Mangin's counter-offensive

On 18 July 1918 at 4.35 a.m., in the grey light of morning and the remnants of the night’s mist, the French Tenth Army of General Charles Mangin emerged from the forests around Villers-Cotterêts and struck the western flank of the German salient on the Marne. There was no bombardment lasting several days, such as had heralded every great offensive for three years. The artillery opened fire at the moment of the attack, and the creeping barrage at once moved forward, with the infantry and hundreds of tanks close behind it. At the same time, south of Mangin, the Sixth Army of General Jean Degoutte attacked. Three days earlier the Germans had launched their last great offensive on both sides of Reims, and now it was they who were taken by surprise. By the evening the French, Americans and Moroccans had broken into their positions, in places to a depth of several or even a dozen or so kilometres. The initiative on the Western Front, which the Germans had held since 21 March, passed into Allied hands and did not return to the Germans before the end of the war.

Preparations

Since the end of May, when the Germans reached the Marne, their troops had been sitting in a deep salient between Soissons and Reims, with its tip at Château-Thierry. The whole salient was supplied by a single main railway line through Soissons, which ran not far from the western edge of the front. General Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of the Allied armies since April, had for weeks been thinking of striking at exactly this point. Mangin, an energetic and ruthless commander who in June had halted the German offensive on Compiègne with a counter-attack on the Matz and had then taken over the Tenth Army, was himself pressing for an attack as soon as possible. In the first half of July his divisions pushed forward out of the forests in small attacks to secure better jumping-off positions. On 12 July the commander-in-chief of the French armies, General Philippe Pétain, set out the aim of the operation: to cut off the salient by attacks from both sides, or at least to deprive the Germans of the free use of the junction at Soissons.

When the Germans attacked on 15 July and crossed the Marne west of Reims, Pétain wanted to halt Mangin’s preparations and take away his reserves. Foch refused. “Until you inform me of some new development,” he wrote, “there can be no question of slowing down, still less of stopping, Mangin’s preparations.” In the evening Pétain conceded that he was right: 16 and 17 July should suffice to break the German attack, and the counter-offensive would begin on 18 July as decided. The order was finally confirmed at noon on 17 July, when it was already clear that the Germans had stalled.

The deployment of the troops began on 14 July and ended on the night of 17–18 July. According to the British official history, the Tenth Army had 16 divisions in four corps, a cavalry corps, about 1,545 guns and 346 tanks, and the Sixth Army eight divisions, about 590 guns and 147 tanks. Together that was almost five hundred tanks: medium Schneiders and St. Chamonds, one group assigned to each assault division, and three battalions of light Renault FTs in reserve, for exploiting success. The great forests around Villers-Cotterêts, stretching along the front for more than 20 kilometres, hid the troops from observation, and the superiority of the French air force prevented the Germans from seeing much from the air. The spearhead of the attack was the XX Corps of General Pierre Berdoulat, which was to take the plateau south of Soissons. It consisted of the American 1st Infantry Division of General Charles Summerall, the American 2nd Infantry Division of General James Harbord, with the Marine brigade that had fought in Belleau Wood in June, and between them the French 1st Moroccan Division of General Albert Daugan, with a marching regiment of the Foreign Legion, one of the most famous assault divisions of the French Army. The American divisions were twice the size of the French ones, so four-fifths of the corps’ strength was American. Against the 24 divisions of Mangin and Degoutte stood 19 divisions of the German Ninth Army of General Johannes von Eben and the Seventh Army of General Max von Boehn, 11 of them in the front line.

The night and dawn of 18 July

On the evening of 17 July a downpour fell. The night was sultry and pitch-dark, the roads through the forest turned into dark tunnels, the trees dripped, the ditches overflowed and the verges became sodden. Columns of infantry, artillery and tanks became mixed up on the narrow forest tracks. The Americans of the 2nd Division marched all night, and the last battalions reached their jumping-off positions at the double, just as the barrage was starting. Even so, everything arrived on time.

The Germans expected nothing serious. Agents and prisoners had predicted a great attack for 14 July, the French national holiday, and when nothing happened either then or in the following days, the Seventh Army staff concluded that a great offensive was no longer likely. Reports of tanks and troops in the forests of Villers-Cotterêts were taken as preparations for local attacks. According to the British official history, based here on German sources, at about a quarter past three two French deserters came over to the outposts of the Bavarian 11th Division and stated that the attack would begin between four and five in the morning. The message, however, went up from company through battalion, regiment and brigade, and the division raised the alarm only at 4.10 a.m. It was too late.

