Péronne in the First World War

Péronne, a small fortified town on the Somme in Picardy, mattered in this war above all as a crossing over the river and its marshy floodplain. For most of the war it was held by the Germans: from the autumn of 1914 to March 1917, and again from March to September 1918. The front ran a dozen or so kilometres to the west, and in 1916 the town was one of the goals of an Allied offensive that never reached it. In the end it was taken by storm by the Australians, after a fight for the hill of Mont Saint-Quentin.

The Germans arrive twice (1914)

The inhabitants knew what was coming. At the end of August 1914 they fled the town by road and by train, and the councillors and officials went with them. On 28 August, during the march on Paris, German infantry burst into the streets and opened fire, and the first civilians were killed. For 18 days the town was looted and set on fire. After the defeat on the Marne the Germans withdrew in mid-September.

They were back within days, during the Race to the Sea. The new French Second Army of General Noël de Castelnau advanced towards Noyon and Péronne, but in the First Battle of Picardy it ran into corps brought over from the Aisne and from Reims. The Germans took Péronne again on 24 September, although French accounts give the day before, and the Bavarians crossed the Somme and pushed west. The front came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres from the town.

Under occupation and under fire (1914–1916)

Péronne became a rear base for the German front. The flag of the Reich flew over the town hall, the clock was set to German time, and a council of local people answered for public order to the Kommandantur with their lives. The occupiers brought in the inhabitants of villages in the front-line zone, so the population was almost as large as before the war. According to the Historial de la Grande Guerre, 7,000 soldiers were stationed here, and there were 3,500 civilians. In the summer of 1915 a Spanish and American food relief operation saved them from hunger. The Germans imposed heavy levies and seized valuables, and the town had to introduce its own emergency money.

In 1916 Péronne, along with Bapaume, was to be taken in the first days of the Battle of the Somme. From 24 June 1916 heavy shelling fell on it, and hundreds of inhabitants sat it out in cellars. On 22 July the Germans deported the last civilians to the north and to the Aisne department. On the south bank of the river the French had already taken Biaches, the village directly opposite the town, on 9 July in the Battle of Albert, but they got no further. When the battle died down in November, Péronne was still German and wrecked by shelling.

Ruins that changed hands twice (1917–1918)

In March 1917 the Germans fell back to the Hindenburg Line, destroying everything behind them. Sappers of the British 48th Division towed pontoons by night along a canal covered in ice, and on 18 March the division’s infantry entered the town and occupied the hill of Mont Saint-Quentin. The British official history describes a pitiful sight: the fronts of almost all the old houses had been blown out. On one building the Germans left a board reading “Nicht ärgern, nur wundern!” (“Don’t be angry, just wonder!”).

The British held Péronne for only a year. During Operation Michael General Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army left it on the afternoon of 23 March 1918, in haste but in good order. Refugees and columns of evacuated hospitals streamed through the town, depots had to be set on fire, and sappers destroyed the bridges behind the last units. The British chronology records the loss of the town under 24 March, when a German battalion crossed the river south of it. The Germans were stopped only before Amiens.

Mont Saint-Quentin (1918)

At the end of August, during the Hundred Days Offensive, the Germans stood on the line of the Somme and counted on holding it through the winter. Péronne was shielded by the river’s floodplain and by the hill of Mont Saint-Quentin, a perfect observation post. General John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps, did not force the river at the town but crossed further west, at Cléry, and on 31 August attacked the hill. A counter-attack drove the Australians off the summit, but on 1 September they won it back, and men of the 54th Battalion crossed the moat on planks and the rubble of a blown bridge and broke into the town. The Germans held the north-eastern suburb for one more day, and the Historial gives 2 September as the date of liberation.

For this fighting the Australians received eight Victoria Crosses. According to their official history, in three days they took about 2,600 prisoners and lost just over 3,000 men. Monash wrote that General Henry Rawlinson repeatedly called the operation the finest single feat of arms of the war. Together with the breaking of the Drocourt–Quéant Line, the capture of Péronne ended the Second Battle of Bapaume and forced the Germans to fall back towards the Hindenburg Line.

After the war

The ruined town was rebuilt, partly in its old form. Its medieval castle from the early 13th century now houses the Historial de la Grande Guerre, one of the most important museums of the First World War.