Germans capture Noyon

On 25 March 1918, the fifth day of Operation Michael, the German 18th Army of General Oskar von Hutier captured Noyon on the Oise. In the morning its divisions broke through the line of French reinforcements, rushed up to take the place of the shattered right wing of the British Fifth Army, and in the evening they entered the town which for two and a half years, until March 1917, had been the point of the German front closest to Paris. The same day the French also lost Nesle and the line of the Canal du Nord, and their retreat to the south-west carried them ever further from the British, who were falling back westwards. The British official history records that on that day the line of the Somme was lost along the whole battle front and a considerable retirement took place, despite the arrival of French divisions.

Before dawn

Noyon, an old episcopal town with a Gothic cathedral and the birthplace of John Calvin, had returned to France only a year earlier, on 18 March 1917, when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line. It lay less than a hundred kilometres from Paris, at the junction of the roads from Saint-Quentin and from Roye to Compiègne. In the winter of 1918 it was behind the lines of the British III Corps, whose headquarters moved into the town on 23 March; British supply depots had been gathered in the area and, west of the town, heavy artillery.

In four days of the offensive Hutier had advanced from Saint-Quentin and the Crozat Canal to the outskirts of Noyon. His army, originally intended only to cover the attack on the British against the French, had proved the most successful of all, so on 23 March Erich Ludendorff gave it the direction of Chaulnes and Noyon, and then the south-west. Facing it were the French of General Maurice Pellé’s V Corps and General Robillot’s II Cavalry Corps, who since 22 March had been entering the fight division by division, brought by lorry from distant sectors of the front, and mixed in with them the exhausted remnants of the British III and XVIII Corps. At 3 a.m. all British troops south of the Somme passed under the command of the French Reserve Army Group of General Émile Fayolle, and the previous evening Philippe Pétain had ordered him, if necessary, to fall back to the line Noyon–Porquéricourt–Lagny–Roye, resting his right flank on the Oise.

The French were weak. Most of their divisions had arrived without their own artillery, relied on British guns and had no regular supply of ammunition. During the night the commander of the French 10th Division, fearing for his right flank, pulled it back to a new line, leaving only rearguards in the old positions until dawn. At 5 a.m. General Diebold, whose group (the 55th and 125th Divisions) stood nearest the Oise, issued instructions for a retreat across the river.

Morning: the breakthrough

The fog, which for four days had favoured the German storm troops, lifted earlier that day, at about 7.30 a.m., but the Germans did not wait. By about 7 a.m. they had already broken in between the French 1st Dismounted Cavalry Division and the 9th Division of General Maurice Gamelin, turned their flanks and pushed them back. After 8 a.m. fresh French divisions, just arriving near Noyon, were ordered by telephone to counter-attack towards Chauny and Guiscard, and General Grégoire, commander of the 1st Division, took over a group made up of his own division, the 9th Division, the dismounted cavalry and, as the French official history puts it, “the debris of the British 18th Division”. It was already too late. The 35th Division too, the only reserve Fayolle had that day, sent by lorry through Montdidier to Noyon, did not attack as a whole: it was split up and dispatched battalion by battalion wherever the front was crumbling.

The worst was west of the town. The 10th Division, attacked from 7 a.m., gave ground step by step, and the Germans drove into the gap between it and the 9th Division. As a result of a misunderstanding, which the British attribute to the commander of the 35th Division, the Porquéricourt hill north of Noyon, key to the defence of the town, was left without defenders. By 4.30 p.m. the 10th Division had split in two and fallen back nearly ten kilometres, behind the Canal du Nord. At about 4 p.m. the Germans pushed the 9th Division onto the hills south-west of Noyon. The British 14th Division, which was to assemble in reserve, then withdrew under cover of its own rearguard to the high ground behind Beaurains, and after dark moved off to Thiescourt.

On the right flank Diebold’s group crossed the Oise by 4 p.m. “without great difficulty”, as the French recorded, because the German artillery shelled the bridge only weakly. After 3.30 p.m. Grégoire’s group also went over the river. The retreat was covered by the British 54th Brigade. Its commander, General Sadleir-Jackson, noticed that the French might lose the batteries standing near the village of Babœuf. He halted the brigade and, despite the men’s fatigue, retook the village, capturing ten machine guns and killing or taking prisoner 230 Germans. The brigade stood in front of Babœuf until 2 a.m., then withdrew and blew the bridges. From the morning the crossings of the Oise east of Noyon were guarded by British cavalry, about 1,100 horsemen of the 2nd Cavalry Division, remounted at the request of the III Corps commander.

