The Allied offensive would be a key turning point, considering the Germans had launched a massive offensive five months earlier. One of the most significant Allied offensives of the Great War was beginning.
With visibility down to just a few dozen feet, the Canadians followed the rolling barrage that hurled a curtain of death forward in 100-yard intervals. Through a heavy fog blanketing the terrain near Amiens, soldiers of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Canadian Divisions pushed forward. The German guns returned fire, but owing to McNaughton’s counterbattery planning, the enemy’s artillery fire was mostly neutralized. “ Boche is getting his now,” he told her. Andrew McNaughton, the Canadian Corps counterbattery officer, in a letter to his wife.
The noise of the bomber soon faded as it flew away, only to be replaced with the deafening crash of artillery.Īll hell broke loose on the German lines at 4:20 am when a heavy barrage erupted, lighting up the dawn. The lone aircraft sought to cover the rumbling and clanking of hundreds of tanks moving forward to the start line to support an imminent attack. Indeed, France had fallen in six weeks, an outcome that can largely be attributed to the speed and efficacy of Germany's Blitzkrieg.The drone of a Royal Air Force bomber could be heard overhead in the early morning of August 8, 1918, as it flew up and down the Allied line near Amiens, France. Despite a seemingly miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk in which hundreds of thousands of troops were rescued, the invasion was nonetheless a strategic catastrophe for the Allies. Once the invasion was underway, the Wehrmacht raced to the English Channel to cut off the Allied soldiers.
Hence, the Wehrmacht went through the far-less heavily French-Belgian border, giving them the element of surprise since the French believed that the Ardennes Forest would function as a natural barrier. The Battle of France was a lengthier affair, with the initial problem for the Germans being the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications, weapon installations, and obstacles put in place in the 1930s. Much like in Poland, these Blitzkrieg tactics were effective: Luxembourg fell in a day, the Netherlands was defeated in a week, and Belgium took about two and a half weeks to fall. The invasions of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France all began on May 10, 1940, involving a combined arms approach in conjunction with a surprise attack.
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