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Cantigny Was The Perfect Spot For A Gesture

The place selected to demonstrate that the AEF could take the initiative in battle was a small, once pretty village lacking any strategic or tactical importance. Now reduced to skeletal ruins, Cantigny was in other words the perfect spot for a gesture. If the doughboys managed to wrest it from German control, they would prove to both Germans and Allies that they were a force to be reckoned with. If they failed, the humiliation would not damage much more than their pride. Cantigny was close to the point of the furthest advance of the German stormtroops in the March 1918 spring offensive. If relatively meaningless in strategic terms, a victory here would nevertheless bolster the jittery morale of the doughboys, many of whom were by now almost unbearably keyed up, desperate to get into action but also fearful of failure.

Pershing had high hopes of success in this engagement. He believed the AEF was by now beginning to amount to a respectable army, at least in sheer size. By the end of May 1918 the AEF had eleven combat divisions, 290,765 troops out of a total force of 488,224 in France and Britain. The total strength of the army, including those in training in the States, was now about 1,900,000, including more than 790,000 volunteers. The combat troops in France were defending a 35-mile front, twice that held by the Belgian army. The 1st Division was with the French near Amiens, the 2nd, 26th and 42nd were occupying usually quiet sectors, while the 32nd was preparing to go into the line. The 77th Division - along with four regiments of railway engineers, one regiment of pioneer engineers, a telegraph battalion, six base hospital teams and almost 10,000 men of the American air service - was in support with the British. Three more divisions were ready to sail from the United States, and, more remote still from the fighting, another 263,852 US-based infantrymen were deemed good enough to be ready to receive training in France.

By 20 May the 1st Division had spent a month in the lines opposite the small village of Cantigny, three miles west of Montdidier. It was at that time part of a French corps under the command of General Eugene Debeney. The village of Cantigny sat at the tip of a small German-held salient projecting some three miles into the Allied lines. The AEF and French trenches were some 700 yards from the village. Every angle of approach to Cantigny was covered by German flanking machine-gun fire, and the Germans often drenched the entire Allied lines with shrapnel and gas. On 15 May Debeney had suggested to General Bullard that his 1st Division might like to wrest Cantigny from its German occupiers. This was something of a poisoned chalice; the French had twice previously taken and lost the very same obscure hamlet. To lead the assault Bullard chose the 28th Regiment, commanded by Colonel Hanson Ely, a 6 feet 2 inch, 220-pound, beefy regular army soldier, one possessed of a fearsome reputation: 'If Ely asked his mess attendant for a cup of coffee, the request had the tone of a battalion fire chief ordering a hoseman back into a burning building. When he was silent, which was not too often, he continually worked the leathery muscle at the corner of his jaw, as if banking the fires that smoldered in his rasping vocal chords.’

The timing of the attack, which started on 28 May, was unlucky for the AEF. On the previous day the Germans had themselves launched another offensive on a fifty-mile front across the Chemin des Dames, a fifteen-mile-long ridge east of Soissons. This was supposedly a quiet sector, chosen by Ludendorff primarily as a means of diverting Allied reserves from the British sector of the front, to the north, preparatory to delivering a further offensive against the British in June or July. At 1 a.m. on Monday, 27 May the Germans pounded the French lines using high explosive and gas to terrorize and deracinate the rear areas to a depth of twelve kilometres. After a three-hour artillery blizzard, seventeen German divisions burst across the French lines, held by six divisions. By 11 a.m. the Germans had reached the French second lines, at the river Aisne; by nightfall they were easing their tired feet in the river Vesle, a total incursion twelve miles deep and thirty miles wide, and one of the most successful attacks of the war up to that time. Next day the Germans marched into Soissons; by the end of the third day of the attack they had penetrated the Allied defences to a depth of more than thirty miles, captured 650 artillery pieces, 2,000 machine-guns and 60,000 (mostly French) prisoners. Day four of the attack saw them on the Marne, with minor bridgeheads across it. The French reserves thrown into the offensive were routed, the French General Staff in despair, and the politicians in Paris prepared to scurry away to Bordeaux. On the weekend of 1-2 June, more than 1 million civilians are estimated to have fled Paris, convinced that the Germans, now less than forty miles from the French capital, would be marching down the Champs-Elysees within week.

The battle of Cantigny was thus overshadowed by a much larger and strategically more vital engagement. That did not matter in itself; of much more serious consequence was that the defence of Paris sucked away from the doughboys at Cantigny the weapons essential for securing swift success. Observation aircraft and heavy artillery, both supplied by the French, were quickly withdrawn, to be thrown desperately into the breach opening up before Paris. The doughboys can and did swiftly take Cantigny (the German divisions holding Cantigny were not crack units; the 82nd Reserve was categorized as a third-class division, while the other division, the 25th Reserve, was in such bad shape that it was defined by the Germans as little better than a labour unit), but lack of these vital arms made holding on to the village much more difficult than it need have been.

Cantigny was situated on the slope of a long, rather steep, high ridge; the Germans occupying the upper ground had an excellent observation platform for studying and shelling the 1st Division. At the start of the attack the doughboys were to be supported by French aircraft, French flamethrower units, twelve French heavy tanks and almost 400 artillery pieces of various sizes. In addition, the 1st Division's 6th Field Artillery Regiment and machine-gun battalions, an engineer company and two extra rifle companies from the 18th Infantry Regiment (also of the 1st Division) were in support.

It may have been a sideshow in the context of the much larger German offensive threatening Paris, but for those who took part it was a shattering experience. From Colonel Ely down to the lowest private, Cantigny was a searing crash-course (it only lasted from 28 to 31 May) in bitter and degrading Western Front combat.

