| I've thought of an even better, and more positive heroic moment, and it started exactly 90 years ago today, 8th August 1918.
This was the breakout from Amiens that finally finished WW1. Some say that this was the British Army's finest hour, and the last hundred days of WW1 was its most successful campaign.
In WW2 we were merely on the winning side; we would have been nowhere without the USA and the Soviet Union. But it was Britain (and of course the ANZACs, Canadians, Indians and Africans) that won WW1. The French Army did very little after Verdun in 1916; much of it was virtually in a state of mutiny. The Russians were out. The Italians had been badly mauled by the Austrians. The American mobilisation was painfully slow; Pershing refused to put his troops under Foch's command, and the first major US operation had been at Belleau Wood only the previous month, which they won but at terrible cost because they had not learned from the British experience on the Somme and Passchendaele. I'm not saying the Americans played no part in the final offensive, but it would have been 1919 before they could have fielded a numerically overwhelming Army.
But Haig had learned from experience. The August 1918 offensive was designed to be far more conservative with the lives of his men than before. The ground operation was fully integrated with the Artillery, the Tanks, and with Air Power - not just for observation but for ground-strafing and bombing, foreshadowing all later wars. The Germans, weakened by their failed Kaiserschlacht offensive in the Spring, crumbled and never again regained the upper hand. |