Start of the Battle of the Soissonnais and the Ourcq

On 23 July 1918 two British divisions, the 15th (Scottish) and the 34th, went into the attack against the western flank of the German salient on the Marne, on the plateaus south of Soissons. They fought as part of General Charles Mangin’s French 10th Army, far from the rest of the British army, and went into battle the day after arriving at the front, after a night spent relieving exhausted American and French divisions. They knew neither the ground nor the position of their own line, and received their orders at the last moment. That day they gained very little, as did the French divisions fighting beside them. British historiography dates from 23 July the Battle of the Soissonnais and the Ourcq, in which both divisions fought for the next ten days, until the Germans gave up Soissons and fell back behind the Vesle.

Background

Five days earlier, on 18 July, Mangin had struck from the forest of Villers-Cotterêts at the western flank of the salient which the Germans had driven in May between Soissons and Reims. On the first day his divisions, led by the American 1st and 2nd Divisions, advanced several kilometres and brought under fire the road from Soissons to Château-Thierry, the main supply artery of the salient. In the following days the Americans took Berzy-le-Sec and crossed the road, but the attack began to bog down. The Germans threw fresh divisions and batteries onto the threatened flank, which destroyed French tanks, and on 21 July they repulsed another attack by the 10th Army. Mangin’s first impetus was spent and his divisions had been bled white. He therefore decided to bring four fresh divisions into the fighting, including two British ones which Foch had taken from Haig as a reserve a few days earlier.

The 15th (Scottish) Division of General Hamilton Reed, formed in 1914 from volunteers and fighting in France since the Battle of Loos, detrained near Liancourt on the day the counter-offensive began. The divisional history recorded that the local people had never seen Scottish soldiers before, and the battalions in kilts aroused great interest. Over the following days it moved towards the front on foot and in lorry columns, along dusty roads crowded with French and American troops. During the night of 21/22 July, by the light of a full moon, German aircraft spotted the dust above the columns and bombed them near Cœuvres, killing and wounding several dozen soldiers. General Lothian Nicholson’s 34th Division was in effect a new division. In April, after its losses on the Lys, its infantry had been broken up, and in June it was re-formed from battalions brought from the Middle East and India. None of them had yet fought in France. The 2nd Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment was going into its first big battle since the defeat at Tanga in East Africa in November 1914.

The night before the attack

On 22 July at 9.20 p.m. Reed received from General Pierre Berdoulat, commander of the French XX Corps, an order to relieve the American 1st Infantry Division during the night and at 5 a.m. to attack the German positions between Berzy-le-Sec and the village of Buzancy. The divisional orders went out only five minutes before midnight. There was no time to reconnoitre the ground, and the commanders were given small-scale French maps of 1:80,000. The relief in the dark, without trenches and without a continuous front line, proved very difficult. The divisional history quotes the account of an officer of the 8th Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, to whom the commander of the French company being relieved pointed out several directions in the dark, said: “Machine gun there and there, Germans there. I go,” and left. One platoon walked straight into a German outpost, and the Germans, alerted, shelled the division’s whole sector. The relief was completed at 3 a.m., two hours before the attack.

The Americans helped as best they could. Since the 15th Division’s artillery had not had time to take up its positions, Reed agreed with General Charles Summerall, commander of the 1st Division, that the American guns would stay in place for another day and support the Scots’ attack. Their commander, Colonel L.R. Holbrook, noted in a circular issued for the occasion that “for the first time in history French, British and American artillery are cooperating under one command”. The Americans also left the Scots their ambulances and field hospitals, because the British division had neither a casualty clearing station nor an ambulance convoy behind it. Reed later wrote that without this help at least 400 of his wounded would have been left on the battlefield. In no man’s land, however, the Scots saw what the American attacks of the previous days had cost. Whole rows of fallen Americans lay in the cornfields, mown down by machine-gun fire as they advanced in dense waves. The Scots later buried them.

The 34th Division, whose infantry had been brought up by lorry, had been relieving the French 38th Division in XXX Corps, opposite Hartennes, since 22 July, and finished only on the morning of 23 July. The French commander, General Guyot d’Asnières de Salins, handed Nicholson a ready draft of the attack orders and left him two field artillery regiments and a group of twelve 155 mm howitzers, which the commander of XXX Corps placed under the British artillery commander, because he turned out to speak good French. The Germans had clear air superiority in this area. Their aircraft circled over the French lines all day and bombed the roads at night, so all troop movements took place in the dark.

The Scots at Buzancy

Mangin’s plan was for XX and XXX Corps to strike at dawn first at the flanks of the woods lying in front of the line, and only then, on a signal from the army, for the centre, that is the 34th Division and its French neighbours, to move. The objective for the day was a line from the Orme du Grand Rozoy hill through Taux to Buzancy. At 4.15 a.m. the 1st Division’s artillery opened fire, and at 4.55 the barrage began to move forward. It turned out that the line taken over from the French and the Americans lay several hundred metres behind the one marked on the map. The fire was therefore not only weak but fell behind the German machine-gun nests, which were left untouched. The Scots immediately came under fire at close range from the front, while heavy guns near Soissons shelled them from the flank.