Afternoon: Nesle and the Canal du Nord

Further west, on Robillot’s sector, the Germans moved off at 8 a.m. The Franco-British counter-attack planned for that hour, which was to close the gap between the British XVIII and XIX Corps around Nesle, never took place at all: the French 22nd Division did not reach its start positions and soon began marching south. The French 62nd Division, exposed by the retreat of the 10th Division, fell back on Robillot’s orders from 10.45 a.m. and by 4 p.m. had lost Libermont and the whole sector of the Canal du Nord up to the positions of the British 30th Division. The British of the 30th and 20th Divisions, who had repulsed attempts to cross the canal all day, suddenly came under fire from the rear. At 4.30 p.m. the 30th Division was ordered to retire through the French lines and suffered heavy losses in doing so. At the bridge at Buverchy the remnants of a Royal Warwickshire battalion and a pioneer company of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry still launched a counter-attack, but held the Germans up only for a moment.

At about 4 p.m., as the French official history laconically states, the 22nd Division lost Nesle and began to fall back. Two French divisions, stretched along a front of some 15 kilometres, could not stop the “greatly superior in numbers” German infantry. The 62nd Division still lacked its artillery, the 22nd Division was urgently demanding ammunition, and the British guns supporting them were worn out. At 7 p.m. Robillot ordered both divisions to fall back another few kilometres, and the retreat began at midnight. To the west of them, as the British official history observes, yawned “an enormous gap”. Ludendorff later noted briefly that on 25 March the 18th Army took Nesle, “meeting only slight resistance”.

Evening: the fall of the town

At 6 p.m. Fayolle, following Pétain’s directives, ordered General Georges Humbert, commander of the French Third Army, to hold the heights above Noyon, with Porquéricourt as the main defensive position, and the line beyond as far as Roye. The order was not sent to General Hubert Gough, commander of the British Fifth Army, and contact with the British was to run along the line Roye–Nesle, which according to the British official history “gave no idea of preventing a gap”. Humbert passed it on to his corps commanders at 8 p.m. According to the French official history it could no longer be carried out, because Noyon had been lost and the Porquéricourt hill abandoned to the enemy.

French local studies describe the last hours of the town’s defence. The men of the 57th Infantry Regiment were ordered to hold the northern edge of Noyon as long as possible and keep the Germans away from the Canal du Nord at the main road. Abandoned British supply depots were burning in the town, and the inhabitants, who had lived to see liberation only a year before, were again fleeing south. At about 10 p.m. the Germans entered the northern districts. The last French began to withdraw around 11 p.m., and the order to break contact and fall back to a line through Pontoise-lès-Noyon and Mont Renaud came at 2 a.m. By the morning of 26 March the whole town was in German hands. Some of the stores left by the British survived the fires and, as the French write, later helped the Germans to hold on in Noyon.

By the evening the French had relieved almost the whole British III Corps. Only the units across the Oise remained in the line, but the French kept all the corps’ field artillery with them. The British 18th and 14th Divisions, which had been falling back in continuous fighting since 21 March, were leaving the front. The infantry and pioneers of the 14th Division numbered, when relieved the next day, fewer than 1,550 men against more than 5,900 before the offensive.

Decisions at headquarters

Pétain feared that the Germans’ main blow was still to come, and in Champagne rather than on the Somme. Even so, late in the evening of 24 March he ordered the Eastern Army Group to entrain six more divisions for Fayolle, and on the morning of 25 March he sent two more divisions and three heavy artillery regiments to the Somme. Even at the railways’ greatest capacity, however, they would arrive only in a few days. Between Humbert’s army and the British a new French First Army under General Debeney was to take its place. Its first division, the 56th, began detraining at Montdidier during the night of 24–25 March. To cover the detrainment Humbert received three cavalry divisions, but none of them went into action on 25 March.

On the German side this day was regarded as the peak of success. “On 25 March the sun of German victory stood high at its zenith”, wrote the German author Goes, and yet progress fell short of expectations: the left wing of the 18th Army was approaching Noyon and Roye, but the centre of the 2nd Army on both sides of the Somme was lagging behind. Crown Prince Wilhelm, to whom Hutier was subordinate, ordered the right wing of the 7th Army to shift divisions to the Ailette river, between Noyon and Chauny, to cover the 18th Army’s lengthening flank. He also proposed that for the time being Hutier’s left wing should go no further than the line Noyon–Roye, and that the weight of the attack be shifted to the right wing, towards Amiens. Ludendorff agreed. That morning at Avesnes he had also settled with General Hermann von Kuhl, chief of staff of the army group of Rupprecht of Bavaria, that the “Mars” attack would be launched on 28 March on both sides of the Scarpe near Arras.

The next day

The capture of Noyon ended the phase of Hutier’s drive southwards that was most dangerous for the French. On 26 March the Germans pushed them back another few kilometres and for a time even held the Mont Renaud hill south-west of the town, but there the French defence held, and the 18th Army turned its main forces west, towards Montdidier and Amiens. The crisis at the junction of the Allied armies meant that on that same day, at the conference at Doullens, the coordination of British and French operations was entrusted to General Ferdinand Foch. Noyon remained in German hands until the end of August 1918, and in that time French artillery reduced it to ruins.