Third Battle of Champagne

The Third Battle of Champagne, called by the French the Battle of the Hills (bataille des Monts), was part of the spring Nivelle Offensive. The day after the main blow on the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames, the French 4th Army of General François Anthoine attacked the Moronvilliers massif east of Reims, a range of chalk hills from which the Germans had overlooked the whole plain around Châlons since 1914. In the first days the French forced their way onto most of the summits and took several thousand prisoners, but the breakthrough the commander-in-chief had counted on did not come. The Germans held out in concrete shelters and in tunnels bored under the hills, and their counter-attacks won back part of the gains. The fighting for individual summits lasted until 20 May, when the French finally took Mont Cornillet, and hundreds of German soldiers died in the tunnel beneath it.

Name and dates

On this site we use the dates 17 April – 20 May 1917. The British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based ends the French offensive on 20 April, and the English Wikipedia likewise dates the battle to 17–20 April. After 20 April the attack did indeed lose momentum, but fighting went on in the hills: on 30 April and 4 May the French renewed their attacks, and on 20 May they made their last major assault, which gave them Mont Cornillet. French works, including the French Wikipedia and regional histories of the Champagne front, close the battle on precisely 20 May. German counter-attacks continued until the end of May and into June, but no longer changed the course of the line.

The name “Third Battle of Champagne” is used less often, but it appears in some French and English works. We use it to keep continuity with the First and Second Battles of Champagne of 1915. More common are the names “Battle of the Hills of Champagne” or “Battle of Moronvilliers”, and the colours of the French regiments that distinguished themselves in it bear the inscription “Les Monts 1917”. The Germans treated it as part of one great battle on the Aisne and in Champagne.

Background

General Robert Nivelle, commander of the French armies since December 1916, intended to break the German front with a single powerful blow between Soissons and Reims. The main role was to be played by the 5th and 6th Armies of General Micheler’s Reserve Army Group. To their right, the Centre Army Group of General Philippe Pétain was to make a subsidiary attack east of Reims to tie down German reserves and widen the breach. The task went to the 4th Army, which General Anthoine had taken over on 24 March; an artilleryman, he had been chief of staff of General Noël de Castelnau’s 2nd Army in 1914. The British official history calls this attack “an important subsidiary operation”.

The objective was the Moronvilliers massif, a chain of hills about 10 kilometres long formed, from the west, by Mont Cornillet (206 m), Mont Blond, Mont Haut (257 m, the highest point), Mont Perthois, Le Casque and Le Téton, and in the east, closer to the river Suippe, Mont Sans Nom. From the summits the Germans could see every movement on the Champagne plain between Reims and the Argonne, and their artillery could fire on the French rear as if on a practice range. Losing the hills would also threaten the German positions around Reims, from Berru to Fort Brimont.

The Germans had fortified the massif with exceptional care. From the autumn of 1915 they expanded two former lines into four, and in places five, positions reaching 9–10 kilometres in depth. The first ran along the foot of the hills, the second halfway up the slopes, and on the summits and reverse slopes stood concrete shelters and machine-gun nests. Under the northern slope of Mont Cornillet and under Mont Perthois tunnels were cut into the chalk, each able to shelter several companies or even a battalion. The Cornillet tunnel had three parallel galleries linked by a cross passage, a light railway, ventilation shafts and exits on the reverse slope, invisible from the air. For a long time this sector belonged to the 3rd Army of General Karl von Einem. In the spring of 1917, however, the Crown Prince’s army group under Wilhelm was given an additional headquarters: between the 7th and 3rd Armies was inserted the 1st Army of General Fritz von Below, transferred from the Somme, with the sector from the Aisne near Berry-au-Bac to the Suippe. According to the British official history, Below took command only on the day of the French attack on the Aisne. The German official history, cited by the German Wikipedia, assigns Group Prosnes (General Chales de Beaulieu’s XIV Corps), which defended the hills, to the 1st Army, and for the attack sector beyond the Suippe also the right wing of the 3rd Army. Some works, especially French ones, nevertheless write that the hills were defended by von Einem’s soldiers. Behind the front line stood divisions intended for counter-attacks (Eingreifdivisionen), and once the French bombardment began, more were brought in from Alsace and other sectors.

On a sector of a dozen or so kilometres from Prunay to Aubérive the French assembled, according to French sources, about 1,600 guns, including trench artillery and heavy artillery, as well as 22 air squadrons and 11 observation balloon companies. Captain Lefebvre’s tank group was assigned to VIII Corps, but according to most accounts it did not go into action here and was later moved to Laffaux. The artillery began registering at the beginning of April, and the bombardment proper lasted from about 10 to 16 April, in snow and rain that hampered observation. It destroyed most of the trenches on the southern slopes, but not the tunnels or all the concrete shelters.

For the attack were assigned, from the west, General Hély d’Oissel’s VIII Corps (16th and 34th Divisions) between Prunay and Prosnes, General Jean-Baptiste Dumas’s XVII Corps (the 45th and 33rd Divisions and General Degoutte’s Moroccan Division) between Prosnes and the Suippe, and the 24th Division of XII Corps, which was to cover the right flank beyond the river. The Moroccan Division, despite its name, consisted of the Foreign Legion, Zouaves and North African tirailleurs, and was among the best divisions of the French army.

A day earlier, on 16 April, north-west of Reims, as part of the 5th Army’s attack, two Russian brigades that had arrived in France in 1916 went into action. The 1st Brigade took the village of Courcy, one of the few successes of that day. According to the French Ministry of Defence, by 20 April, when they were relieved, the two brigades had lost 70 officers and 4,472 men. This was not, however, fighting for the Moronvilliers hills, but part of the Second Battle of the Aisne.

