by Lloyd, Nick
The three-hour bombardment that Pershing had planned reached crushing intensity just before Zero Hour: 5.30 a.m. on 26 September. For those American and French troops sheltering in their forward positions, the hours before they went over the top were nerve-wracking and intensely stressful. Everyone dealt with the uncertainty in his own way. It was true that for many soldiers a resigned fatalism was accepted, but others found it a maddening experience; trying to get the body and mind ready for the experience of combat, for the possibility, even probability, of being killed or wounded. According to an American battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Ashby Williams, ‘No men who have not passed through the experience can realize how it feels to wait for the beginning of an attack. There is excitement, of course, but it is suppressed, and there are anxious moments of speculation and anticipation as to what the attack will bring forth.’12 Even for commanders – those maligned ‘château generals’ – the stress was not easy to deal with. Hunter Liggett was at his headquarters waiting for the first reports to come in. ‘The nervous strain is difficult,’ he admitted. ‘I have learned to have two packs of cards by me and to lay them out in double solitaire position when an attack has started. That is as good an anodyne as I know. It saves you from nail biting and pacing the floor until your nerves are shot.’13
At the appointed time, whistles blew across the line and thousands of tired, damp and cold men got up out of their trenches and marched off, in artillery formation, into the early-morning fog, nervously scanning the ground in front of them for signs of the enemy. Despite the high hopes in Allied headquarters, it was to be a day of disappointment. On the left, Gouraud’s Fourth Army proceeded slowly and surely, as was the French method by 1918. That day the French advanced four kilometres and captured 7,000 prisoners. This may have sounded impressive, but much more had been expected of the operation than this, which was supposed to sever Germany’s main rail arteries into northern France. Foch was appalled. This was not how his grand offensive was supposed to look; at this rate it would be years before the Germans gave in.14 On the American sector, initially at least, things seemed to promise more. Within five hours of pushing off, Liggett’s I Corps had secured its objectives, about four miles into the German position, while III Corps also reached its designated line. In the centre, however, the heights of Montfaucon – which the Germans called ‘Little Gibraltar’ – held out and slowed everything else down, with hidden defenders cutting the attackers to pieces with heavy machine-gun and artillery fire. This delay would have serious implications for Pershing’s goal of breaking through the German line.
First-Lieutenant Clair Groover was one of those who witnessed the attack on Montfaucon. Originally hailing from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Groover belonged to 313th Infantry Regiment of 79th Division. His men went forward that morning behind the bombardment and covered by smoke shells. The shelling was ‘like a succession of express trains passing overhead’. Although they made progress, by the time the sun had risen and the smoke had dissipated, their advance had ‘slowed down to nearly a snail’s pace’ across ‘the roughest ground that troops ever had to fight over’. Not only was the terrain broken by shell holes and barbed wire, but they were also up against heavily entrenched defenders who were committed to holding on. Groover was amazed to stumble across a map of the defences they faced, which showed 113 machine-guns in fixed positions, many of them in concrete pill-boxes, supported by at least half as many moveable weapons. Whatever training Groover and his men had received had not prepared them for fighting of this intensity and, perhaps inevitably, their unit rapidly splintered apart. As Groover later admitted, ‘In the confusion of the attack, barbed wire across no-man’s-land, continuous shell holes, forests, machine gun fire; companies had been broken up into little groups; men were separate from their unit[s]. Officers assembled stragglers, and kept advancing.’ By 4 p.m. they reached the southern slopes of Montfaucon, but had been badly hit. That day Groover’s regiment lost three majors, two captains and six junior officers, and during the next two days suffered over 1,200 men killed, wounded or missing.15
Others reported similar scenes of chaos and confusion. Sergeant James Meehan (also of 313th Infantry Regiment), remembered no-man’s-land being ‘full of men pushing ahead through barbed wire, jumping trenches and across shell holes’. They had barely gone one hundred yards when they suffered their first casualty, one of their gunners hit in the leg. When they finally reached the slopes of Montfaucon and moved over the brow of the hill, they were met by what seemed like ‘a hundred machine guns’, which rapidly stopped their advance. The rest of the day was spent trying to work around the position, flanking enemy machine-guns, and avoiding the persistent shellfire, both German and American.16 The problem was that having been slowed up by the difficult ground and the unexpectedly heavy resistance, American units lost the protection of their creeping barrage, which bounded away to the north. Lacking the training and experience that had long been drilled into their British and French counterparts, American units found it very difficult to move forward on their own, resulting in heavy casualties, confusion and attacks that rapidly came to a juddering halt. Soon the fields and woods of the Meuse–Argonne, crisscrossed with barbed wire entanglements, would also be strewn with American bodies and bleeding wounded.
