page_title: Hindenburg Line
section_title: German plan
hierarchical_section_title: Hindenburg Line / Withdrawal / German plan
caption_attribution_description: English: German Withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. The ruined village of Athies, Pas-de-Calais, showing the mine crater intended to impede traffic. Athies was taken 9th April 1917.
context_page_description: The Hindenburg Line was a German defensive position built during the winter of 1916–1917 on the Western Front during the First World War. The line ran from Arras to Laffaux, near Soissons on the Aisne. In 1916, the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme left the German western armies exhausted and on the Eastern Front, the Brusilov Offensive had inflicted huge losses on the Austro-Hungarian armies and forced the Germans to take over more of the front. The declaration of war by Romania had placed additional strain on the German army and war economy.
  The Hindenburg Line, built behind the Noyon Salient, was to replacement the old front line as a precaution against a resumption of the Battle of the Somme in 1917. By wasting the intervening ground, the Germans could delay a spring offensive in 1917. A shortened front could be held with fewer troops and with tactical dispersal, reverse-slope positions, defence in depth and camouflage, German infantry could be conserved. Unrestricted submarine warfare and strategic bombing would weaken the Anglo-French as the German armies in the west recuperated.
context_section_description: Over the winter, German deception operations were conducted and indications of an offensive through Switzerland diverted French attention at the end of 1916. The British were occupied by reports of troops and heavy artillery moving into Flanders and increased numbers of agent reports of troop movements from Lille, Tourcoing and Courtrai. Until January 1917, the British took seriously a possible limited offensive towards the Channel ports and made Flanders the subject of most of their long-range reconnaissance flights. Rupprecht, the northern army group commander on the Western Front, was made responsible for planning the devastation of the infrastructure within the Noyon Salient and the retirement to new defensive positions along the Siegfriedstellung (Hindenburg Line), codenamed the Alberich Bewegung (Alberich Manoeuvre). The Germans prepared a 35-day Alberich timetable; infrastructure in the salient was to be destroyed and buildings demolished from 9 February – 15 March.
  Booby-traps were devised with delayed-action fuzes used a striker on a spring, held back by a wire. Acid ate through the wire, to release the striker and detonate the explosive. A number of devices with such fuzes were planted in bunkers but most booby-traps had simple pressure detonators. Wires were attached to useful items like stove chimneys and loot; trip-wires on the stairs of dugouts were connected to bundles of hand-grenades. On some roads, heavy-artillery shells were buried with contact-fuzes, which would only be triggered by the weight of a lorry. British engineers and tunnelling companies scoured areas as they were occupied and disabled many of the explosives. Roads were flooded by destroying drains and water-courses; wells sabotaged by drilling a shaft next to them and exploding a charge, permanently ruining the well. Much of the explosive used by the Germans (Donarit, Westphalite and Perdit) had the property of water-absorption so could be neutralised by dousing. Some British booby-trap patrols made German prisoners go first, who revealed traps rather than be blown up and British tunnellers removed 22,000 lb (10,000 kg) of explosives. (In some areas no booby-traps were found, as German divisional commanders had been allowed to choose whether to mine their areas and some refused.)
  Trees were to be cut down, wells polluted and the civilian population forced to leave the area. Rupprecht objected to the scorched-earth policy on moral and practical grounds, that the destruction would be a propaganda disaster, provide enemy troops with shelter, material to repair the damage to roads and undermine the morale and discipline of the German soldiers involved in the destruction. The buildings of Nesle, Ham, Noyon and several villages were excluded from the plan and 10,000–15,000 French civilians were to be left behind in them, while 150,000 able-bodied civilians were to be evacuated to work in the rest of occupied France and Belgium. A 35-day timetable for the demolition plan was prepared to be followed by two marching days for the troops on the flanks of the area, three for the troops between Nauroy and Coucy le Chateau and four marching days for those between St Quentin and La Fère.
caption: Mine crater in the road through Athies, to impede the British
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