Three days after the jumpoff both Foch’s headquarters and the German High Command knew that Ludendorff’s fifth offensive had failed.
Foch’s Mass of Manoeuvre
The hour had come that Ferdinand Foch had been waiting for. For a month he had worked to concentrate a striking force in the wooded region around Villers-Cotterets. From there he would be in a position, if the boche should continue to attack Reims in preparation for a drive against Paris, to hit them on the exposed flank of their salient between the Marne and the Ourcq. The very success of Ludendorff’s drive south of the Marne, combined with his failure to budge Gouraud’s force defending Reims, to throw him off balance and to make the western flank of his armies south of Soissons more vulnerable. This was the moment for Foch to risk an offensive.
Fending off interference from his British allies and from his own generals kept him even busier than planning the logistics of his troop movements. Versailles was in an uproar.
The success of three German drives threw Lloyd George into a case of jitters. He was desperate to stop the drain on British manpower. He kept advocating drastic changes in military policy. He dreamed of restoring the old stalemate in France and Flanders. He advocated moves against Germany through Austria or the Balkans. He wanted expeditions to Russia to keep the Germans from mobilizing Russian manpower. At the same time he was appalled by the prospect of a new German attack on Haig’s shattered armies.
Every meeting of the Supreme War Council was angrier than the last. Backbiting and recrimination were the order of the day. Pershing was having to use all sorts of subterfuges to get the artillery and service troops he needed to complete his divisions shipped across the Atlantic. At Lloyd George’s insistence cables were sent Woodrow Wilson making the completely impractical demand that a hundred divisions of American infantry be dispatched immediately. At the same time he was importuning Haig to take back his XXII Corps which, according to the Beauvais and Abbeville agreements, the British field marshal was placing at Foch’s disposition.
Haig, who distrusted his own politicians even more than he distrusted the French, loyally stood by his commitments to Foch. When Lloyd George sent an emissary to try to make him change his mind, he wrote out his reply: “I take the risk, and I fully realize that if the dispositions prove to be wrong, the blame will rest on me. On the other hand, if they prove to be right the credit will lie with Foch. With this,” he added bitterly, “the Government should be well satisfied.”
In spite of continual private bickering between the two men, Foch had support from Clemenceau. Even so he was not yet master in his own camp. As late as the morning of July 15, when he was driving north to confer with Haig, he discovered, dropping in unannounced on the headquarters of his Tenth Army at Noailles, that Pétain, as commander of the French armies in the field, had issued orders to discontinue the concentrations of troops around Villers-Cotterets. Pétain, as always defensive-minded to the point of timidity, wanted to reinforce Gouraud at Reims.
“Let Gouraud take care of himself,” said Foch with his arrogant gesture of brushing away the cobwebs of human stupidity. He countermanded Pétain’s orders in the nick of time.
Possibly some rumor of Pétain’s intended dispositions reached German Intelligence and encouraged Ludendorff to weaken his flank south of Soissons and throw everything he had against Reims. The High Command’s strategic thinking seems to have been confused by the fact that the Germans had a double objective: to seize the Reims-Paris trunk line of railroad and at the same time to build up the reserves for Prince Rupert’s knockout blow against the British in the north which was set for two weeks after a German victory on the Marne.
Foch, always punctual, hurried from the Tenth Army to his meeting with Haig at nearby Monchy. That day he let the British commander in on just enough of his plan to keep him welldisposed. It wasn’t until the morning of the seventeenth, when Foch knew that the German drive was stalled before Reims and at least slowed across the Marne, that he sent Haig a message fully disclosing his intentions: early next day General Mangin of the French Tenth Army would attack south of Soissons with twenty divisions.
The Forest of Retz
Charles Marie Emmanuel Mangin, a small jumpy sallow man with deep lines in his face and a jetblack mustache, was a veteran leader of colonial troops. Bullard described him as a little foxterrier with a bulldog jaw. He had made his reputation leading two successful counterattacks at Verdun in 1916. The plan of the move to cut off Soissons was his. The crux of the operation was intrusted to Berdoulat’s corps which was to consist of the American 1st and 2nd and a Moroccan division famous for recklessness and dash.
The 1st, now under Major General Summerall who had been promoted for his conduct of the artillery at Cantigny, received orders on July 11. They were to start moving out of the Beauvais rest area for an undisclosed destination. Travel was to be by night and the troops were to hide from airplane observation in copses and villages during the day. The 1st’s advance towards the front proved strenuous but was carried out with no more than the usual confusion.
The 2nd, notified three days later, had a rough time of it. The division was in the process of being relieved from the now fairly inactive Belleau Wood region to the west of Château-Thierry. General Edwards’ Yankees were moving in to replace them. To add to the complications Major General Harbord had barely been notified that he was to take over divisional command from General Bundy.
Harbord was in Paris on two days leave, outfitting himself with new uniforms, and being wined and dined as the hero of Belleau Wood by his crony Charley Dawes, when he received orders to replace Bundy at once. Arriving at the rest area near La Ferté-sous-Jouarre where his division was supposed to be, he found that most of his troops were already on the move but nobody could tell him exactly where they were going.
