Four o'clock a.m., March 21, 1918. An eerie quiet had settled over the Western Front in France. From the high command to the Tommies in the trenches, the British army nervously waited for the massive German assault they knew was coming.

"I woke up," Winston Churchill remembered, "in a complete silence at a few minutes past four and lay musing. Suddenly, after what seemed about half an hour, the silence was broken by six or seven very loud and heavy explosions several miles away... And then, exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear." Churchill dressed, and went outside. "This is it," he was told.

General Erich von Ludendorff had conceived a master plan for at last winning the war but the German victory would rely upon an all-out assault that needed to succeed before the Americans committed more troops to the war that was being waged on the European continent.