Allies retake Château-Thierry

On 21 July 1918 French troops entered Château-Thierry, the small town on the Marne where Jean de La Fontaine was born, which for seven weeks had been the point of the German front pushed furthest towards Paris. The Germans abandoned it without a fight on the night of 20–21 July. According to the British official history the town was occupied by units of the French XXXVIII Corps. French divisional histories credit this to General Pougin’s 39th Infantry Division, which since the end of June had held the sector on both banks of the Marne at Château-Thierry and Vaux. On the same day the American 3rd Infantry Division, which since June had defended the south bank of the river, crossed to the other side and set off in pursuit.

The Germans reached Château-Thierry on 31 May, in the last days of the offensive on the Aisne. At the turn of May and June they occupied the northern part of the town, with the castle from which it takes its name, and French sappers blew up the main bridge to stop them at the river. Throughout June and July the town lay on the front line: the Germans held the north bank, the French and Americans the south. West of the town, at Vaux and on Hill 204, the French and Americans fought local actions in June and early July, and further west the US Marines took Belleau Wood. On 15 July the Germans crossed the Marne east of the town, but at Château-Thierry itself, where they made only feint attacks, they did not win a crossing.

The town’s fate was sealed by Mangin’s counter-offensive of 18 July. The French and Americans threatened the German supply routes through Soissons, and the tip of the Marne salient, with Château-Thierry, became a trap. After abandoning the bridgehead on the south bank of the Marne on the night of 19–20 July, Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group ordered the whole front from Chartèves on the Marne to the area of the Ourcq to be pulled back about 8 kilometres the following night. The Germans withdrew in good order, leaving rearguards with machine guns.

On 21 July the French Sixth Army, to which the XXXVIII Corps had then passed, and the right wing of the Tenth Army advanced rapidly. According to French accounts, by evening the leading elements of the Sixth Army were about 10 kilometres further on, near Bézu-Saint-Germain and Épieds. That day the American 26th Division passed through the woods west of Château-Thierry up to Hill 204 above the town. One regiment of the 3rd Division crossed the Marne near Château-Thierry and took Mont-Saint-Père, covering the crossing of the rest of the division, which crossed the river during the night and on the morning of 22 July by a pontoon bridge built by its engineers. The commander of the Reserve Army Group, General Émile Fayolle, “in great elation”, according to the British official history, sent the 6th Cavalry Division in pursuit and asked for a whole cavalry corps, but the cavalry was unable to get ahead of the infantry.

The recapture of Château-Thierry was above all symbolic. It was near this town that the Americans first helped the French in large numbers to stop the Germans on the road to Paris, and for them its name became a byword for their part in the war. On the flanks of the salient, at Soissons and at Reims, the Germans continued to defend themselves fiercely and neither on 21 July nor in the following days did they allow themselves to be cut off. The withdrawal from the Marne salient went on for more than two weeks. After the war the United States erected a monument on Hill 204 above Château-Thierry commemorating the fighting of its soldiers in the area in 1918.