March 20th 1918 - On this day, exactly 100 years ago my two grandfathers were not far apart, both being situated in trenches on the western front in France. They had been there for a combined period of around 5 years without making much progress.

They may have heard rumours of an impending attack, as the British army knew that the German General Luffendorf was planning something to break the stalemate on this front.

He had negotiated an armistice with the Russians that allowed him to transfer 500,000 German soldiers to the western front to add to the 900,000 already there.

Luffendorf was also aware that in the USA a Million new soldiers were being trained up to join with the allied forces and, worried this would give the allies too much power, he had resolved to make his move first.

Grandad Tame was with the 1/6th South Staffords holding a line at Annequinn. Further down the line was Granddad Proom with the Northumberland Fusiliers.

Both of them may have been feeling nervous as the day went on, Grandad Proom may have been more nervous as one of his brothers had already been killed in France in August 1916. The British Commanders were confident they could repulse any attack which might happen.

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March 21st 1918 - 100 years ago today, in the German trenches in France, excitement was at fever pitch. In the dark 1.4 million men had gathered over a 50 mile stretch of the Western Front. 6,600 big guns and 3500 mortars were being moved into position and the first wave of troops were moved into position to attack the British lines. This was Operation Michael, General Luffendorf's plan to break the stalemate and overrun the British front line.

At 4:40am on March 21st 1918 the German Army opened fire over the whole of the 50 mile front. Germans guns blazed away to a predetermined plan that lasted for five hours, firing a mixture of Shrapnell shells, which exploded in mid-air raining down shell fragments and balls of lead, high explosive shells that detonated on impact and three types of gas shells containing either, chlorine, phosgene or a type of tear gas. The early part of the bombardment was targeted at British key points such as telephone exchanges, headquarters and key defensive positions in order to break the British lines of communication.

In just five hours, the Germans fired over one million artillery shells at the British lines – over 3000 shells fired every minute.

At 9:40am the bombardment stopped and through thick fog the Germans advanced on the British lines.

Granddad Tame was with the 1/6th South Staffords holding a line at Annequinn when the Germans began this tremendous bombardment. Believing this was to be a German assault they manned their defences in readiness for the German attack. The attack never materialised.

At the north end of the line the British Third Army, were well dug in and were able to stall the German advance.

Further down the line near Bullecourt, the Northumberland Fusiliers, including Granddad Proom were also in a state of readiness. The bombardment had broken all lines of communication leaving groups of British troups isolated from their colleagues.

Here, the artillery bombardment was followed by an attack by elite German storm troopers who had been training for this attack. This was a new tactic, these soldiers travelled lightly and did fast, hard-hitting attacks before moving on to their next target. Unlike soldiers burdened with weighty kit etc., the storm troopers carried little except weaponry (such as flame throwers) that could cause much panic, as proved to be the case in this attack.

Granddad Proom’s Battalion found themselves alone and isolated and were being attacked and eventually overwhelmed.

An eye witness account says ‘We kept up rapid fire as the Germans advanced, but there were so many of them and we seemed so few. Eventually we could do no more and some of the men put up their hands to surrender. Others decided to fall back to reserve positions. This decision cost many men their lives as they were under shell and machine gun fire as they retreated.

From what I have been told, I believe Granddad Proom started to retreat but fell into a shell crater, and sheltered there from the bullets and shells until the advancing Germans found him and took him prisoner.

Granddad Proom was captured on 21st March 1918. He was made a prisoner of war but told the Germans he was a farmer, because he knew if he’d told them he was a miner he would probably been sent to work in a German coalmine.

By the end of March 21st 1918, 21,000 British soldiers had been taken prisoner and the Germans had made great advances through the lines of the Fifth Army. Senior British military commanders had lost control of the situation. They had spent three years used to static warfare and suddenly they had to cope with a German onslaught. The British Fifth Army had to withdraw.

March 21st - the aftermath. The German attack which started on March 21st was the biggest breakthrough in three years of warfare on the Western Front. Ironically, the land given up to the Germans was the Somme region – where so many British and German soldiers had been killed in the battle of 1916.

The Germans kept up the offensive for several days but eventually spread themselves too thinly and when British and French troops carried out counter attacks it proved difficult for the Germans to hold on to the newly gained territory due to a lack of resources. The operation petered out by the start of April 1918, by which time the British had lost 178,000 men, 90,000 of whom were taken prisoner. The French lost 34,000 and the Germans had almost 240,000 killed missing or wounded soldiers from this one battle.

The German failure to hold onto their gains was probably the turning point of the war, and despite several further operations which inflicted more severe losses on the allies between April and July 1918, the Germans were forced into retreat in July when the French attacked them with hundreds of Tanks, and this retreat turned into a rout as the English and their American Allies joined in.

Granddad Tame was part of the British offensive in September 1918, winning a military medal for bravery. Granddad Proom was sitting in a POW camp waiting for the war to end.

After Granddad Proom was released at the end of the war, he always celebrated March 21st like a second birthday, believing that being captured that day was the reason he survived the war.