Second Battle of Noyon begins

On the morning of 17 August 1918 the French Tenth Army of General Charles Mangin went into the attack on the wooded hills between the Oise and the Aisne, north-west of Soissons. This was not yet the great blow, only the first of a series of preparatory attacks. By 8 a.m. two corps from the centre of the army had driven back the German outposts and taken the hills from which the main attack was to be launched a few days later. The French date the Second Battle of Noyon from this day; within two weeks it brought them to the river Ailette and into recaptured Noyon. It was also the first step towards extending the offensive that the Allies had begun on 8 August at Amiens to the whole front from the Aisne to the Scarpe.

After Amiens

The attack by the British and the French First Army of General Debeney at Amiens was the greatest Allied victory since the start of the war, but after only a few days it slowed down. Beyond the belt taken on 8 August stretched the old trenches and wire of the Battle of the Somme of 1916, and the Germans were bringing in more divisions and manning the line between Roye and Chaulnes. The Third Army of General Georges Humbert, which joined the attack on Debeney’s right on 10 August, gained a few kilometres, but on 12 and 13 August its attacks achieved little. Douglas Haig concluded that further frontal attacks at Roye would be too costly and proposed that his Third Army attack further north, near Albert.

Ferdinand Foch, a Marshal of France since 6 August, eventually agreed with him, and at the same time changed the way the offensive was conducted. Instead of forcing a single point, he wanted to deal the Germans successive blows at different points of the front, so that they would have no time to shift their reserves. At noon on 16 August the French First Army passed from Haig’s orders back to those of General Philippe Pétain. In a letter to Pétain, Foch demanded that he combine without delay the operations of the First, Third and Tenth Armies to “liberate the area of Lassigny – Noyon – Carlepont wood” and prepare the subsequent liberation of the area of Roye – Chauny – Soissons. On 17 August at 9.30 a.m. he telegraphed Haig and Pétain that the attacks being prepared by the individual armies were to start as soon as they were ready, “on 20 August at the latest”.

On the German side the mood was grim. On 13 and 14 August, at the conferences in Spa, Erich Ludendorff admitted that the enemy could no longer be forced to make peace by an offensive. Yet instead of falling back to the Hindenburg Line prepared in the rear, as General Fritz von Lossberg, the new chief of staff of General Max von Boehn’s army group, advised him, he insisted on holding the present front. In the sector between the Oise and the Aisne stood the Ninth Army of General Johannes von Eben, and west of the Oise, facing Humbert, the Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier. According to British intelligence, in mid-August only two of Hutier’s 18 divisions were really rested.

Mangin’s army

Mangin, a colonial army officer by origin, was regarded as the most offensive-minded of the French generals. In October 1916 his troops recaptured Fort Douaumont at Verdun, but after the failure of the Nivelle offensive in 1917 he lost command of his army and earned among the soldiers the nickname of “the butcher”. He returned in June 1918, when within a single day he prepared the counter-attack on the Matz, and on 18 July his Tenth Army struck from Villers-Cotterêts at the western flank of the German salient on the Marne. After the Germans gave up Soissons on 2 August and fell back behind the Vesle and the Aisne, Mangin faced north, on a line from Soissons to the Oise.

The French knew the country in front of his army well. From the autumn of 1914 until March 1917 the old trench line had run here, through Tracy-le-Val, Nampcel and Nouvron-Vingré. The Germans had abandoned it when they withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, and returned in the spring of 1918. The terrain was difficult for attackers: hills and plateaux cut by ravines, woods and numerous caves in which the German infantry sat out bombardments. On 14 August Pétain informed Foch that the Tenth Army would attack on 17 August, “if the tanks arrive in time, without which starting the attack would be very difficult”.

17 August

Mangin decided not to throw his whole army at once against the main German position. According to French accounts, he noticed that between Audignicourt and Morsain the Germans had deployed their forces in depth, with strong outposts in front of the main line of resistance. He wanted to push these back beforehand in order to gain good jumping-off positions and move his artillery forward. On 17 August, according to French accounts at 5 a.m., the VII and XXX Corps, standing in the centre of the army, attacked. The British official history, summarising the French one, states that by 8 a.m. both corps had taken the hills around Autrêches intended as a base for more important operations. Little happened that day on other sectors of the front. The French First Army gained a little ground near Roye, and the left wing of Humbert’s army, trying to keep pace with it, advanced only very slightly.

The Germans had no doubt what this foreshadowed. Ludendorff later wrote that by 17 August the French had pushed the German outposts back onto the main line of defence between the Oise and the Aisne, and that these had held out longer than they should have. As a result the fighting strength of several divisions had fallen to a degree he had not reckoned with in his calculations. Behind the main position, around Cuts, the German command held divisions intended for counter-attack.

The following days

On 18 August, according to French accounts in the evening, at about 6 p.m., the Tenth Army attacked on a front of about 10 kilometres and advanced roughly 2 kilometres, approaching the first line of Eben’s main position. The next day it continued the attack. According to the British official history, in these two days it took a belt about 2 kilometres deep, although neither Lassigny nor Roye fell. Foch wrote that the attacks of 17 and 18 August gave it the hills between Tracy-le-Val and Morsain and allowed part of the artillery to be moved forward. French accounts state that they cost little and yielded between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners. On the evening of 19 August the Tenth Army’s line ran west of Nampcel, through Audignicourt, Morsain and Nouvron to Fontenoy on the Aisne.

On 20 August Mangin struck the main German position with twelve divisions on a front of about 20 kilometres, from near Soissons to the Oise, and broke through it. Ludendorff called this day “another black day” of the German Army. In the evening Foch wrote to Haig that the enemy was shaken everywhere and that the blows must be repeated without loss of time. The next day, 21 August, the British Third Army went into the attack north of the Somme, and the Allied offensive begun at Amiens now covered the whole front from the Aisne to the area of Arras.