End of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel

On 16 September 1918 the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, the first offensive of an independent American army, came to an end. This is the end date given by the US Army’s official list of campaigns. The attack proper, however, lasted only two days. On 12 September General John Pershing’s American First Army broke through the German defences on the southern and western faces of the salient, at dawn on 13 September its troops met near Vigneulles, closing the salient, and by the evening of that day almost all the objectives of the operation had been achieved. That same day French troops entered Saint-Mihiel, abandoned by the Germans.

The last days of the battle were filled with local fighting. The American divisions beat off German counter-attacks, sent out deep patrols and made limited attacks to improve the line and reconnoitre the new German defences. On 14 September the 4th Division advanced on the western face of the former salient, and First Army troops took the village of Woël on the Woëvre plain. The fighting lasted longest on the right wing, by the Moselle, where by 16 September the 90th Division had taken the whole of the Bois des Rappes and the surrounding ground. The new front line ran roughly from Haudiomont on the Meuse heights to Vandières on the Moselle. According to the American Battle Monuments Commission it was about 35 kilometres shorter than the old one. Opposite it the Germans manned the Michel position (Michel-Stellung), prepared earlier at the base of the salient, and quickly reinforced it. By 17 September they already had ten divisions and two brigades in line there and ten divisions in reserve, seven more than at the time of the attack.

The balance of the battle was very favourable to the Americans. In his final report Pershing gave nearly 16,000 prisoners, 443 captured guns and fewer than 7,000 American casualties during the attack proper. The Monuments Commission wrote of more than 15,000 prisoners, about 450 guns and fewer than 9,000 American casualties. France recovered more than 500 km² of territory together with a population that had lived through four years of occupation there. The railway from Verdun to Toul and Nancy was freed, and the German artillery could no longer shell the main line from Paris to the east. The President of France, Raymond Poincaré, thanked the American government for the liberation of Saint-Mihiel.

Some American officers, among them General Douglas MacArthur, believed that the army should have pressed on to the nearby fortress of Metz while the German defence was in disarray. Pershing, however, was bound by his agreement of 2 September with Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Saint-Mihiel attack had a limited objective, and no later than 25 September the First Army was to strike between the Meuse and the Argonne, about 60 kilometres to the north-west. That is why, immediately after the salient was closed, the divisions that were to play the main role in the next offensive began to be withdrawn from the front, and with them most of the artillery and aircraft.

The transfer, planned by the operations section of the First Army staff, where George Marshall worked, was one of the most difficult logistical tasks of the whole war. The troops moved only by night, so as not to be spotted by German aircraft, along a few rutted roads. According to the Monuments Commission, by 20 September only five American and four French divisions remained on the Saint-Mihiel front, and in the whole transfer about 220,000 Allied soldiers were withdrawn from the sector on the Meuse and the Argonne and about 600,000 Americans brought in. For the following weeks the Saint-Mihiel front became a quiet sector once more, where divisions exhausted by the fighting on the Meuse rested.