Battle of Noyon

The Battle of Noyon was the fighting on the southern wing of Operation Michael, the great German offensive begun on 21 March 1918. The German 18th Army of General Oskar von Hutier, which in the first days had shattered the right wing of the British Fifth Army, was pressing south-west between the Oise and the Somme. Facing it were successive French divisions, brought by lorry straight into the fighting, often without artillery or ammunition, together with the remnants of the British III Corps. On 25 March the Germans broke their line, in the evening they entered Noyon, and by the morning of 26 March the town was entirely in their hands. That day the French fell back another few kilometres, but they stopped the Germans on the Mont Renaud hill, which closed the Oise valley and the road to Compiègne and Paris.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee did not single out the fighting at Noyon as a separate battle: it counted it among the “First Battles of the Somme 1918”, and the only British units fighting there were the remnants of III Corps, placed under French command. The name comes from the French tradition, which speaks of the first Battle of Noyon, one part of the second Battle of Picardy. French accounts set its limits differently. Some begin it on 24 March, when the Germans approached the town, and end it only on 30 April, with the last German assault on Mont Renaud. To distinguish it, the name second Battle of Noyon is given to the French attack in August that recaptured the town. In German nomenclature the “Battle of Noyon” is something else again: the June attack of the 18th Army between Montdidier and Noyon, so named in the memoirs of Erich Ludendorff.

We describe here the two days, 25 and 26 March 1918, in which the fate of the town was decided: from the breaking of the French line north of Noyon to the settling of a new front at Mont Renaud and Lassigny. We give times mainly according to the British official history, which draws heavily on the French official history but does not always agree with it. The course of the last hours of the defence of the town itself is known chiefly from French local studies.

Background

Noyon, an old episcopal town with a Gothic cathedral, lay less than a hundred kilometres from Paris. From the autumn of 1914 until March 1917 it was in German hands, and the French recovered it only during the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line. In the winter of 1917/1918, when the British took over the front from the French as far as the Oise, the Noyon area became the rear of the right wing of the British Fifth Army of General Hubert Gough. The headquarters of the British IX Corps was set up in the town, and together with the headquarters of the French Third Army of General Georges Humbert, quartered in Clermont, it drew up plans for mutual assistance. The plans approved on 7 March by Douglas Haig and Philippe Pétain provided that, in the event of a great attack on the British, the French would assemble six divisions with artillery in the Montdidier–Noyon area by the evening of the fourth day and commit them to battle as a whole, not piecemeal.

On 21 March Hutier struck between Saint-Quentin and the Oise at the British III Corps of General Richard Butler and XVIII Corps of General Ivor Maxse. In three days of the Battle of St Quentin his troops broke through the battle zone and forced the Crozat Canal and the Somme at Ham. The first French reinforcements, General Diebold’s 125th Division, reached Chauny at noon on 22 March. Behind it came General Maurice Pellé’s V Corps, which took over command of the whole III Corps sector north of the Oise, and after it General Robillot’s II Cavalry Corps, which was taking over the XVIII Corps sector. On 23 March Pétain promised Haig that eleven divisions, a dismounted cavalry division and a cavalry division would stand on the British right wing under the orders of General Émile Fayolle, commander of the Reserve Army Group. At 3 a.m. on 25 March all British troops south of the Somme came under his command.

Hutier’s success changed the plans of the German high command. Originally the 18th Army, part of the army group of Crown Prince Wilhelm, was only to screen the main attack on the British from the French side. On 23 March Ludendorff gave it the direction of attack on Chaulnes and Noyon, and at a conference at Avesnes he announced that the aim was now to separate the French and the British by a rapid advance on both sides of the Somme. South of the river the Germans were to wheel onto the line Amiens–Montdidier–Noyon and then strike south-west. By 23 March the 18th Army had received eight additional divisions from the 7th Army and the reserve of the supreme command. From the screen of the whole operation it had become, as a German account quoted by the British official history puts it, its “spearhead”, from which even greater successes were expected.

