Portal:World War I/Selected event/6
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The Battle of Arras was an offensive during World War I by forces of the British Empire between 9 April and 16 May 1917. British, Canadian, and Australian troops attacked German trenches near the French city of Arras.
At this stage of the war, the Western Front was a continuous line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. With minor adjustments caused by the ebb and flow of asaults and counter-assaults, this corresponded roughly to the final line of confrontation in the last phase of the war of movement of 1914. From behind barbed wire and fortifications, about 100 German divisions faced about 150 French and British Empire divisions in seeming deadlock. In its simplest terms, the Allied objective from early 1915 onwards was to break through the German defences into the open ground beyond and engage the numerically inferior German army in open battle.
The Battle of Arras was planned in conjunction with the French High Command, who were planning a massive attack (the Nivelle Offensive) about eighty kilometres to the south. This had the stated aim of ending the war in forty-eight hours. At Arras, the British Empire's immediate objectives were more modest: (i) to draw German troops away from the ground chosen for the French attack and (ii) to take the German-held high ground that dominated the plain of Douai.
When the battle officially ended on 16 May, British Empire troops had made significant advances, but had been unable to achieve a major breakthrough at any point. New tactics had been battle-tested, particularly in the first phase, and had demonstrated that set-piece assaults against heavily fortified positions could be successful. This sector then reverted to the stalemate that typified most of the war on the Western Front.
