French retake Roye

At 10 a.m. on 27 August 1918 units of the French XXXI Corps of the First Army of General Marie-Eugène Debeney entered Roye, a ruined small town and an important road junction where the highway from Amiens crossed the road from Paris to Lille. According to French accounts, the town was taken by General Demetz’s 56th Division. The Germans, who had taken Roye on 26 March during Operation Michael and had defended it stubbornly since 10 August against the advancing French and Canadians, gave it up as they fell back to a new line behind the Canal du Nord and the Somme. British chronologies of the 1920s credit the British with the recapture of Roye, but the British official history, drawing on the French one, states unequivocally that the town was taken by the French.

That summer Roye was one of the most strongly defended points of the German front. After the Battle of Montdidier the French First Army, advancing on the right of the British, was held up on the old trenches of 1916 west of the town. The Canadians, who after 8 August stood at the junction with the French, fought bloody battles for several days for the woods and villages north of the Amiens–Roye road, until on 20–25 August they were relieved by French divisions and the Canadian Corps left for Arras. Erich Ludendorff later wrote that in mid-August the centre of gravity of the enemy’s attacks lay “on both sides of Roye, which was held in heavy fighting”. The village of Fresnoy-lès-Roye, lying on high ground a few kilometres north of the town, from which the Germans had a good view of the approaches, held up the French for several days.

The breakthrough came on 26 August. At 4.50 a.m. the French 126th Division attacked Fresnoy-lès-Roye and the surrounding trenches and by 7 a.m. had taken all its objectives. The divisional commander, General Mathieu, congratulated one of its regiments, the 173rd Infantry Regiment, on taking 450 prisoners and 16 officers. In the afternoon the division, together with the 47th Division, gained some ground on the ridge south of the village, and at 4 p.m. the 56th Division, after a fierce fight, took Saint-Mard on the Avre, south-west of Roye. That same day the German command, alarmed by the progress of the French between the Oise and the Aisne and of the British north of the Somme, ordered the Eighteenth and Second Armies to fall back to a shorter line from Noyon along the Canal du Nord to Nesle, and from there along the Somme. According to the British official history the retreat was planned for the night of 27–28 August, but Ludendorff writes that it was carried out “roughly on the night of 26 August”. At Roye the Germans were already falling back on the morning of 27 August.

On the morning of 27 August the French advanced along the whole front of the First Army. XXXV Corps took Crapeaumesnil south of Roye, X Corps Laucourt, and XXXVI Corps the Roye–Chaulnes railway. At 9.30 a.m. Debeney ordered by telephone a vigorous pursuit of the retreating enemy, and half an hour later XXXI Corps took Roye. At 11 a.m. General Émile Fayolle, commander of the Reserve Army Group, instructed the First and Third Armies to follow the Germans “giving them no respite, but without playing their game”, that is, avoiding unnecessary losses: strongpoints were not to be attacked frontally but outflanked, and the troops were to advance quickly wherever resistance weakened. At noon Debeney ordered the cavalry forward and set objectives for the evening on a line through Nesle, but by the evening his army had come to a halt well short of that town.

Roye had been retaken once before, in March 1917, when the Germans were withdrawing to the Hindenburg Line. On that occasion several hundred inhabitants whom the occupiers had not deported were waiting for the French. Now the town, shelled by both sides since March 1918, lay in ruins. The next day the First Army advanced about 8 kilometres, took Chaulnes and reached the outskirts of Nesle, and two days later the French recaptured Noyon.