French retake Montdidier

On 10 August 1918 General Marie-Eugène Debeney’s French First Army entered Montdidier, a small town in Picardy that had been in the hands of the German Eighteenth Army since 27 March. There was no fighting for the town itself. After two days of the battle that had begun on 8 August alongside the British attack at Amiens, Montdidier had been outflanked from the north and south, and the Germans abandoned it on the night of 9–10 August so as not to be trapped in it.

The encirclement was the result of the previous day’s fighting. On 9 August the First Army’s left wing took Hangest-en-Santerre and crossed the Doms stream north of the town, and in the afternoon, at 4 p.m., XXXV Corps attacked south of it, Debeney having moved the mass of his artillery to its sector. The corps retook Assainvillers, Piennes and Faverolles and threatened the road from Montdidier to Roye, the Germans’ main line of retreat. In the evening the army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, told General Oskar von Hutier that his whole Eighteenth Army had to fall back or it would be outflanked from the north. Erich Ludendorff agreed to this only after a long telephone conversation. Rearguards with machine guns were to delay the French, and according to French accounts the retreat from the town was carried out in great disorder. Ludendorff admitted that a great deal of equipment had to be left behind.

On the morning of 10 August, after a half-hour bombardment, the First Army moved off at 5.30 and advanced almost without resistance. The 60th Division of X Corps entered Montdidier, and according to French battlefield guides the town was entirely in French hands by about noon. The British official history, following the French one, notes briefly that it was found “completely destroyed”. Since 1915 Montdidier had lain just behind the front and had been shelled, and during the German occupation the inhabitants who had not managed to flee in March lived in cellars amid looting. The same day, to the right of the First Army, General Georges Humbert’s Third Army joined the attack without artillery preparation; it advanced about 10 km on its flank and reached Ressons-sur-Matz.

In the afternoon the attack slowed. East of Montdidier the French came up against a belt of old trenches from 1915–1916, where the Germans had set up a new defensive line, and their left wing did not get beyond Andechy, a few kilometres short of Roye. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who had come to Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s headquarters before noon, issued new directives that day: the First Army was to go on towards Ham, and the Third Army towards Lassigny and Noyon, so as finally to clear the area around Montdidier and then Noyon. The recovery of the town pushed the German artillery back from the Paris–Amiens railway, which had been one of Foch’s main aims since the spring.

Montdidier remained in ruins. After the war the town was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour, the citation stressing that it had paid for victory with its complete destruction. Reconstruction lasted until the early 1930s.