Course

17 April. Sleet fell during the night. At 4.45 a.m., still in darkness, the French infantry advanced behind a creeping barrage. The darkness and the blizzard favoured the attackers, because the German defensive barrages began late. On the right wing of the Moroccan Division, the 8th Zouave Regiment took Mont Sans Nom at 5.55 a.m. and pressed on northwards. The Foreign Legion Regiment and the 4th Tirailleur Regiment, however, immediately met fierce resistance in front of a heavily fortified salient called the Golfe near Aubérive and had to take it trench by trench. The commander of the legionnaires, Lieutenant-Colonel Duriez, was mortally wounded. The 33rd Division advanced about 1,800 metres and reached the slopes of Le Téton and Le Casque, and the 45th Division, including African battalions and Zouaves, reached Mont Perthois, but stopped in front of a concrete shelter complex called the Konstanzlager. In the west two regiments of the 34th Division had reached the summits of Mont Blond and Mont Cornillet by about 9 a.m. In the afternoon, however, the German garrison of the tunnel came up from underground and pushed the French off the Cornillet ridge. On the left wing the 16th Division came under fire from intact bunkers in the Bois de la Grille copse and made almost no progress. Beyond the river the 24th Division occupied the eastern part of Aubérive. On the first day the French advanced between 500 metres and 2.5 kilometres and took more than 2,000 prisoners.

18–20 April. On 18 April, after a bombardment by heavy howitzers, the garrison of the Konstanzlager surrendered, and in the evening the 45th Division broke onto the summit of Mont Haut. The 34th Division held Mont Blond but could not get onto Cornillet. Pétain, seeing the strength of the resistance, limited the objectives to holding and widening the gains and asked for fresh divisions. On 19 April the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division took Le Téton at dawn. That day, according to the British official history, the Germans threw three divisions into a counter-attack between Nauroy and Moronvilliers, but the French artillery, directed from observation posts on the captured summits, broke up the attack. Le Téton changed hands several times during the night. Also on 19 April the Germans abandoned Aubérive, which was occupied by patrols of French territorial units and the 24th Division. By 20 April the 4th Army had taken 3,550 prisoners and 27 guns, but its divisions were exhausted.

21 April – 4 May. The legionnaires, who had been fighting at Aubérive for five days, broke into the last German trenches between the hills and the Suippe on 21 April. German counter-attacks, among them one on Mont Haut on 22 April, were repulsed. At the end of April the French relieved most of the first-wave divisions and brought in X Corps. On 30 April they attacked again between Le Téton and Beine. They took the Le Casque ridge and cut off the exits of the tunnel under Mont Perthois, whose garrison, 225–250 men according to various sources, surrendered on 2 May. At Mont Blond and Cornillet, however, the attack broke down, and the 19th Division’s attack on Cornillet on 4 May was again repulsed by the tunnel garrison, which came to the surface only at the moment of the assault.

20 May. Before the last attack the French artillery shelled Cornillet for several days, and on the night of 19–20 May the tunnel entrances and ventilation shafts were drenched with gas shells. According to French accounts, on the morning of 20 May a shell from a 400 mm heavy howitzer firing from near Mourmelon-le-Petit hit a ventilation shaft, pierced the roof and brought down the junction of the galleries. The entrances were buried, and the garrison from the Württemberg 476th Infantry Regiment, waiting in full kit for the order to counter-attack, suffocated in the gas and smoke or was trampled at the exits. In the afternoon the 1st Zouave Regiment took the summit of Cornillet in half an hour, and other divisions seized the northern slopes of Le Casque and Le Téton. At Mont Blond and Mont Haut the attack stalled again. That day the French took almost a thousand prisoners. Two doctors of the 1st Zouave Regiment who entered the tunnel a few days later described piles of bodies at the exits.

Losses

There are no exact loss figures, and sources give different numbers. According to a compilation by a French historian of the regiments, cited by the English Wikipedia, the 4th Army lost about 21,700 killed, wounded and missing in the battle, while the French Wikipedia gives about 14,300 killed and wounded. Individual divisions lost several thousand men each: the 33rd Division, which fought from 17 April to 1 May, about 3,500. German losses are not known. By 20 May the French had taken in all about 6,100 prisoners, 52 guns, 42 mortars and more than 100 machine guns. In the tunnel under Cornillet the French found more than 600 bodies in 1917. Some of the dead remained walled up in the galleries. The remains of several hundred of them were recovered only in the 1970s and buried in the German war cemetery at Warmeriville.

Significance

The Battle of the Hills was the most successful part of the Nivelle Offensive, but only against the background of the defeat on the Aisne. The 4th Army took almost the whole Moronvilliers ridge and took from the Germans the observation points from which they had controlled the Champagne plain since the autumn of 1914. The British official history observes that the results were similar to those on the Aisne, or even slightly better, but there was no chance of a breakthrough. The summits were so tightly hemmed in by German positions that the French had to keep a great deal of infantry on them under constant fire, and the Germans went on counter-attacking until the summer.

The hills of Champagne also saw the first signs of the crisis that engulfed the French army in the spring of 1917. As early as 17 April, near Aubérive, a dozen or so soldiers of the 108th Infantry Regiment abandoned their positions. Twelve were sentenced to death and then pardoned. On 29 April about 200 soldiers of the 20th Infantry Regiment, detailed for a renewed attack on Le Téton, fled from their camp near Châlons into the woods. In May and June mutinies spread to dozens of divisions. On 15 May Pétain replaced Nivelle as commander-in-chief, and in June the 4th Army was again taken over by General Gouraud. The French held the Moronvilliers hills until July 1918, when during the last German offensive in Champagne they withdrew from them, and they recovered them in the autumn.