French retake Craonne

At six in the evening on 4 May 1917 the French 18th Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division went into the attack on the ruins of the village of Craonne at the eastern end of the Chemin des Dames ridge. The Germans, who had taken Craonne in September 1914 and since then had had a view from here over the whole Aisne valley and the plain near Reims, were taken by surprise. Before dark the French had seized the ruins of the village and the edge of the Californie plateau that towers above it, which the Germans called the Winterberg. The next day, 5 May, the 18th and 34th Regiments consolidated on the plateau. They were unable, however, to descend its northern slopes towards the valley of the Ailette.

The attack was part of the last major blow of General Robert Nivelle’s offensive. After hopes of a breakthrough had collapsed, the French wanted at least to take the whole Chemin des Dames ridge. Craonne lay in the sector of General Denis Duchêne’s 10th Army, which had been brought into the fighting between the 5th and 6th Armies on 21 April. On 16 April the French 1st Division had attacked here and got stuck in the cellars of the village. The attack of 4 and 5 May already had limited objectives, in line with the course recommended to the government by the new chief of the general staff, General Philippe Pétain. A simultaneous attack planned on Fort Brimont near Reims was postponed by the government at the request of the minister of war, Paul Painlevé, and never took place. The British official history (Falls) acknowledges that although the 10th Army’s gains were narrow, its troops “did fine work” in completing the capture of the Californie plateau. To the left of the 36th Division there was also fighting for the neighbouring Vauclerc and Casemates plateaux.

The bombardment before the attack produced one of the grimmest episodes of the battle. On 4 May French shells caved in the entrances to the Winterberg tunnel, a gallery about 300 metres long dug deep under the plateau, through which the Germans brought men and ammunition up to the front line. Soldiers of the Baden 111th Reserve Infantry Regiment, more than two hundred by various estimates, were trapped in it. Only a few got out; the rest died for lack of air and water. The buried tunnel, with the soldiers’ remains inside, was found only in 2020.

On 4 and 5 May, on the western wing of the offensive, the 6th Army, which General Paul Maistre had taken over after the dismissal of General Charles Mangin, broke into the Hindenburg Line on the Chemin des Dames on a stretch of about 4 kilometres and took the mill at Laffaux, reaching the approaches to Allemant. It took more than 4,000 prisoners. The attacks of the 4th and 5th Armies achieved little. Nivelle did not direct this battle from close by, because on 4 and 5 May, like the British commander-in-chief Douglas Haig, he was attending a Franco-British conference in Paris, which adopted the principle of attacks with limited objectives instead of attempts to break through the front.

The gains had to be paid for in blood and were hard to hold. The 18th Regiment lost about 800 men on 4–8 May, and the 34th Regiment more than 1,100. As early as the nights of 6 to 9 May the Germans counter-attacked on the ridge, and the Californie plateau was fought over all summer. The offensive was halted on 9 May. The soldiers of the 18th Regiment, withdrawn to rest, took part at the end of May in one of the mutinies that swept the French army at that time. The name of the village also passed into history thanks to the anti-war “Song of Craonne” (La Chanson de Craonne), sung to the tune of the pre-war romance “Bonsoir m’amour”, whose Craonne version circulated among the soldiers in 1917. The high command banned it.