The Long, Long Trail. Oppy is a village North East of Arras. Oppy was well behind the front line and in German hands from October During late and early , the formidable construction known as the Siegfried Stellung Hindenburg Line to the British incorporated the village into the deep defensive system. One subsidiary system running off the main Hindenburg position was known as the Oppy-Mericourt-Vendin Line. It can be seen here, running to the west of Oppy and its wood, branching off to pass on both sides of Arleux.
The Oppy-Mericourt-Vendin Line comprised numerous trenches, with dug outs and emplacements, protected by thick barbed wire defences. This is part of a British trench map of May Having not been within range of the fighting before April , Oppy was much as it had been in I found this image online but could not trace a source or owner of the original: please accept my apologies and let me know if we have contravened any copyright.
On 23 April , in a phase of operations during the Battle of Arras, British forces made an advance of between 1 and 2 miles which included ground at Gavrelle.
It was decided to carry out a next stage of this advance but as a preliminary to it there would need to be operations on both flanks of the sector to be attacked. Oppy lay in the northern flank and both it and the village of Arleux were to be captured by the British First Army. This attack went in on 28 April, but proved to be a failure. In particular, the Royal Naval Division struggled to make any headway, leaving 2nd Division β whose objective was to take Oppy β exposed on its right.
To make matters worse, after recent operations 2nd Division was greatly under strength and whole on paper it deployed two infantry brigades, in reality its manpower amounted to little more than one.
