Battle of the Matz

The Battle of the Matz was the fourth of the great German offensives of spring 1918 and the first that the French foresaw to the day and the hour. After their victory on the Aisne the Germans stood on the Marne in a deep salient, and west of it, between Montdidier and Noyon, the French front still drove a wedge between that salient and a second one, formed on the Somme in March. On 9 June 1918 the German 18th Army of General Oskar von Hutier attacked this wedge, held by the French Third Army of General Georges Humbert. On the first day it advanced about 10 kilometres in the centre and crossed the river Matz; on the second it reached the Oise. On 11 June General Charles Mangin delivered a swift counter-attack against its right flank with more than a hundred tanks, and the next day the German Supreme Army Command broke off the attack. The Germans never reached Compiègne, which before the battle lay about 20–25 kilometres behind the front.

Name and dates

The French call it the Battle of the Matz (bataille du Matz), after the small stream that flows down from the Lassigny massif and joins the Oise above Compiègne. The British Battles Nomenclature Committee gave it the same name, although the British fought in it only in the air, and dated it 9–14 June 1918. The Germans prepared the attack under the codename “Gneisenau”, after the Prussian general of the Napoleonic Wars. Erich Ludendorff calls it the Battle of Noyon in his memoirs, and the Americans, who counted these days among their campaigns, speak of the Montdidier–Noyon operation and end it on 13 June. The end of the battle is fixed in different ways. According to the German monograph, as summarised by the British official history, the Supreme Army Command ordered the attack to be broken off on the evening of 12 June; Ludendorff writes in his memoirs of 11 June, and Ferdinand Foch considered that the offensive came to a halt on 13 June. Local attacks and shelling, however, went on until 14–15 June. We give the dates of the British committee. We take facts and times from the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume III, 1939), which here relies mainly on the French official history and the German monograph of the battle, and from the memoirs of Foch and Ludendorff.

Background

On 27 May the Germans opened the Third Battle of the Aisne and within a few days reached the Marne. Their western wing, however, was stuck before Soissons and the forests of Villers-Cotterêts, and the whole salient was supplied by a single railway line. The attack of the 18th Army between Montdidier and Noyon, planned from the start as a complement to the Aisne offensive, was now meant to come to its aid. On 5 June the Supreme Army Command informed Hutier that the further operations of the 7th Army depended on the success of “Gneisenau”. The 18th Army was to advance about 8 kilometres in a single bound, pivoting on Montdidier, as far as the lower Matz, and, if it went well, to reach the Montdidier–Compiègne line. This would straighten the front between the Somme salient, won during Operation Michael, and the Marne salient, draw off more Allied reserves and open the way into the Oise valley. Ludendorff wanted to attack on 7 June, but at a conference at 18th Army headquarters he became convinced that the artillery, much of it being brought from the Chemin des Dames, would not be in position in time. The attack was put back to 9 June, although it thereby lost its direct connection with the fighting on the Aisne.

This time haste gave the Germans away. The preparations were not concealed as carefully as before 27 May, and from 30 May French airmen and intelligence noticed all the usual signs of a coming attack. The only thing the French staff did not know was the strength of the German blow; it even reckoned with some forty divisions. On 7 and 8 June prisoners stated that the attack would come by 10 June at the latest, the number of German deserters rose sharply, and on the night of 8/9 June one of them revealed the exact day and hour. General Philippe Pétain and the commander of the Reserve Army Group, General Émile Fayolle, had assembled in good time behind the threatened sector several reserve divisions, a cavalry corps, four tank groups and strong air forces, including the British IX Brigade of the RAF.

The method of defence caused the most dispute. The Third Army had taken over this sector in the last days of March, when French reinforcements were plugging the gap left by the shattered British Fifth Army, and through April and May it had prepared it rather as a base for a future attack on Roye. In keeping with Foch’s directive that not a scrap of ground between the Oise and the sea could be given up, Humbert concentrated on the first position, while the second was merely marked out on the ground. Only at the beginning of June, under the impression of the disaster on the Aisne, where a defence crowded into the front line had been crushed by fire, did Pétain and Fayolle order him to move the main line of resistance further back, out of range of the German trench mortars. Humbert replied that it would take eight days to move the artillery, depots and communications to the second position. It ended in a compromise: the line of resistance was fixed on the line of redoubts of the first position, on average about 3 kilometres from the German mortars. In practice, for lack of time and out of habit on the part of some commanders, the corps still kept nearly half of their infantry within 2 kilometres of the front line.