On July 14, which was a nice quiet sunny day along the Marne, the marines of the first regiments to come out of the firing line were placidly swimming and washing their clothes in the green river or writing letters or dozing on the grass in anticipation of a few days of very much needed rest, when the sergeants began snapping out orders to fall in for a long march. They broke up camp in a hurry and hiked till long after dark.
Next day they hiked on through back roads of the beautiful green countryside between the Oise and the Ourcq. In the late afternoon their rolling kitchens caught up with them. They hurriedly swallowed some slum and hiked again. They hiked all night. After fifty hours of marching they reached their destination and were told to get ready to attack within twentyfour hours.
It wasn’t till late in the night of July 16 that Harbord, after ramming his staffcar through an incredible tangle of military traffic moving up the main road into the woodlands around Villers-Cotterets, found General Berdoulat. The corps headquarters was in a village that proved to be a terrible bottleneck for traffic because the highway narrowed there to a single street hemmed between stone houses.
Berdoulat greeted Harbord cordially and served him some supper, but he could give him no idea of where the various units of the 2nd Division were at that moment. While they were eating he announced casually that Harbord’s division was to take up positions along the edge of the woods and attack on the morning of the eighteenth in the direction of the Soissons-Château-Thierry road.
Nobody on Berdoulat’s staff vouchsafed any further information as to where the regiments arriving by forced marches were expected to assemble or where such troops as were being transported by bus and truck would be unloaded. That was the business of the army, not of the corps the officers told him.
They did furnish him with maps and with copies of the general orders. A French general, who had fought over this countryside in 1914, hurriedly dictated a description of the terrain to Harbord’s chief of staff, Colonel Brown.
Harbord and Brown spent the night writing up their divisional orders. The tactical problem, over ground as unknown to them as the face of the moon, was hard enough to put down on paper; the pro
spect of putting it into practice appalled them. They did the best they could, spurred to the work by a brief but vigorous bombing by boche planes which made them fear that perhaps the boche knew more about the plans of the French Army than they did. With the first streaks of day they were on the move.
“Just twentyfour hours before the coming attack,” wrote Harbord, “we left Taillefontaine in my motor car to attempt to find the division, concentrate it, distribute the necessary orders, assure the supply of ammunition, rations, evacuation of the wounded, and to guarantee its assault at the prescribed hour.”
Foch picked the ancient Forest of Retz as a concentration point because the enormous trees afforded considerable protection from boche observation planes. The highway to Soissons cut through the middle of this forest and from that highway narrow logging roads made tunnels of greenery to the right and left. Every road and woodland trail was packed with the troops and the mounts and the rolling equipment of twenty divisions converging for the attack.
The morning of the seventeenth dawned rainy but the day turned out hot. The rain from intermittent thundershowers was a relief for men hot and sweating from long marches. When the sun shone drenched uniforms steamed. The men suffered tortures of thirst. The roads became slippery and the ditches filled with mud.
Dogtired and footsore as they were, the arriving doughboys and marines were impressed by the majesty of their surroundings. Green on the fringes and dark almost to blackness within, great oaks and beeches towered on either hand ninety feet above the mossy forest floor.
It was midafternoon before the American units reached the depths of the forest. One regiment was late because the French major in charge of the trucks held them up for two hours while he haggled to have receipts signed for the transportation of the men. The Americans knew that the minute he had his receipts he would dump them out where they were instead of taking them to their destination. “Oh those frugal French!” exclaimed Harbord.
Men looked around wideeyed at the great concentration of troops. Picketlines of artillery and cavalry stretched out of sight among the trees. French infantrymen in faded blue lolling beside their stacked rifles seemed to the arriving Americans to be giving them appraising looks. Some thought they smiled approval through their wiry beards and droopy mustaches.
Tanks elbowed them to one side as they marched—along the right side of the road since the center had to be left open for heavy traffic. Many of the Americans were seeing tanks for the first time. There were big tanks and little tanks, weirdly camouflaged with splotches of green and brown and blue. They rattled and crunched and groaned and snorted along. Sometimes a man had to throw himself into a thicket to get out of their way. Plodding wearily along they passed piles and piles of small arm ammunition. There were rows of shells of every conceivable caliber, ranks of winged aerial bombs, enormous dumps of handgrenades and pyrotechnic equipment for signalling.
The center of the road was a jumble of howitzers propelled by lowslung caterpillars, graceful French seventyfives hauled by brisk sixhorse teams, larger fieldguns dragged by eight straining drayhorses. There were rolling kitchens and waterwagons behind their spans of mules, and troops of led horses of every color and shape: roan, sorrel, black, bay. Through the tangled mass wound neverending convoys of ammunition trucks, dispatch riders on motorcycles, officers in sidecars, the impatient crowded touring cars of some general’s staff.
