Most of us picture the Hindenburg Line as a single great fortress that the Allies smashed through on one glorious day. It was never that. It was a system, built on purpose in the winter of 1916 and 1917 by German engineers and more than sixty-five thousand workers, most of them prisoners of war, and it was designed to solve a very specific problem: too much front and too few soldiers.
In this episode, we look at what the Line really was, from its belts of wire and concrete shelters to the new German way of defending in depth. We follow Operation Alberich, the scorched-earth withdrawal that gave it its first test, and we meet the old field marshal whose name it carried. The veterans of the 49th Battalion, the Edmonton Regiment, wrote about him in the Forty-Niner newsletter in 1930, with a grudging respect that tells you a great deal about the men who fought against him.
Then we follow the Canadian Corps into the autumn of 1918. We stand at the Drocourt-Quéant Line on 2 September, where seven Canadians won the Victoria Cross in a single day, and at the Canal du Nord on 27 September, where Sir Arthur Currie pushed the Corps through a narrow dry stretch of canal bed in one of the boldest plans of the war. We read the 49th Battalion’s own report of its fight at the Marcoing Line, including the lessons its officer wrote down two days later. Through archival recordings, we also hear from the German, British and Australian soldiers who lived it.
The Line was a system, and it was defeated by a system. It took weeks, not a day, and the cost was real. This is the story of both.
