armies would fight separately and thus be greatly weakened. After a heated argument, Ludendorff stuck to his strategy, while Ruprecht and Kuhl were forced to accept orders and assumptions from the Quartermaster General to relay OHL's orders to their subordinates.
Ironically, before Ludendorff realized the importance of Amiens, the military conference convened by the Allied military leaders in Durham on the 26th decided on the ultimate failure of Operation Michel. Fuxi was authorized by the leaders of Britain and France to coordinate the actions of the coalition forces with full authority (note that it was only coordination, not commander-in-chief). The future Commander-in-Chief of the Entente, whose strategic vision far exceeded that of Germany's quartermaster general, stressed that Amiens must be defended at all costs, and the direction of the entire war would depend on this! General Pétain would revoke his instructions of 24 March that the French on the Champagne line must cover Amiens with all their might and try to maintain contact with Marshal Haig's friendly forces.
Here's a little story, in the German prisoner-of-war camp in late May, a captured British officer said to Ruprecht: You can occupy Amiens by March 26, we have no troops at that time, and we are completely at your mercy. But God forbid, you're halfway there and you're turning around.
Dyed photograph of soldiers on the front lines of the Allies
March 27 was the second time since Operation Michel that the Allies and Germans were engaged on all fronts. But this was the third fierce battle for Huttier's 18th Army, which needed to advance from La Neuville across the Evre and Mondidir to the southeast to Champagne.
At about 7:45 a.m., Ludendorff spoke on the phone with Hutil. With the 2nd Army waiting to move south, the 18th Army may not advance toward Champagne until 30 March. Previously, the 18th Army had been too tired to expand its superiority in manpower, and now Hutil was able to free his hands and feet. Early that morning, he opened 11 assault divisions reinforced with 10 Storm Assault Battalions on the Nuevoyon-Mondidier line, with 12 more divisions on the road behind him against 17 French and 3 British divisions. At ten o'clock in the morning, after the artillery had finished firing 11,000 kilograms of shells, an onslaught began. By noon, the German right flank had largely destroyed the defenses of the French 3rd Army, which had not yet been breathless from Noyon's defeat, and once again tore the connection between the British and French forces. In the middle of the road, Hutil repeated the trick, sending 2 divisions to encircle the flank of the French 1st Army and tearing a 5-mile gap between the 1st and 3rd Armies. The French had to be forced to throw all their reserves to seal the gap.
German artillery positions in stained old photographs
However, the results of the German 2nd Army that day were not so remarkable. The right wing of the ministry tried to cross the Anchor River that day and expand the bridgehead of Albert Abbeville, unaware that it had stepped into a death. The Ancre river, a tributary of the Somme, is shallow, but it is surrounded by a swamp-flooded plain of 200 to 300 meters wide. The British artillery deployed in the Highlands of the West Bank had a clear picture of the Situation of the Germans, which had not been captured that day and suffered heavy casualties.
The left flank of the 2nd Army began to attack Amiens. Although Ludendorff defined it as a "capture target" in the 26th order, Matwitz apparently did not realize the importance of Amiens. The general, who was only good at defense, sent only 1 assault division, 2 first-line divisions, and 3 second-line divisions to capture Amiens. Even so, the six divisions hit the outskirts of the city, allowing the 150 mm howitzers to threaten the railway line outside Amiens. However, due to overstretching, the front line of the 2nd Army had been extended from 25 km to 40 km.
If the 2nd Army's progress that day was disappointing, the 17th Army's offensive can only be described as "defeated." The unit advanced only 1.5 km and then had to stop the offensive.
German sapper unit in stained old photograph
On the afternoon of the 27th, after five more divisions, the 18th Army attacked Mondial at 19:30. The Germans not only cut off the railway leading to the area for French reinforcements, but also divided the British 5th Army again. Mary. Debene reports to Pétain and Foch that I can't save the British. After all, the only fortunate thing for the French was that the 1st and 3rd Armies had withdrawn from the battle intact and did not become Hutil's meal.
That night, Ludendorff and the chief of staff of the 18th Army, Sorbertsweig. Schulenburg, chief of staff of the Crown Prince's Army Group, made a telephone call and asked: After the capture of Mondial, can your troops march along the Evre Valley to Amiens and take Amiens? Apparently, that night Ludendorff also began to slowly realize that Amiens was a place that could not be taken away. To this end, on the evening of the 27th, the Germans had to adjust their offensive posture again. But after 23:00 in the evening, Army Group William replied to the OHL that the 18th Army could not advance towards Amiens.
German assault forces in the British defensive area were constantly being compressed
Sobertzweig explained to the quartermaster general that Mondidie, although 30 kilometers from Amiens, was already in the rear of the coalition forces. Our unit has advanced 50 kilometers in less than a week and is in urgent need of repairs, not to mention that we still have to deal with 3-4 enemy army groups. However, Ludendorff still demanded that Hutil take the strength of an army and advance towards Amiens, and the rest of the army continued to maintain pressure on the former French army. A new order issued by the OHL early in the morning of the 28th required that the 17th Army launch 'Mars'; the left wing of the 2nd Army and the right wing of the 18th Army (an army) advance towards Amiens.
This is where Ludendorff really began to pay attention to Amiens' performance. But it was only a half-hearted effort, because the largest volume, the 18th Army, which had more than 30 divisions, was still stranded on the southern front...