At 4.35 a.m. the artillery of the Tenth and Sixth Armies opened fire simultaneously. On Mangin’s sector, where thanks to the earlier attacks no strong obstacles were expected, the barrage moved forward at once, and the infantry followed close behind it. The tanks helped to surround and quickly mop up the German outposts. Degoutte shelled the German trenches for three-quarters of an hour before his infantry went over the top. Further east, as far as Reims, the French Ninth, Fifth and Fourth Armies carried out only local operations that day. Their time was to come later.

Course of the day

The surprise was complete. The Americans and Moroccans went through the first lines, overran German artillery positions and took prisoners in whole groups. According to the American Battle Monuments Commission, by eight in the morning the leading elements of XX Corps were already more than five kilometres from the start line. At 7.15 a.m. Mangin ordered the II Cavalry Corps forward; it was to pass in front of the infantry as far as Fère-en-Tardenois, into the rear of the Germans defending on the Marne. The cavalry, however, could not break through a battlefield full of machine guns.

Before noon it was clear at the headquarters of Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group that the front-line divisions on the western face of the salient had been shattered and the support divisions drawn into heavy fighting. At 10.54 a.m. the Crown Prince ordered the Seventh Army to organise a defence on the line from Soissons through Hartennes to the heights north of Château-Thierry and to prepare a second line a few kilometres further back. At 11.45 a.m. he ordered the abandonment of the bridgehead south of the Marne, won with such difficulty three days earlier. Eben was instructed to hold Soissons and the heights south-east of the town at all costs. Around noon the attack weakened for a while and the Germans were already beginning to plan a counter-attack for the next day, but in the afternoon Mangin’s right wing and centre moved forward again. By the evening the Americans of the 2nd Division were already fighting for Vierzy, and the road and railway from Soissons to Château-Thierry were within range of French and American guns.

The day’s gains are assessed differently. According to French studies, the most advanced units of the Tenth Army moved forward about 9 kilometres and those of the Sixth Army about 5 kilometres, while the British official history speaks of an average of about four miles, that is 6–7 kilometres. In the first two days, according to French figures, the Allies took more than 17,000 prisoners and about 360 guns. The price was high. The German artillery fired at the tanks over open sights, and according to the figures cited by the British official history, of the 225 tanks of the Tenth Army that went into action, 102 were put out of action, 62 of them by artillery. On a single square with sides of one and a half kilometres, 23 tanks destroyed by gunfire alone were counted. The American 2nd Division lost about 4,300 men in two days, and the 1st Division about 6,900 in five days.

Ludendorff at Mons

General Erich Ludendorff was far from the Marne that day. On the night of 17–18 July, convinced that the attack at Reims, though unsuccessful, would at least draw in the French reserves, he went to the headquarters of Crown Prince Rupprecht’s army group at Mons to settle the final details of the great offensive against the British in Flanders, code-named “Hagen”, planned for the first days of August. The conference was still going on when news of the French attack arrived. Ludendorff at once sent reserve divisions to Soissons, and in the afternoon the Supreme Army Command ordered Rupprecht to send more south. The transfer of troops from the Seventh Army to Flanders was halted and further attacks at Reims were called off. As late as 9 July Ludendorff had assured the foreign minister, Paul von Hintze, that the offensive of 15 July would finally and decisively defeat the enemy. Two days after Mangin’s attack he admitted that the “Hagen” offensive would most probably never take place.

The turning of the war

Over the following days the Allies attacked around the whole perimeter of the salient, and the Germans, defending fiercely on the flanks, began to withdraw from its southern part. On the night of 19–20 July they abandoned the bridgehead on the Marne, and by the beginning of August they had fallen back behind the Vesle. Historians agree in regarding 18 July 1918 as the turning point of the war in the west. Ludendorff admitted in his memoirs that the attempt to force the Entente to make peace by victories before the Americans arrived had failed, and that Germany’s situation had become very serious. The chancellor, Georg von Hertling, is said to have remarked later, according to an account often quoted by historians, that at the beginning of July he had still expected peace proposals from the enemy before 1 September, but on 18 July even the greatest optimists understood that all was lost.

The attack from Villers-Cotterêts also demonstrated a new way of fighting, which the Allies were to use for the rest of the war: surprise instead of a long bombardment, a creeping barrage, masses of tanks, superiority in the air and fresh American divisions. On 6 August Foch was appointed a Marshal of France, and two days later the British and French attacked at Amiens, beginning the Hundred Days Offensive, which ended with the armistice.