Americans capture Cantigny

On 28 May 1918 at 6.45 a.m. soldiers of the 28th Infantry Regiment of the American 1st Infantry Division left their trenches and advanced on the village of Cantigny, a few kilometres west of Montdidier in Picardy. Within an hour the village was in their hands, and over the next two days they held it against several German counter-attacks and unceasing shellfire. The Battle of Cantigny was small compared with what was happening on the Western Front in those days, but it went down in history as the first attack carried out by a division of the American Expeditionary Forces. We give the facts and times according to the history of the 1st Division of 1922 and the guide of the American Battle Monuments Commission of 1938.

The village on the hill

At the end of March, when the German Operation Michael broke the front on the Somme, General John Pershing placed all American combat troops in France at General Foch’s disposal. The 1st Division, which in the autumn of 1917 had been learning trench warfare in a quiet sector in Lorraine and had suffered its first losses there, was moved north of Paris, and at the end of April, under Major General Robert Lee Bullard, it took over a sector of the front west of Montdidier, where the German offensive had come to a halt. For the first time an American division stood on an active front. Opposite it lay the village of Cantigny, held by the German Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier. It stood on a hill in the middle of a small salient and gave the Germans a view into the American positions, while at the same time screening what was happening behind it. According to the division’s history it had already changed hands twice before the Americans arrived. In mid-May the French X Corps, to which the division was subordinate, decided that the Americans would take it.

The attack was entrusted to Colonel Hanson Ely’s 28th Infantry Regiment, reinforced with machine-gun companies, engineers and two companies of the 18th Regiment, about four thousand men in all. The regiment left the line and for several days rehearsed the attack on ground resembling the battlefield, on which German trenches had been reproduced from aerial photographs. The Americans still had little heavy weaponry, so the French supplied the rest: artillery, aircraft, twelve Schneider tanks and a detachment with flamethrowers. According to the division’s history the preparatory bombardment was fired by 386 guns and mortars, and about 200,000 shells were brought up to the batteries by night.

The attack and the counter-attacks

At 5.45 a.m. the artillery opened fire on the village, the trenches and the German batteries, and at 6.45 it turned into a rolling barrage, behind which the infantry advanced with the tanks in three waves. Resistance was weak. One battalion went through the village, the other two went round it on both sides, and French soldiers with flamethrowers smoked the Germans out of their dugouts. At 7.20 a.m., as planned, the whole regiment stood on a line about half a kilometre beyond Cantigny and began to dig in. According to the division’s history, five officers and 225 men of the German 82nd Reserve Division were taken prisoner. The prisoners stated that the attack had taken them completely by surprise.

Holding the village was harder. The day before, the Germans had broken through the front on the Aisne, and immediately after Cantigny was taken the French withdrew part of the heavy artillery that had been engaging the German batteries and sent it to the threatened sector. From noon the Americans came under heavy fire, which according to the Monuments Commission guide went on without a break for 72 hours. The Germans counter-attacked several times: on the morning of 28 May with weaker forces, and at 5.10 p.m. with several waves of infantry behind a barrage. The strongest blow fell on a battalion of the 26th Regiment commanded by Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the son of the former president. On the evening of 29 May the Germans pushed part of the 28th Regiment’s left wing back to the old line, and the last counter-attack, on the morning of 30 May, broke down under artillery and machine-gun fire. On the night of 30/31 May the 16th Regiment relieved Ely’s exhausted soldiers.

The price and the significance

According to the history of the 1st Division, by that night the Americans had lost 1,067 men, including 199 killed and about two hundred gassed. Some works, counting a longer period, give about 1,600 killed, wounded and missing. It was a high price for taking one village, but the result mattered above all for morale. For months the French and British had wondered whether the inexperienced American divisions would cope in battle. On 28 May itself Pershing wrote to Bullard that the action, “although comparatively small, marks a distinct step forward in America’s part in the war”. The Monuments Commission guide later called it a bright spot in gloomy days, because it came the day after the defeat on the Aisne.

The 1st Division remained in the Cantigny sector until 8 July, losing almost 5,200 men in all during that time. A few days after the battle other American divisions were thrown in on the Marne. The monument erected at Cantigny by the United States government commemorates “the first offensive by an American division in the World War”, and Robert McCormick, then an artillery officer of the 1st Division and later publisher of the Chicago Tribune, named his estate near Chicago after the village.