On 24 March the fighting reached Noyon itself. The French 1st Dismounted Cavalry Division fell back for lack of ammunition, and the 125th Division after it. The 9th Division of General Maurice Gamelin, though barely attacked, had to leave a projecting salient and in the evening stood, “very shaken”, at Quesmy, a few kilometres from the town. The British 14th Division crossed during the night behind the dry cutting of the Canal du Nord at Beaurains to cover the heavy artillery assembled west of Noyon. In the evening Pétain passed Fayolle the order that, if the attack continued, his armies were to keep their right wing on the Oise and fall back to the line Noyon–Porquéricourt–Lagny–Roye. Above all he wanted the French armies to remain “one compact whole”, and they were to maintain contact with the British only “if possible”. Haig, to whom Pétain handed a copy of this order late in the evening at Dury near Amiens, read it as a sign that the British right wing would be abandoned.

Course

25 March, morning. The mist lifted earlier than on the previous days, at about 7.30 a.m., which should have helped the defenders. The French, however, were weak. Their divisions fought without their own artillery, supported by British guns, and without a steady supply of ammunition. The commander of the 10th Division, fearing for his right wing, withdrew it during the night to a line south-west of Freniches without waiting for the attack. At 5 a.m. General Diebold issued instructions for a retreat behind the Oise. At about 7 a.m. the Germans broke in between the 1st Dismounted Cavalry Division and the 9th Division, outflanked them and pushed them back. After 8 a.m. the fresh French divisions arriving at Noyon, among them the 1st Division, were ordered to counter-attack towards Chauny and Guiscard. General Grégoire, commander of the 1st Division, took over a group made up of his division, the 9th Division, the dismounted cavalry and, as the French official history writes, “the debris of the British 18th Division”. It was already too late for a counter-attack.

25 March, during the day. On the right wing Diebold’s group crossed the Oise in the afternoon. At about 3.30 p.m., on General Pellé’s orders, Grégoire’s group followed it, without the 9th Division. The retreat was covered by the British 54th Brigade of Brigadier-General Sadleir-Jackson, which despite its exhaustion retook the village of Babœuf to save the French guns standing there. The British captured ten machine guns and killed or took prisoner 230 Germans, and withdrew only at two in the morning, blowing up the bridges behind them. Further west the Germans drove into the gap between the 9th and 10th Divisions. The 35th Division, intended for the counter-attack, was split up: three battalions went to the dismounted cavalry, three to the 10th Division, and the rest remained in reserve south of Noyon. Through a misunderstanding, which the British attribute to the commander of the 35th Division, the important Porquéricourt hill north of the town was left without defenders. The 10th Division, attacked from 7 a.m., had broken into two parts by 4.30 p.m. and fell back nearly ten kilometres, behind the Canal du Nord at Beaurains. At about 4 p.m. the Germans also pushed the 9th Division back onto the heights south-west of Noyon, and the British 14th Division withdrew after dark to Thiescourt.

Further west, in Robillot’s sector, the situation was similar. The French 62nd Division, attacked frontally and exposed on its right by the retreat of the 10th Division, was withdrawing from 10.45 a.m. on the orders of the corps commander and by 4 p.m. had lost Libermont and the line of the Canal du Nord as far as the positions of the British 30th Division. At about 4 p.m. the French 22nd Division lost Nesle. The British 30th Division and part of the 20th Division, which until then had repulsed every attempt to cross the canal, came under fire from the rear and had to withdraw through the French lines. In the evening Robillot pulled his divisions back another few kilometres. The French official history admits that two divisions on a front 15 kilometres long were unable to stop the “very superior in numbers” German infantry, which was pushing into the gaps.

Evening of 25 March. The fall of Noyon. At 6 p.m. Fayolle ordered Humbert to hold the heights above Noyon, with Porquéricourt as the main defensive position, and then a line to Roye. The order reached the corps commanders at 8 p.m., but the French official history admits that it could not be carried out, because Noyon was already lost and Porquéricourt abandoned. According to French local studies, soldiers of the 57th Infantry Regiment were still defending the northern edge of the town in the evening, while an abandoned British supply depot was burning in it and the civilian population was fleeing south. At about 10 p.m. the Germans entered the northern districts, and the last French withdrew around 11 p.m. At 2 a.m. the order came to break contact with the enemy and retreat to the line Pontoise–Sempigny–Mont Renaud. By 6 a.m. on 26 March Noyon was entirely in German hands. By then the French had relieved almost the whole British III Corps, while keeping all its field artillery.