On Monday, 27 May, 1st Lieutenant Daniel Sargent, of the 5th Field Artillery Regiment (1st Division), woke early in the Bois de Plainville, some two miles south-west of Cantigny, a village which he thought was 'shaped like a ship with its bow pointed toward us'. Sargent was a reserve officer in the regular army and had been attached to 'F' Battery, armed with French-made 155mm howitzers, for nine months. That morning Sargent was ordered to report to brigade headquarters at Tartigny, two miles to the south-west of his position. At Tartigny he was met by Colonel Charles de Chambrun, a liaison officer attached to Pershing - itself an indication of how closely interested both the French staff and Pershing were in this relatively minor fracas. De Chambrun told Sargent that his ability to speak a little French meant he was being appointed artillery liaison officer between the 1st Division and the French artillery. Sargent's job would be to occupy an observation post (code-named 'Pennsylvania') in front of Cantigny, and from there report (via field telephone) on the progress of the infantry assault artillery 'if they called me up to inquire about it'. 'Pennsylvania' was at the point of a wood jutting out towards Cantigny, on the right of the one-mile-wide front of the attack. After conferring with de Chambrun, Sargent trudged the battle front to familiarize himself with its layout, so that next day he would have a clear idea of the lie of the land.

At 'Pennsylvania' on the morning of 28 May, Sargent was joined by two French officers, an American infantry lieutenant (whom Sargent refers to in his memoir as 'L. C.') and a doughboy sergeant. Preliminary range-finding shelling of the German positions in Cantigny started at 4.45 a.m., the men gradually making their adjustments with single shots here and there. The full-scale bombardment started at 5.45 a.m. Captain Raymond Austin was that morning in command of a battery of field artillery.

The waves of doughboys attacking on the comparatively tiny front went over the top in just the same fashion as their British and French allies had been doing for almost four years. They were probably unable to do much more than walk, as each was plodding towards death loaded with '220 rounds of ammunition, three sandbags, two hand grenades, one rifle grenade, two water canteens, two iron rations, one shelter half, two cakes of chocolate as emergency rations, plus one lemon and wads of chewing gum as thirst quenchers'.

For once, the preliminary bombardment - just one hour, comparatively short by Western Front standards - had succeeded in its main task of softening up resistance to the point where it crumbled and posed little or no obstacle to the first attack wave. Captain Austin reported that 'our losses in the attack proper were comparatively small', and added that 247 prisoners were taken (other sources put the tally at about 100 prisoners and some fifty AEF casualties), but the attack quickly degenerated into a messy to-and-fro. The Americans suffered their biggest losses only After taking the village. German defenders had sheltered in the deep, well-protected basements of houses during the preliminary bombardment. The US advance was swift and rather casual; many of the German defenders who came up from their shelters found themselves behind the doughboys who had pushed a considerable distance east beyond Cantigny. A little after 7 a.m. it appeared to Lieutenant Sargent that Cantigny was taken.

The Germans launched a series of counter-attacks, beginning at about 4.30 p.m. with a huge artillery bombardment, followed by a wave of German infantry attacking the village at 5.10. At one point Major Theodore Roosevelt - son of the former president - led the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry across the fields in front of Cantigny, to plug a gap. A second and then a third wave of assaulting Germans were courageously repulsed.

In the early morning of the second day of the battle (29 May) matters were becoming so confused that Lieutenant Sargent was ordered to enter Cantigny to act as an on-the-spot liaison officer between the infantry and artillery. Guided to a chalk cliff on the edge of the village he found himself taken to a cave which, it turned out, was the headquarters of Colonel Ely. In the twenty-four hours since the start of the attack approximately 30 per cent of the 28th Infantry had become casualties, most as a result of the intense German air and artillery bombardments. Those not dead or wounded were utterly exhausted, as were the artillerymen who vainly did their best to support them.

Sargent made his way unscathed to a dugout - 'a black hole that stared out of the ashes' in a 'featureless field' - which was a former wine cellar, no more than seven feet high. He discovered Major Roussel, who was sitting on a shelf 'rasping' out orders, plus an assortment of French and US officers; Sargent's arrival made seven in total. A fellow 1st Lieutenant turned a spigot on a nearby hogshead and passed him a mug of 'Normandy cider': 'I much enjoyed this cider. It was a Godsend.' The infantry major initially did not think much of Sargent, referring to him as 'Mr Artilleryman'; but after Sargent had managed to direct some fire on to a troublesome battery of nearby German howitzers and put them out of action, his prestige grew. Late in the afternoon of 29 May Sargent was relieved by another artillery lieutenant, when the German guns had fallen silent. The Germans had finally relinquished hope of recapturing and holding this meaningless speck of rubble.

A few days after the battle Captain Austin wrote to his mother: 'when the wind is right you can smell Cantigny two miles away'. After Cantigny Pershing's tail was up. It proved to him that his doughboys were not only as courageous as any other soldier on the Western Front, but that they were capable of delivering on his promises. It marked a psychological turning-point for Pershing; the poor relation perched on a rickety chair at the edge of the family party now felt his rightful place was at the top table: 'I remember particularly Pershing's banging his fist down on the table and shouting out, "I am certainly going to jump down the throat of the next person who asks me, 'Will the Americans really fight?’”

'The Boches certainly were whipped for once,' said Captain Austin, but he was forced to admit in his same letter home that it was a close thing. Fear of both the Germans and Pershing goaded the doughboys and their field officers into making tremendous efforts. Pershing had ordered that not an inch of Cantigny was to be relinquished; Bullard, Ely and every subordinate officer below them realized that their future careers depended on that order being obeyed.

Gary Mead. . The Overlook Press, New York. 2000.

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