Battle of Amiens & General A. W. Currie

On April 9, 1917, the Canadian Corps, consisting of four infantry divisions numbering almost one hundred thousand, captured an important tactical landmark in northern France known as Vimy Ridge.This was a great achievement as the Germans during the previous two years had already repulsed several Allied attempts to seize the ridge. Blood of troops from the British Isles had already permeated the ridge. But France had suffered the most. Fifty thousand Frenchmen had lost their lives in vain attempts to wrest the ridge from German forces. Ultimately the capture of Vimy Ridge cost Canada ten thousand casualties, 3,598 of them fatal, but it won the Canadian corps a reputation as one of the hardest-hitting Allied formations on the Western Front. Because this was the first Allied victory since the beginning of the war almost three years earlier, Vimy Ridge is almost always regarded as the greatest Canadian triumph of the Great War, overshadowing what was actually a greater triumph — the Battle of Amiens.

The battle of Amiens began on August 8, 1918. This was the first day of what war historians call “The Last Hundred Days.” The Canadian attack so surprised and disoriented the Germans that their commander-in-chief, General Ludendorff, said that August 8, 1918 was “the blackest day of the German Army in the history of the war.” And Sir Julian Byng, the British general who had commanded the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge, told his successor, Ontario-born General Arthur Currie, that the Canadian performance at Amiens was “the finest operation of the war.”

General Arthur Currie's men broke the German line at Amiens on August 8th, 1918. Currie, from Strathroy, Ontario, became a hero. In this view, October 1918, Currie is standing left, next to the Prince of Whales. To the Prince's right is Brig. Gen. Morrison and divisional commander, Major-General David Watson. This ceremony marked the freeing of Denan by the 4th Canadian Division. [C.J. Humber Collection]

It is no wonder that Ludendorff and Byng made such statements. During the hundred days which followed the Canadian Corps’ initial and speedy penetration of the German line, the Corps, under Currie’s command, had liberated 500 square miles of territory containing 228 cities, towns, and villages and captured 31,000 prisoners, 590 heavy and field guns and thousands of machine guns and trench mortars. Fifty German divisions — approximately one-fourth of the total German forces on the Western Front — were defeated. By nightfall on the first day of the battle of Amiens, the Canadian Corps’ penetration of the enemy line was unequalled: no other engagement on the Western Front up to that time had achieved this kind of success as the result of a single day’s fighting.

A year earlier, when the Canadian Corps had assaulted Vimy Ridge, Currie had been the general commanding the First Canadian Division. An unsuccessful real estate agent and former school teacher when war broke out, Currie was also a keen amateur soldier holding the rank of lieutenant colonel after fourteen years of militia service. As major general, less than three years later, he commanded his division so well at Vimy that, when Byng was promoted to command one of the five British armies on the Western Front, he strongly urged that Currie, instead of another British general, succeed him as commander of the Canadian Corps.

Currie fell heir not only to the four fighting divisions which constituted his corps but also to extra thousands of men who constituted the corps troops, lines-of-communication troops, and base troops all of whom backed the fighting formations. This meant he commanded, all in all, some 120,000 Canadian soldiers. He proved so successful in the ensuing months that the British prime minister, Lloyd George, toyed with the idea of sacking the British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, and replacing him with Currie. This would have put Currie at the head of five British armies totalling about a million men and would have elevated him over the heads of five senior army commanders, and thirteen corps commanders, all professionals with one exception. This was General Monash, the Australian corps commander, who, like Currie, was an amateur. Quite obviously, the British government and the War Office would never have countenanced this. Besides, because Haig was on intimate terms with the King, the Prime Minister’s rather wild idea never materialized. However, the idea certainly speaks well of Canada’s Currie and the men he commanded.

Currie proved himself such a successful tactician and administrator that, when the Allies planned their 1918 campaign with a view to winning the war by the spring of 1919, Currie and his corps were chosen to spearhead the Allied advance. As history tells us, Currie’s attack on August 8, 1918, met with such success and penetrated the enemy’s defences so quickly and so deeply that the Germans were thrown off balance. This helped the flanks follow; the attack developed into a pursuit battle along the entire vast front.

The entire operation ended three months later when the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, Germany having been defeated six months sooner than the Allies had anticipated. But on August 8, 1918, at Amiens, the Canadian Corps, almost 100 percent amateur soldiers, delivered the first of the knock-out blows that won the war.