End of the Third Battle of the Aisne

On 6 June 1918 the last fighting took place in the offensive that the Germans had begun on the Chemin des Dames ridge on 27 May. In the morning two German divisions, the 86th and 232nd, attacked on the right flank of the breach, west of Reims, against the British 19th Division and the neighbouring French 28th Division. The main objective was the small but highest hill in the area, the Montagne de Bligny, from which the British trenches could be enfiladed and the batteries observed. After an hour’s bombardment the Germans took the village of Bligny, held by the French, and the hill, from which they drove a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment. At about 11 the brigade commander ordered the 1/4th Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry to retake it. The battalion, now only about two hundred strong and commanded by a lieutenant, crossed almost two kilometres of open ground under artillery fire and at about 1 p.m., together with the remnants of two other battalions, recaptured most of the former position. In the evening the French 154th Division regained Bligny. The Shropshire battalion was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for the attack. Some contemporary chronicles, such as R. P. P. Rowe’s chronicle published in 1920, record the recapture of Bligny under 7 June, but the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. III) describes this fighting under 6 June. That same day, on the other flank, near Château-Thierry, the American 2nd Division went into the attack.

With that the offensive died down. The British Battles Nomenclature Committee ended the “Battle of the Aisne 1918” on precisely 6 June. The British IX Corps and the 19th Division sent to its aid had lost almost 29,000 men since 27 May. The troops of the shattered 8th, 25th and 50th Divisions were formed into composite battalions and a brigade and placed under the commander of the 19th Division, who in turn was subordinate to the French V Corps. The French did not yet want to release them. On the nights of 17–18 and 18–19 June they were relieved by the Italian 8th Division of the French Fourth Army.

On the German side the attack had been fading for several days. From 2 June the British official history describes the fighting as local affairs without influence on the general situation. The divisions of the 7th Army were exhausted, a single Bavarian division remained in army reserve, and the artillery and supplies could not keep up with the infantry. The German monograph on the battle admits that the fresh divisions thrown into the fighting “went through a painful ordeal”, because conditions were entirely different from those of the first days. On 3 June the Supreme Army Command warned Rupprecht’s army group that, because divisions intended for the decisive offensive in Flanders, code-named “Hagen”, had been used on the Aisne, it would probably have to be postponed by a few weeks. On 4 June General Max von Boehn, commander of the 7th Army, on the advice of the Supreme Army Command, decided to abandon larger attacks and confine himself to preparing a narrow thrust in the following days. Everything now depended on the new “Gneisenau” offensive between Noyon and Montdidier, which was to join the breach on the Marne to the salient at Amiens.

The balance of the ten days was impressive for the Germans, but ambiguous. The front, which on 27 May had run along the Chemin des Dames, now rested on the Marne from Château-Thierry to near Dormans and came within less than 90 kilometres of Paris. The Germans, however, had taken a deep, narrow salient between Soissons and Reims, with a single main railway line through Soissons, and the shoulders of the breach had held. General Erich Ludendorff had used up in it divisions set aside for the decision in Flanders. In Paris the crisis continued. In the days when the Germans reached the Marne, politicians demanded the heads of commanders, and on 4 June Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in a stormy debate in the Chamber of Deputies, defended Generals Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain with the words that the soldiers of France had “good leaders, great leaders”. Foch, convinced that the enemy was weakening and that the Allies were growing stronger every week thanks to the Americans, agreed on 3 June with Douglas Haig and John Pershing to transfer five American divisions, hitherto training with the British, to quiet sectors of the French front in order to free French divisions from there. The commander of the French Sixth Army, General Denis Duchêne, who was blamed for the defeat of 27 May, was soon to lose his post.