Battle of Cantigny

Background

By the spring of 1918 Germany had beaten Russia and was gambling on a run of great offensives in the west before the American army arrived in strength. The first, on 21 March, drove the British back towards Amiens. In the emergency General John J. Pershing placed all American combat troops then in France at Foch's disposal, and on 5 April the 1st Division was moved north of Paris. On 27 April it took over a sector west of Montdidier under the French VI Corps of the First Army, the first American division to hold an active battle front.

The sector was anything but quiet. German guns shelled it constantly, and on 3 May some 10,000 mustard-gas shells fell on the 18th Infantry at Villers-Tournelle, costing about 800 casualties. Opposite the Americans the line bulged round the village of Cantigny, on a rise that gave the Germans observation over the American positions and screened their own rear. It had already changed hands twice. The Allied command was planning a counteroffensive from the Montdidier front, and Cantigny had to be taken first to straighten the line and give it a jumping-off position.

Late in May, now under the French X Corps, the division was told to take it. It would also be the first offensive by an American division, and the Allies would read it as a test of what the newly arriving American troops could do. It went in on 28 May, the day after the third German offensive broke the French line on the Chemin des Dames, some fifty miles away.

The armies

The 1st Division under Major General Robert L. Bullard was a square division of more than 28,000 men, twice the size of a French or German division. Its operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, largely wrote the attack order, Field Order No. 18 of 20 May. The assault went to Colonel Hanson Ely's 28th Infantry of Brigadier General Buck's 2nd Brigade, with machine-gun, Stokes mortar, 37-mm gun and engineer detachments and two companies of the 18th Infantry in reserve.

The French supplied what an American division of 1918 lacked. Twelve Schneider tanks were to deal with machine-gun nests, a detachment of flamethrowers was to clear dugouts, and French aircraft spotted for the guns. The division history counts 386 pieces for the operation: 132 75-mm guns, 36 155-mm howitzers, 178 heavier guns and howitzers up to 280-mm, and 40 trench mortars, some 200,000 rounds in all. The 28th rehearsed for days behind the lines on ground laid out like the German trenches from air photographs, down to platoon level, with the tanks.

The village was held by the German 82nd Reserve Division, which had relieved the 30th Reserve Division on 16 May. It was a weaker formation, said to be full of over-age veterans and teenage recruits. On 28 May the 1st Battalion of its 272nd Reserve Infantry held Cantigny itself; the 83rd Reserve Infantry of the neighbouring 25th Reserve Division lay to the south.

The battle

27 May: a German raid. The 28th Infantry came back into the line on the nights of 26/27 and 27/28 May, taking over from the 18th. At 0430 on the 27th German guns opened on the whole divisional front and at 0600 boxed in a raid against the 26th and 28th Infantry. It was beaten off, but the shelling caused serious losses, and Company D, 1st Engineers, lost two officers killed and some thirty men before the attack began. Men captured in the days before gave nothing away; the German prisoners later said the attack came as a complete surprise.

28 May, 0445–0720: the assault. At 0445 every gun fired a few registration rounds. At 0545 the preparation began: at least two heavy guns on each German battery position, the heavy howitzers and mortars on the village, gas on the support areas. At 0645 the 75s lifted into a rolling barrage moving 100 metres every two minutes and the infantry followed in three waves, the tanks moving up with the leading wave. The three battalions went in abreast on a front of 2,200 metres: the 3rd on the left, in touch with the French 152nd Division, the 2nd in the centre, from 600 metres west of the village, and the 1st on the right. The centre battalion took Cantigny from the west and north; its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Maxey, was mortally wounded and Captain Clarence Huebner took over. Resistance was slight. By 0720, on schedule, the whole objective line, some 500 metres beyond the village, was reached, an advance of 1,600 metres in the centre.

Mopping up and consolidation. Fighting in the village was at close quarters, and the French flamethrowers drove the garrison out of its dugouts. About 230 prisoners were sent back. The tanks were withdrawn about 0800. The leading wave covered the front from shell holes, the second dug trenches and wired them, and the third built three strongpoints: east of the château, in the wood on the northern edge of the village and at the cemetery to the north.

28 May, afternoon: the French guns leave. Almost as soon as the objective was reached the French began pulling out the counter-battery artillery to meet the German drive from the Aisne. The German batteries, freed, hammered the new line; by noon the fire was intense and it went on for two to three days. Small counterattacks at 0730 and 0900 were shot down. At 1710 another was broken by the barrage, and after a heavy bombardment several waves came out of the Bois de Framicourt against the right. Battalions of the 83rd and 272nd Reserve Infantry attacked in sequence and were stopped by artillery, machine guns and rifles; the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, on the flank, suffered heavily. Ely asked for his regiment to be relieved; Bullard and Buck sent reinforcements instead, and on the night of 28/29 May they went into the line: two companies of the 18th Infantry, a company of the 26th and the engineers of Company D, fighting as infantry.

29–30 May: holding on. Two small attacks between 0600 and 0700 on the 29th failed under the barrage. At 1745, after another heavy bombardment, a strong assault hit the left; it was beaten back, though the advanced posts on the extreme left fell back to the old line. At 0530 on the 30th the Germans tried once more, two waves from the Bois de Lalval behind a rolling barrage, and were driven off before they reached the position. On the night of 30/31 May the 16th Infantry relieved the 28th and the 18th.

Aftermath

The 28th Infantry and its reinforcements lost 1,067 officers and men in three days, 199 of them killed and 200 gassed; Davenport's later count is higher, about 1,600. The division history says the losses made a profound impression on the division, and the 2nd Brigade called them 'very near the limit of endurance for seasoned veterans'. The 82nd Reserve Division lost about 1,400 men and some 230 to 255 prisoners. The 1st Division stayed in the sector until 8 July, losing almost 5,200 men in 73 days in line, and ten days later attacked at Soissons.

Militarily Cantigny was a small, local success; the HERO study calls it 'only a minor success' and its significance 'much overstated in the press'. Its value was in its timing. Coming the day after the Chemin des Dames breakthrough, it showed the French and British that American divisions could attack and hold, days before the 2nd and 3rd Divisions went into action at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Pershing wrote to Bullard that the engagement, 'though relatively small, marks a distinct step forward in American participation in the war.'

It is remembered out of proportion to its size. The American monument in the village square, dedicated in 1937, commemorates 'the first attack by an American division'. Colonel Robert McCormick, who spoke at its dedication, renamed his estate outside Chicago Cantigny; the First Division's museum there opened in 1960.

Wargaming it

Cantigny is a near-perfect set-piece for a battalion- or regiment-level game: one village, a 2,200-metre front, three American battalions abreast and a clock that matters. Played at platoon or company scale on a table a mile or so across, the assault itself is a test of the 1918 attack system, the rolling barrage, tanks for the machine-gun nests and flamethrowers for the dugouts, against a second-rate German division caught by surprise. The interest is less whether the village falls than what it costs and how fast.

The better game is the defence that follows. Give the American player the newly won line, the three strongpoints at the château, the northern wood and the cemetery, and a dwindling artillery park as the French guns leave, and let the German player feed in counterattacks from the Bois de Framicourt and the Bois de Lalval over three days. Reinforcement timing, ammunition and the morale of a regiment taking heavy casualties under shellfire it cannot answer are the real decisions.

What ifs: the French counter-battery guns stay; the German raid of 27 May finds the jumping-off trenches; the 82nd Reserve Division is the crack 30th instead; Ely is given leave to withdraw.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.