26 March. Fayolle ordered: “One cannot fall back indefinitely, one must let oneself be killed on the spot.” Even so, the troops of Pellé and Robillot, resting first on Mont Renaud south-west of Noyon, fell back another six to eight kilometres. At 4 a.m. the Germans drove back the left wing of the 10th Division, and after it the whole of its line began to give way. At 8 a.m., before General Gamelin, commander of the group of the 9th and 35th Divisions, had time to prepare an attack on Porquéricourt, the Germans broke through a gap onto the left wing of the 35th Division and for a time even held Mont Renaud. The British 2nd Cavalry Division of General Pitman, about 1,100 horsemen, and Harman’s detachment, made up of men from both cavalry divisions, went to the aid of the 10th Division. The cavalrymen fought on foot and used their horses to move quickly to wherever things were hardest. The British official history here corrects the French one, according to which they charged on horseback. British and French, intermingled, stood on a line from Mont Renaud to in front of Lagny, helped by part of the French 53rd Division, sent across the Oise from the Sixth Army.

Humbert, however, had no faith in his troops. Instead of throwing the newly arrived 77th Division into the fighting, he ordered it to occupy a rear position behind Lassigny, from Thiescourt to Canny, on which the retreating troops were to halt. In the afternoon the retreat of the French 62nd Division exposed the 10th Division and the British cavalry. At about 1.30 p.m. the Germans pushed them back to the line of the Bois des Essarts and Lagny, and around 5 p.m. they lost that too, although the British and Canadian cavalry did what they could. The 10th Division passed through the lines of the 77th Division. In Robillot’s sector the Germans took Roye in the morning and entered the gap between the French and the British XIX Corps, and in the evening the French 62nd and 22nd Divisions fell back to the line Canny–Dancourt. The British 14th Division, relieved in the afternoon by the French 53rd Division, went to the rear. When night fell, the front ran from Mont Renaud past Lassigny towards Dancourt, and from there the French cavalry and the 56th Division carried it on to the river Avre.

Losses

The losses in the Battle of Noyon itself cannot be singled out precisely. The French divisions, committed to battle piecemeal, lost many men and prisoners, but the available accounts give no aggregate figures for these two days. The British were already fighting here at the limit of their strength. The infantry and pioneers of the British 14th Division numbered 190 officers and 5,727 other ranks on 21 March, and on 26 March, when it was relieved, only 62 officers and 1,476 other ranks, most of the nearly 4,400 killed, wounded and missing having been lost in the first three days of the offensive. The British 18th Division, handed over to the French without its artillery, returned to III Corps only on 31 March at Villers-Bretonneux. German losses at Noyon have likewise not been separated from the overall losses of the 18th Army.

Significance

The capture of Noyon was one of Hutier’s greatest successes. The Germans once again stood in the town which for two and a half years had been the point of their front closest to Paris, and the French reserves, instead of striking as a whole, as the plans of 7 March had envisaged, fell into the battle by divisions and battalions, without artillery or ammunition. The British official history observes that the French troops, surprised by the German infiltration into gaps and outflanked, did no better than the battalions of the Fifth Army, which had earlier fought an even stronger enemy. Clinging to the Oise and falling back to the south-west, in accordance with Pétain’s order, opened ever wider the gap between the French and the British, like, as a British historian wrote, “the southern wing of a door” through which the Germans could pass between the allies. This crisis led on 26 March to the Doullens conference, at which the coordination of the two armies’ operations was entrusted to General Ferdinand Foch.

At Noyon, however, the German drive to the south stalled. The Crown Prince ordered the right wing of the 7th Army to shift divisions to the river Ailette to cover Hutier’s ever longer flank, and proposed that for the time being the left wing of the 18th Army should not advance beyond the line Noyon–Roye, and that its weight be shifted to the right wing, towards Amiens. Ludendorff agreed. From then on the main effort of the 18th Army went west, towards Montdidier and Amiens, while at Noyon positional fighting went on. French artillery on the heights above the town turned Noyon into a ruin. Throughout April the Germans assaulted Mont Renaud, for the last time on 30 April, but they could not take it. The town remained in their hands until the end of August 1918, when the French retook it.