Over the next month, the Argonne would come to symbolize Pershing’s lost hopes for the offensive. The experience of combat here was exhausting and draining. US soldiers would frequently have to advance uphill through a hellish landscape of shattered trees and shell holes, dragging their tired limbs and heavy equipment through barbed wire entanglements and past thinly dug trenches, while frequently coming under fire from German snipers and machine-gunners, their bullets clipping violently through the trees. At night, they would often have to get down where they could, scraping thin holes in the ground or occupying old bunkers, and drift into an uneasy sleep that was all too often broken by gas alerts or odd shrapnel shells. After three days of unceasing combat, one American officer, Captain T. F. Grady (305th Machine Gun Battalion, 77th Division), was exhausted and angry. On 28 September he recorded in his diary that he was ‘very cold and couldn’t get to sleep at all . . . Up another heartbreaking hill so steep we had to help each other up.’ After a night of rain, he woke up the following morning ‘chilled to the marrow and soaked to the skin . . . Everybody sore and growling.’ Their rations were almost running out.
Dad told me once that I would see the day when I would be glad to get a crust of bread – and this was the day. These damned woods are full of hills and ravines and I guess the French knew it too. Cleaned up a couple of nests and had some trouble with snipers. Bullets were whistling over our heads and we had to take cover from shrapnel. We got ahead of our objective for the day and ran into our own artillery fire and had to fall back.
By 30 September, Grady’s men were becoming increasingly tired and fractious. They marched down another ridge only to get caught in an American artillery bombardment, which ‘shot away’ half the face of an officer and severed the legs of another ‘poor fellow’. They sent up rockets to signal to their guns to stop firing, but German observers spotted them and fired a bombardment of high explosive on their positions. Grady’s men dug in and took what cover they could. ‘Very cold and I would give a month’s pay for a cup of coffee,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘No tobacco and a bum outlook.’17
1. Tom Cotterill, the author’s great-uncle, aged nineteen. This photograph was taken while he was on leave sometime in the summer of 1918. He came home to Sealand to see meet his two youngest siblings – Ben and Gladys – before returning to the Western Front in time for the Hundred Days.
2. The telegram announcing Tom Cotterill’s death. Family legend has it that on the morning of the attack in which he was killed, his mother, Florence, woke up with a terrible headache. By the time the telegram arrived three weeks later, she already knew her son was dead.
3. View from the Sunken Road, Gouzeaucourt, looking north-east towards Dead M
an’s Corner (the clump of trees) where 15/Royal Warwickshire Regiment attacked on the morning of 27 September 1918.
4. The grave of Private Tom Cotterill, plot C30, Neuville-Bourjonval British cemetery, a few miles from where he was killed.
5. Officers of the German General Headquarters celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Kaiser’s reign at the Hotel Britannique, Spa, Belgium, June 1918. The Kaiser stands to the left. The two figures on the right are Hindenburg (with white hair) and Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son.
6. Hindenburg (fourth from right) faces Ludendorff (fifth from right) in the Grand Place, Brussels, surrounded by attendants and somewhat nervous onlookers. The two men formed a quasi-military dictatorship from 1916 onwards, but were unable to save Germany from defeat.
7. Captured French soldiers march along a tree-lined road somewhere near Soissons during the Second Battle of the Marne. Although French losses were heavy, the Allied counter-attack on 18 July marked the turning point of the war on the Western Front.
8. German troops in action, 8 August 1918. This photograph is one of very few to actually show combat in the Great War. Note the size and space of no-man’s-land, the smoke in the distance, and the dispersed tactical formation used to close with the enemy.
9. The front cover of Le Petit Journal from September 1918, showing a selection of Allied commanders: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (top); General Georges Humbert, GOC French Third Army (right); General Sir Henry Rawlinson, GOC British Fourth Army (bottom); and General Eugène Debeney, GOC French First Army (left).
10. Crown Prince Rupprecht, Germany’s northern Army Group Commander. In August 1918 he warned that Germany must ‘make haste and approach our enemies, and especially England, with peace offers, and peace offers which both can be accepted and in view of the temper of the English people must be accepted’.
11. Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps. One of the most talented soldiers produced during the war, Currie’s motto of ‘neglect nothing’ became a hallmark of how his troops operated.
12. Sir John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps, was another astute and gifted general.
13. Men of Ernst Kielmayer’s battery pose for a photograph during a brief rest period. Ernst is sitting under the barrel of a 77mm field gun. During the fighting at Cambrai in late September, three of Kielmayer’s men were ‘torn apart beyond recognition’ by artillery fire; another was fortunately dug out alive.
14. German prisoners carrying a casualty along the Amiens–Roye road as a Mark V passes by. While tanks could be extremely effective, they remained highly vulnerable to German field guns. Of the thirty-four tanks supporting 4th Canadian Division on 8 August, only six were able to reach their final objective.
