What made this revolutionary was not any one element. It was the integration. Earlier in the war, infantry had gone forward first, often against uncut wire, because artillery had failed to accurately destroy obstacles. Tanks had been thrown into battle piecemeal, where they bogged down or broke under concentrated fire. Aircraft had carved out their own role in dogfights and reconnaissance but had rarely been fully woven into ground attack plans. Amiens took all of those separate strands and tried to braid them into one rope.At four twenty in the morning on eight August nineteen eighteen, the rope snapped taut.A heavy fog clung to the fields around Amiens, mixing with gunsmoke as thousands of Allied artillery pieces opened fire almost simultaneously. Unlike earlier offensives, the guns did not spend days smashing a narrow band of front line trenches. Many fired special gas or smoke shells at German batteries deeper behind the lines, blinding gunners and forcing them to wear clumsy masks. Other batteries began conducting a creeping barrage, a moving wall of explosions that advanced in timed jumps, always a short distance ahead of the waiting infantry.Behind this curtain, tanks lurched out of their start positions, grinding through wire and flattening machine gun nests. Infantry units followed so closely behind some crews that soldiers joked they could warm their hands on the hot exhaust. The fog that might have ruined a traditional attack actually favored the attackers; German machine gunners, already confused by the lack of a prolonged bombardment, now struggled to see targets until the enemy was almost on top of them.On the German side, the first reports arriving at headquarters made little sense. Units complained of being shelled not only in their trenches but far to the rear, of telephone lines cut, of enemy tanks appearing out of nowhere with infantry in tow. Officers tried to issue counter orders, only to discover that their messages could not get through. Many of the signal wires they relied on had been severed by shells in the opening minutes. Runners sent on foot often never arrived.By mid morning, some German forward units had effectively ceased to exist, overrun, captured, or simply scattered. Others fought with grim determination, but their resistance was increasingly isolated. In one sector, a German machine gun company held up Australian troops for hours before a tank finally rolled straight over their position. In another, Canadian infantry surprised an enemy unit still calming down after a false alarm raised the previous night; they had been told a raid was coming, and when nothing materialized, they relaxed at the worst possible moment.The speed of the Allied advance shocked even their own commanders. The British Fourth Army, spearheading the attack, gained up to seven miles on the first day, an almost unheard of figure on the Western Front. Entire German batteries were captured before they could be withdrawn. Prisoners streamed back in such numbers that behind the lines, hastily prepared pens overflowed.Ludendorff, receiving the first coherent overview of the day s events, reportedly suffered something close to a collapse. Later he would call eight August the black day of the German army, not simply because ground had been lost, but because of what those prisoners revealed. Many surrendered willingly, without a brutal last stand. Their spirit, their belief that the war could still be won on the battlefield, had been punctured. For a commander who had driven them relentlessly in the spring, counting on their discipline and endurance, that was a psychological fracture as alarming as any gap on the map.The numbers were brutal. By the end of the first day, German casualties numbered in the tens of thousands, including around sixteen thousand prisoners captured. Allied losses, although still heavy, were significantly lower than in earlier big offensives for comparable ground gained. The cost in tanks was high; many broke down or were knocked out over the course of the day. Yet their job had been to get the attack moving and to frighten and confuse the defenders. In that they had succeeded.This did not mean Amiens was bloodless or that the rest of the offensive would be equally dazzling. As the days passed, the initial fog lifted, German resistance stiffened, and the battlefield reverted in many places to the grim back and forth of trench warfare. Some counterattacks recovered local ground. Tanks, mechanical beasts of limited endurance, thinned out. On certain days, advances were measured in yards again rather than miles.Still, the pattern had been set. Amiens was not a single day s miracle. It was the opening blow in what became known as the Hundred Days, a relentless series of Allied offensives that pushed the Germans back across old battlefields they had occupied for years. The breakthrough at Amiens forced them to abandon the salient, shortening their line but also yielding terrain they had paid dearly to seize only months earlier.
