Battle of Montdidier

The Battle of Montdidier was the French part of the great attack which on 8 August 1918, east of Amiens, opened the last phase of the war on the Western Front. While General Henry Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army was breaking through the front between the Somme and the road to Roye, on its right flank General Marie-Eugène Debeney’s French First Army moved off, placed for the duration of the operation under the orders of Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Its task was to cover the British, cross the Avre and outflank from the north and south Montdidier, taken by the Germans in March. On 10 August the neighbouring Third Army of General Georges Humbert also joined the battle. The Germans abandoned the encircled town during the night of 9–10 August, and the French entered its utterly destroyed ruins. The advance then stalled on a belt of old trenches from before 1917, and on 15 August preparations for an attack on Roye were broken off.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Montdidier” (bataille de Montdidier) was given by the French to the operations of their First and Third Armies in the first days of the offensive. In the French list of battles, quoted in the British official chronology of the war, it is the first part of the Third Battle of Picardy and lasts from 8 to 15 August 1918: the First Army attacked on 8 August, the Third Army on 10 August. The British call the simultaneous fighting of the Fourth Army the Battle of Amiens (8–11 August), and the Germans count both attacks as part of the defensive battle between the Somme and the Avre. The British official history notes that in practice the French attack had already ceased on 11 August, when Debeney postponed further operations, and the following days were filled with preparations for an attack on Roye that never took place. Some accounts, including the French Wikipedia, limit the battle to 8–10 August. We give the dates after the French list, and facts and times mainly after the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. IV, 1947), which here relies on the French official history and Commandant Daille’s monograph, and on the memoirs of Ferdinand Foch and Erich Ludendorff.

Background

From the end of March 1918 Montdidier was the apex of a German salient driven into the Allied front during Operation Michael. The town was taken on 27 March by the German Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier. From there the German artillery shelled the Paris–Amiens railway, and at Villers-Bretonneux the Germans stood so close to Amiens that they threatened the railway junction linking the French with the British. According to his memoirs, Ferdinand Foch had been thinking about eliminating the Montdidier salient since the beginning of April. In June Hutier struck from it once more, in the Battle of the Matz, but without much effect.

After Mangin’s counter-offensive of 18 July the initiative passed to the Allies. On 17 July Haig proposed a joint Franco-British attack east of Amiens: the British north of the little river Luce, the French south of Moreuil. Foch accepted the plan and enlarged it. On 26 July at Sarcus Haig, Rawlinson and Debeney settled the outline of the operation, and on 28 July Foch, wishing to ensure a single direction, asked Haig to take command of both armies. Debeney was thus subordinate to Haig “from the tactical point of view”, but in matters of his army’s composition and supply he still answered to the commander of the French Reserve Army Group, General Émile Fayolle.

The First Army had no large concentrations of tanks, so unlike the British it could not attack without artillery preparation. It was agreed that its infantry would go forward 45 minutes after the British, after a short bombardment. Debeney wanted to bring his corps into action one after another, from west to east: first General Toulorge’s XXXI Corps beside the Canadians, then IX Corps on the Avre, while the main blow, on 9 August, was to be delivered by XXXV Corps from Montdidier towards Roye, to meet the British. On 6 August Fayolle widened these tasks: the First Army was to force the Germans to abandon the Avre line, recover Montdidier and prepare to outflank the hills between the Matz and the Oise known as “Little Switzerland”. Humbert’s Third Army concentrated heavy artillery against the Boulogne-la-Grasse massif to cover the right flank of the attack. Debeney’s order to his corps read: conduct the attacks with a single thought, by the quickest possible bounds forward, do not wait for neighbours, and “on the very first day get very far”.

The French had earlier improved their starting positions. On 23 July the First Army took Mailly-Raineval, Sauvillers and Aubvillers, capturing, according to Foch, nearly 2,000 prisoners. On 3 and 4 August the Germans, fearing to fight with a river at their backs, withdrew of their own accord behind the Avre and the little river Doms, blowing up the bridges and leaving only outposts west of Montdidier. The French then occupied Braches and approached Hargicourt. Facing the First Army stood the left wing of the German Second Army of General Georg von der Marwitz and the right wing of Hutier’s Eighteenth Army, both from the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.

Course

8 August. The French artillery opened fire at 4.20 a.m., together with the British, along the whole army front. At 5.05 a.m. XXXI Corps went forward. The Germans, who had been busy with the British for three-quarters of an hour, were surprised by the widening of the attack. The 42nd and 37th Divisions passed on both sides of the woods north-east of Moreuil, and the 66th Division took Morisel and, outflanking it on both sides, Moreuil itself. IX Corps, after an artillery duel of almost four hours, began crossing the Avre from 8 a.m., which went hard under machine-gun fire from the Bois de Genouville. One regiment of the 3rd Division crossed the river at Braches, and the 15th Colonial Division only with the help of its neighbours took the Genouville farm at about 11.30 a.m. In the afternoon XXXI Corps, reinforced by the 153rd Division with two battalions of light tanks, took Mézières-en-Santerre. Debeney ordered it to reach Arvillers that same evening, but German resistance was stiffening: Plessier fell only at about 7 p.m., and Fresnoy-en-Chaussée at 9.30 p.m. West and south of Montdidier X and XXXV Corps conducted only artillery fire. Before noon Haig asked for the French cavalry to strike the rear of the Germans defending Montdidier, but Debeney replied that his horsemen were far away, the roads were blocked and they could not arrive before 9 August. According to the British official history the French took 150 officers and 3,200 men that day, though other accounts give higher figures.