Through the trees on either side plugged weary files of mudcaked poilus, with their rifles that seemed much too long to the Americans, and all their paraphernalia of pots and pans for light housekeeping dangling and clattering from the knapsacks on their backs. Among them were dark Moroccans in khaki, black Senegalese, ruddy English in their welltailored uniforms. In the distance among the great treetrunks flitted shadows of mounted French grenadiers with plumes and lances.
As the long twilight faded into night the confusion was compounded.
“Now it is night in the great Forest of Retz,” wrote Private McCord in his diary, “and dark as a dungeon, and with the darkness comes rain. As we grope in single file we cling each man to a packstrap of the man in front, as blindly, doggedly on we go, in spite of the mud, the heavy packs and the rain that comes down in torrents … Blindly feeling our way, with the help of God and our own intuition, we the lousy infantry, s.o.l. as always, until they get us to where they need us, managed to miraculously accomplish the impossible by getting from the right to the left side of this dark, seething, confusing stream of traffic to follow other lousy troopers, men like ourselves, the other battalions and companies of our regiment, in single file off through the woods to our left …”
Wherever Harbord went, his men told the same story of a weary night ride or endless hike; no information, no maps, no guides, no orders.
The machineguns of the marine brigade were for some reason dumped off at an old château. “When finally located and told the mission of the division, these men,” wrote Harbord, “carried their guns by hand on the long march across fields and muddy roads, getting into position at the last moment. No one can understand exactly what this means unless he has tried to carry a machinegun twelve miles through a ploughed field …
“Seven hours of darkness before the zero hour,” wrote Harbord. “None of my units except the gunners were in place. It rained hard; the forest was plutonian in its darkness: the road, beyond words to describe: trucks, artillery, infantry columns, cavalry, wagons, caissons, mud, MUD, utter confusion … All realized that the task was almost superhuman, but that the honor not only of the division but of the American name was at stake. At 3 A.M. the 5th Marines and the 9th Infantry were forcing their way through the forest … they would be up with about five minutes to spare … The regiments got to the point designated for the assault at double-time.”
Towards the Soissons-Château-Thierry Road
The orders were for the Moroccan division to attack in the center with the American 1st on its left and the 2nd on its right. Many men of the 2nd had marched without sleep for two nights.
“The attack began at the appointed hour of 4:55 A.M.,” Harbord jotted in his notes. “It was out of my hands when they went over the top and there was nothing to do but pray for victory and wait for news.”
July 18: “Nearing dawn and stopped raining,” noted Sergeant Carl McCune of the 5th Marines. His battalion halted on a hill about a half a mile from the front line where the men left their blankets and made up combat packs with reserve rations. Then the hike was resumed, the men very quiet and the artillery silent. A French machinegun outfit, bearded men muddy from the trenches, passed by towards the rear. The sergeant noted that they seemed tired and glad to see the marines. There were shellholes everywhere. Woods thinning out. At a farmhouse the men were issued two bandoliers of ammunition and two grenades each.
“A 75 barked suddenly and then began the most terrible barrage ever experienced up to this time. Every caliber of gun, large and small, firing as rapidly as possible, joined in throwing over a wall of steel and iron that was to drive the invader out of the land. The sky was becoming clearer. As we were late we began to double time into position, panting, stumbling, well-nigh exhausted; the men ran quickly through a counter-barrage thrown over by the Germans. Men fell now and then hit by shrapnel … A French sentinel posted at a wire strung across the road, opened it to let the Marines through; shells dropped closer, several men were hit. Big trees cut by artillery fire lay everywhere about the woods. Exhausted, the men dropped into holes constituting the line and paused for breath. Exhausted as they were, the men arose and went over the top to meet the enemy.”
The Germans were taken by surprise. Some units were out in the fields taking in the wheatharvest the French farmers had abandoned in their flight. Their counterbarrage proved spotty. Outposts made little resistance.
The day turned out bright and clear. The sun was hot and men who had drunk up the water in their canteens during the night suffered agonies of thirst. When a man fell dead his comrades sn
atched for his canteen. Soon they were picking canteens off the fallen Germans.
“We went through barbed wire entanglements,” continued Sergeant McCone. “In front of the advanced posts a machinegun opened up and the men who received the fire halted and lay on the ground, behind trees if possible; our units to the right and left advanced and forced the gun crew to withdraw. We advanced keenly on the alert from tree to tree. Maxims lay scattered about with long belts of ammunition discarded by the Germans in their flight. The barrage roared steadily … The German artillery now dropped shells between the first and second wave which the men avoided by making an encircling movement around the shelled area and reforming when out of range. To the right of the company were captured a four inch gun, a telephone station and several prisoners. We found hot coffee and German warbread and butter which the men devoured after making the prisoners first sample it.”
Marines of another detachment, after storming a ravine, found themselves the possessors of a barrel of sauerkraut. Parched with thirst and starving for food they broached it with a riflebutt. As they continued up through a wheatfield after the retreating Germans each man had his rifle in one hand and a dripping clutch of sauerkraut in the other.
At the same time infantry outfits were storming the village of Vierzy which commanded a heavily defended tunnel on the Soissons-Villers-Cotterets railroad.