Course of the battle

9 June. The French artillery opened counter-preparation fire at 11.50 p.m., a few minutes before the Germans. At midnight the German bombardment began, prepared much as on 27 May but 40 minutes longer: it lasted 3 hours 20 minutes. Hutier had about 600 batteries, and the French 146 field and 161 heavy batteries. The infantry went forward towards dawn, according to French accounts at various places between 3 and 4.30 a.m., which may have pointed to hastily prepared orders. In the first wave a dozen or more divisions attacked, most densely in the centre, between Rollot and Thiescourt, where according to Foch nine of the thirteen attacked. There the French front broke. At about 10 a.m. the Germans entered Ressons-sur-Matz, and an hour later they took the second position on a stretch of about 12 kilometres from Méry to Mareuil-la-Motte. Advancing down the Matz valley, they outflanked the fortifications on the hills of the Lassigny massif and took the Saint-Claude plateau and the Thiescourt wood. In the afternoon their advance was slowed by six French reserve divisions. By the evening the Germans stood about 10 kilometres from their starting line in the centre, beyond the middle Matz, had taken more than 8,000 prisoners, and three French divisions had been almost put out of action. The right wing near Montdidier made little progress. That evening Pétain asked Foch for the British XXII Corps, but the generalissimo decided that he could not yet strip the British of their reserves and had only one division moved closer.

10 June. West of the Matz the Germans gained only another 2–3 kilometres. Events in the east were more serious: the French 53rd Division fell back, opening the road to Ribécourt, and the Germans reached the Oise between Montmacq and Sempigny. Humbert withdrew his whole right wing to the edge of the Laigue forest, so as not to let it be cut off in an awkward salient, and the troops beyond the Oise fell back to the old positions of 1914. The Germans were now about 10 kilometres from Compiègne. On the western flank of the breach, however, the French had reserves ready. Fayolle placed them under Mangin, who had been removed from command of an army in 1917 after the failure of the Nivelle offensive and was just then waiting for a new appointment at First Army headquarters. Mangin was given five fresh divisions, four of which were to go into the front line, and about 140 tanks, and promised to attack the next morning, although part of his artillery would arrive only during the night. Foch, who found him that afternoon at Noailles conferring with Fayolle, backed the haste: every day of delay gave the Germans time to dig in. Fayolle’s order ended with the words that the next day’s operation was to bring to an end the defensive battle that had been going on for more than two months, and that it must succeed.

11 June. After a short artillery preparation, “relatively weak” for lack of time, which began at 10.30 a.m., four French divisions went forward eastwards, at 11.30 according to the British official history and at 11 according to Foch, from the villages between Courcelles and Méry and Wacquemoulin. Some accounts say that the attack went in without artillery preparation and therefore took the Germans by surprise. It was supported by low-flying aircraft and by Schneider and Saint-Chamond tanks, which were to set off together with the infantry, but behind it, and join the fight as they caught up with it. Covered by the morning mist, the attack retook Méry and Belloy, cleared the Aronde valley and took more than a thousand prisoners and several guns. Between 3 and 4 p.m. it came to a halt under the fire of the unsuppressed German artillery. In the east the Germans also took the left bank of the Matz below Chevincourt, but in the afternoon the French right wing regained a little ground in two places.

12–14 June. At 3.30 a.m. on 12 June the French resumed the counter-attack, but it succeeded only partly, on the extreme right wing. On the same day the German 7th Army attacked south of the Aisne towards Compiègne (the “Hammerschlag” attack) to help the 18th Army. According to the German monograph, the attack was broken up by French artillery fire, and in the evening the Supreme Army Command ordered both “Hammerschlag” and “Gneisenau” to be broken off. Foch and Pétain agreed at Chantilly that Mangin would not press the attack further, because the divisions had to be saved in case of a blow on the Somme. The corps and divisional commanders, too, did not want to lose men in an operation that had already served its purpose. On 13 June the French carried out only local attacks to improve their line, and isolated German attacks and shelling went on for a few more days.

Losses

Exact figures for the losses are lacking. Frequently quoted estimates speak of about 35,000 killed, wounded and taken prisoner on the French side and 25,000–30,000 on the German side. The first day alone cost the French more than 8,000 prisoners. Of the 144 tanks which, according to a French study of 1938, took part in the counter-attack of 11–13 June, 69, or almost half, were disabled or destroyed, and their crews lost almost 17 per cent of their men. Cooperation in the air was not a happy one: there were cases of British airmen attacking French troops, and of French airmen and infantry firing at British aircraft.

Significance

The Battle of the Matz showed that the German method of attack, so effective since March, had ceased to surprise. Hutier gained ground, but much less than in March and May; he did not join the Somme and Marne salients and did not seriously threaten Compiègne or Paris. The French defence, although organised in depth only in part, did not break as it had on the Aisne: the troops fell back in good order and the reserves went into action methodically. Mangin’s counter-attack, prepared in less than a day and carried out with tanks, heralded a new way of fighting and was the first French attack in months to take back ground the Germans had won. The French official history notes, however, that after three weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Matz the French army was almost at the end of its reserves, while the German Supreme Army Command still had considerable forces in hand.

Ludendorff admitted that the 18th Army’s attack had not changed the strategic situation. The divisions used up on the Aisne and the Matz came largely from the reserve intended for the decisive blow in Flanders, which once again had to be postponed. Mangin soon took command of the Tenth Army, and it was he who on 18 July led the counter-stroke from the Villers-Cotterêts forest that began the Second Battle of the Marne and the turn of the war in the west. The memory of the Battle of the Matz is kept today by a museum at Courcelles-Epayelles, from where the French tanks set out on 11 June.