On the right wing of the 46th Brigade the 7th/8th King’s Own Scottish Borderers and the 10th Scottish Rifles advanced only about 150 metres. The Borderers alone lost 14 officers and over 300 men. In the 45th Brigade the 6th Battalion, Cameron Highlanders went down a steep slope into the valley of the river Crise, suffered heavy losses, but took the sugar factory in the valley and spread out over the brigade’s whole sector. Because runners had been killed, the orders did not reach some parts of the 8th Argylls at all before zero hour. At about 10 a.m. it turned out that the French divisions on both sides, the 87th near Buzancy and Villemontoire and the 69th on the left, had not moved either. Both flanks of the Scots were in the air, and since the French could not cooperate, Reed called off a further attack. At about 6 p.m. the Germans counter-attacked from Chivry farm, but were driven back by artillery and machine-gun fire. During the night the Camerons withdrew from the advanced sugar factory to the railway embankment.

The 34th Division at the Bois de Reugny

Nicholson took command of his sector at 7 a.m. At about 6.30, when reports from the flanks sounded promising, the brigades received a warning, and at 7.20 an order to move twenty minutes later. The signal was sent by telephone, wireless and rockets, but nobody saw the rockets, the telephone lines were cut, and the runners were killed to a man. The artillery opened fire according to plan and the 102nd Brigade moved off at 7.40, but the 101st Brigade went over only at 8 and lost the cover of the barrage. When the leading 2nd Loyal North Lancashire finally moved, the Germans were already waiting in the woods, copses and tall corn. The first wave of the right-hand company was almost entirely wiped out after fifty metres. The left-hand company advanced almost a kilometre, but at about 9.30 a German counter-attack drove it back to its starting positions.

The 102nd Brigade did better. The 1/7th Cheshire and the 1/1st Herefordshire followed close behind the barrage and got to about a kilometre from the start line, below the western edge of the Bois de Reugny. There they were stopped by fire from the wood and from both flanks, because the French divisions on either side, despite gallant attacks, had been unable to advance. The brigade dug in on the ground it had gained; according to one account of the division’s history it lost about 480 men that day. An attack on the Bois de Reugny and the village of Tigny prepared in the afternoon was cancelled because of the losses of the French 58th Division. The British official history states that apart from the 102nd Brigade’s gain the day brought no result at all. The soldiers could not even show the airmen and gunners their position, because the signal rockets supplied by the French could not be fired from a British rifle.

That was how the whole day went in the 10th Army. According to the French official history, XX Corps and the left wing of XXX Corps renewed their attacks in vain, despite the participation of about a hundred tanks, and Mangin ordered them to consolidate their positions the next day. Only XX Corps was to attack, towards Villemontoire and Tigny. On the eastern flank of the salient, near Reims, the only troops to advance that day were the divisions of the British XXII Corps and their French neighbours.

Foch and Pétain

General Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief, was dissatisfied with the pace. As early as 22 July, probably on hearing of the hasty commitment of the British divisions, he had sent Mangin a handwritten note saying that it would be worth preparing a strong, coordinated blow with the new divisions arriving every day, instead of using them up piecemeal. On the afternoon of 23 July he visited General Philippe Pétain at Provins and handed him a long letter. In it he wrote that the battle was slowing down because the Germans were reinforcing the flanks of the salient with fresh divisions and artillery and delaying the attack on its centre with machine-gun rearguards. At least one flank therefore had to be broken, the western one near Soissons, by giving the 10th Army all available forces. The same day Foch informed Douglas Haig that he could now use the two British divisions which Foch had asked on 12 July to move south of the Somme on any sector of the British front. At 11.45 p.m. Pétain changed his orders: the 10th Army and the left wing of the 6th Army were from then on to attack south-eastwards, north of Fère-en-Tardenois, instead of eastwards.

Balance of the day

The Germans regarded 23 July as a successful day. Their western flank had held, and the 7th Army command had already recorded the day before that the crisis was over and the army was in no danger of encirclement. On 22 July, however, Erich Ludendorff had ordered preparations for a retreat from the southern part of the salient behind the upper Ourcq, and during the night of 23/24 July three corps in the centre of the salient fell back another stage, unmolested. The Germans were giving up the ground between the Marne and the Ourcq, but kept hold of the flanks near Soissons and Reims, which covered the evacuation of guns and stores.

For the two British divisions it was only the beginning. On 28 July the Scots took Buzancy and lost it again the same day, and on 1 August the 34th Division took the heights near Beugneux. The following night the Germans fell back behind the Vesle and the Aisne, and on 2 August they gave up Soissons. The first day of the battle showed, however, what it cost to throw fresh divisions that did not know the ground into an attack a few hours after their arrival: according to the divisional history, nine out of ten attacking soldiers of the 15th Division had never seen the position they were to take, nor had it explained to them.