9 August. The First Army’s attack, according to Commandant Daille, “had no breath”. Foch, a Marshal of France since 6 August, twice reproached Debeney in the morning that his army must reach Roye as quickly as possible and “join hands” with the Third Army, and at 10.35 a.m. telephoned that Debeney was personally to push XXXI Corps on Roye “without losing a minute”. The left wing moved off at 8 a.m. and advanced about 4 km: Hangest-en-Santerre fell at 11 a.m., Contoire at 1.30 p.m., and in the evening the French reached the Canadians’ right flank near Bouchoir. In the afternoon, at 4 p.m., XXXV Corps, to which Debeney had shifted the bulk of his artillery, attacked south of Montdidier. It retook Assainvillers, Piennes and Faverolles and drove a wedge several kilometres into the German front, threatening the road from Montdidier to Roye. The town was now outflanked from the north and the south. According to Foch the Germans abandoned it during the night of 9–10 August. That evening Rupprecht summoned Hutier and told him that the whole Eighteenth Army had to fall back; Erich Ludendorff, after a long telephone conversation, agreed to a withdrawal to the Matz–Conchy–l’Échelle line. Ludendorff admitted in his memoirs that a great deal of equipment had to be abandoned in the process.

10 August. The First Army moved off at 5.30 a.m. after a half-hour bombardment and advanced almost unopposed. The 60th Division of X Corps entered Montdidier. The town was utterly destroyed, and according to French battlefield guides the French held all of it by about noon. The commander of XXXV Corps announced that it was no longer a matter of methodical attacks with a “debauch of artillery fire”, but of strong reconnaissances that were to bypass resistance and push forward quickly. That day before dawn, at 4.20 a.m., Humbert’s Third Army attacked on the right of the First Army without artillery preparation. Its six divisions wheeled on their extreme right, advancing about 10 km on the wing, to the line Conchy-les-Pots–Ressons-sur-Matz–Machemont. The whole battle front, from Dernancourt on the Ancre to Chevincourt on the Oise, lengthened to about 55 km. In the afternoon, however, the French came up against a belt of old French and German trenches from 1915–1916, overgrown with grass and girdled with wire, where the Germans had organised a new defence. XXXI Corps did not get beyond Andechy. The same day Foch ordered the First Army to push on towards Ham and the Third Army towards Lassigny and Noyon, to clear the Germans from the Montdidier area and then from Noyon.

11–15 August. On 11 August the First Army advanced only slightly: XXXI Corps gained about a kilometre and was still 3–4 km from Roye, and the 126th Division was thrown back by a German counter-attack. The Third Army pushed the German rearguards back 1–4 km. At noon Debeney received an order from Fayolle to hand over part of his divisions to reserve, because his army’s front had shortened by a third, and he postponed further attacks to 13 August. On 12 August Foch set a new objective: a strong, concentrated blow by the First Army and the right wing of the British Fourth Army on the road junction at Roye, supported by the Third Army. Haig fixed the attack for 15 August. The Third Army’s attempts on 12 and 13 August achieved little, so Humbert postponed further operations to 15 August. On 14 August Haig, seeing the strengthened German defence on the Chaulnes–Roye line, put back the attack, and on 15 August he persuaded Foch that, instead of attacking frontally south of the Somme, it would be better to strike with the British Third Army north of the Ancre. That day Debeney informed his corps commanders that the attack planned for 16 August had been cancelled, and the First Army returned to the orders of Fayolle and Pétain. The Battle of Montdidier was over.

Losses

According to figures that the British official history quotes from French data, the First and Third Armies took 259 officers and 11,114 men prisoner and 259 guns between 6 and 15 August. Their losses over the same days amounted to 24,232 killed, wounded and missing. German losses facing the French front cannot be separated out. Edmonds estimated that the Eighteenth Army lost at least a third of what the Second Army lost, that is, some ten to twenty thousand men, but notes that this is only an approximation.

Significance

The Battle of Montdidier pushed the Germans back from Amiens and from the Paris–Amiens railway, which was Foch’s first objective, and eliminated the salient from which, since March, blows had threatened towards Paris and against the junction of the French and British armies. The British official history nevertheless judges it harshly: the French corps entered the battle one after another, from left to right, instead of attacking simultaneously, and Hutier’s Eighteenth Army, instead of letting itself be surrounded, withdrew in good order during the night of 9–10 August. Foch too was dissatisfied with Debeney’s pace and urged him on several times a day. Ludendorff observed that after the battle the Second Army was completely shattered, but the strength of the Eighteenth Army remained intact.

Even so, the defeat at Amiens and Montdidier shook the German Supreme Army Command, and for the Allies it opened a period of uninterrupted attacks later called the Hundred Days Offensive. As early as 17 August the French armies of Humbert and Mangin began the Second Battle of Noyon, and on 21 August the British Third Army joined the attack. The French retook Lassigny and Roye only in the second half of August. Montdidier was in ruins. After the war the town was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour, and its reconstruction lasted until the early 1930s.