On 21 March 1918 the Germans attacked. For the first three days of the offensive, the War Cabinet was uncertain of the seriousness of the threat. General Petain was waiting and expecting the main assault to come in his sector of Compiègne, about 75 miles south of where it actually took place. Having secured victory on the Eastern Front in 1917, the Germans turned their attention to the Western Front in the winter of 1917-18 by moving their combat divisions in the east, by rail, to France. It was thought that Germany had in place over 200 divisions on the Western Front by the spring of 1918 (compared to France's 100, and England's 50). When the German's struck on March 21, they concentrated their manpower and hit the allies at their weakest point, at the junction between the English and French lines. They were helped by a number of factors: 1) a recent redeployment of the B.E.F. to cover a 28 mile longer line on the front, 2) the lack of a central reserve of soldiers that the civilian leadership had ordered, but which the military had ignored, 3) the pre-deployment of divisional reserves of each side to places opposite from where they were needed, 4) the lack of an overall allied leader, which, in a time of crisis, caused the military leaders to look out for their own national interests, and not that of the whole, 5) the intense retraining of German infantry divisions into new forms of soldiers called, "stormtroopers", 6) dry weather that made otherwise swampy ground hard, 7) intense fog on the morning of the first two days of the assault, and 7) complete surprise.