15. The sworn enemy of Allied armour: a German 77mm field gun in action. German artillery may not have been designed for taking on Allied vehicles, but its gunners proved remarkably effective at stopping the slow-moving British tanks throughout the Hundred Days.
16. General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force. He continually resisted Allied attempts at ‘amalgamating’ US troops in British and French divisions and was determined to wield American combat power into an independent, war-winning force.
17. Lieutenant-Colonel R. D. Garrett, chief signal officer of 42nd US Division, testing a telephone line left behind by the Germans in the retreat from Saint-Mihiel, 12 September 1918.
18. A 15 inch naval gun seized by 3/Australian Battalion on 23 August 1918 near Chuignolles on the Somme. This was the largest gun captured during the war and had been used for the bombardment of Amiens. Monash later presented it to the city as a gift.
19. Marshal Foch conversing with General Charles Mangin outside the War Ministry in Paris. Although Mangin had many enemies in the French Army, he proved indispensable to Foch as they endeavoured to keep French units going in the final months of the war.
20. General Georg von der Marwitz, commander of the German Second Army. Marwitz’s forces were almost destroyed at Amiens in August, prompting his removal to command Fifth Army in the Argonne.
21. A German supply column in the village of Gouzeaucourt, the scene of particularly bitter fighting on 27 September 1918.
22. A selection of German guns taken by 4th US Division on 26 September 1918, the first day of the Meuse–Argonne offensive. Although this was an impressive haul, the initial stages of the offensive were characterized by frustration, delay and missed opportunities.
23. Members of 314/Field Signal Battalion (89th US Division) encamped in mud at Epionville. The exposed conditions endured by American infantry in the Meuse–Argonne were a cause of frequent complaint.
24. An American tank company undergoing repairs in the Bois de Hesse, north of Récicourt on the Meuse, 12 October 1918. Although the US First Army began operations in the Meuse–Argonne with 189 Renault tanks, within ten days only eighteen were still in action.
25. Major Charles Whittlesey (left), commander of the ‘lost battalion’, with Major Kenny of 3/Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment, whose unit was the first to relieve Whittlesey’s men on 7 October, near Apremont in the Argonne.
26. Men of 116/Canadian Infantry Battalion (3rd Division) move up to the front during the Battle of the Canal du Nord, 27 September 1918. According to a veteran, Private Guy Mills, ‘It was just like a furnace door opening. There was nothing but guns, you couldn’t hear anything else but guns.’
27. A horse team of the Royal Artillery pulls an 18-pounder field gun up a slope through the bank of the Canal du Nord near Moeuvres. Making sure the artillery kept up with the advance was absolutely vital. One gunner remembered being ‘on the go for days and days and nights and nights, pulling our guns out, pulling them into some new position three or four hours later.’
28. The Kaiser standing on the bridge of the submarine tender Meteor on a visit to Kiel, 2 October 1918. The strain on his face is clearly visible. Four days earlier Ludendorff had told Hindenburg that the war must be ended as soon as possible.
29. Soldiers from 106th Infantry Regiment (27th US Division) return to the village of Corbie on the Somme, 25 October 1918. Some are carrying souvenirs taken from German prisoners captured on the Hindenburg Line.
30. Men of the North Lancashire Regiment make their way through the burning streets of Cambrai, 9 October 1918. One witness wrote: ‘The dastardly Hun is burning what he cannot plunder or carry off. It just makes my blood boil to contemplate his villainy. I am reminded by the sight of Cambrai ablaze of the burning of Moscow.’
31. German infantry camping in Caudry, west of Le Cateau, while a French girl looks on, 15 October 1918. By mid-October large parts of the German Army were in full retreat. The pilot Rudolf Stark remembered seeing marching columns and long trains of wagons moving eastwards day and night.
32. German dismounted cavalry on the march, 9 October 1918. This mixture of aged veterans and youthful recruits was typical of what the German Army had become by 1918.
33. German reserves being brought up to the front for a counter-attack, 28 October 1918. As the front crumbled throughout October, German reserve units increasingly found themselves being pushed forward with no orders, little intelligence, and often under air attack.
34. The heavily damaged cathedral of Saint-Quentin, October 1918. The French commander, Charles Mangin, complained that ‘the Boche is leaving Saint-Quentin in flames. Only the threat of reprisals will be able to prevent it from being ransacked before they leave.’
35. The town of Lens in the final days of the war. A householder watches from a balcony as streams of refugees pour through the streets.
36. ‘The horrors of Dante’s Inferno’: the shattering effect of heavy shelling on the village of Champigneulle, north of Saint-Juvin, in the Ardennes.
37. Second-Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, the war poet, was killed in action on 4 November 1918 on the Sambre–Oise canal. Several days earlier he had written to his mother, ‘I hope you are as warm as I am;
as serene in your room as I am here . . . you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.’