The Meuse Heights to the Armistice: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Great War

By Maarten Otte

The Americans had considerable initial success when they launched their huge offensive against the Germans in the Meuse-Argonne in the last days of September 1918. However, not everything went smoothly and the attack became bogged down, held up by the several lines of the Hindenburg System and logistical challenges. A major additional obstacle was the presence of batteries of German artillery on the high ground on the right bank of the Meuse, almost untroubled by any significant assaults by the allied forces. These guns created severe problems for the American commanders and their troops. Eventually sufficient resources were allocated for an American-French attack on the right bank, with the aim of removing the German artillery and pushing the Germans off the Meuse Heights, part of the renewed offensive on the Left Bank and the Argonne Forest. The action often took place over ground that had already seen ferocious fighting during the Battle of Verdun in 1916 and the French offensive of late summer 1917. It also involved the very difficult achievement of getting large bodies of troops over the River Meuse and its associated canal. The terrain is rugged and, even then, quite heavily wooded. The American and French troops often had to fight uphill and in the face of German defences that had been developed over the previous twelve months. On the other hand, the quality of the defending troops was not high, as Germany faced so much pressure in other sectors, and included a significant number of Austro-Hungarian troops. Popular opinion tends to be dismissive of the fighting quality of these Austrian troops who, in fact, performed well. The tours take the visitor over some beautiful countryside, with stunning views over the Meuse and the Woevre Plain. There are significant vestiges of the war still to be seen, including numerous observation bunkers and shelters as well as trenches. An unusual feature of the area are the traces of part of the Maginot Line, notably bunkers (some of which are very large) and the rail infrastructure to support it, sometimes making use of lines that the Germans built during the First World War. One of these tours follows the fate of Henry Gunther, officially the last American soldier to be killed in action in the Great War. There is substantial myth about Gunther; the facts surrounding his death are examined, as well as placing his last action on the ground. There is a tour dedicated just to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526796189

Maarten Otte

Maarten Otte is a long time resident of the Argonne. Growing up in the Netherlands with a fascination with the Great War, particularly the role of the United States. He has published books on Nantillois in 1918 and on US Medal of Honor winners.

Book preview

The American Expeditionary Forces in the Great War

The Meuse Heights to the Armistice

This book is dedicated to Eric Mueller, Matthew Young, Todd Rambow and Paul Osman, who keep the history and memory of the US 26th, 29th and 33rd Divisions alive, and to Tom Gudmestad who over the years has provided me with invaluable information in the form of books, photographs, general advice and, dare I say it, friendship.

The American Expeditionary Forces in the Great War

The Meuse Heights to the Armistice

Maarten Otte

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Maarten Otte, 2021

Maps © B. Metselaar, 2021

ISBN 978 1 52679 617 2

eISBN 978 1 52679 618 9

The right of Maarten Otte to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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Contents

Series Editor’s Introduction

Introduction

List of Maps

Chapter 1 The Americans in the Meuse

Chapter 2 Summary of Operations, 26 September to 31 October

The 33rd Division

The 29th Division

The 26th Division

Chapter 3 Summary of operations, 3 to 11 November

The 79th Division

The 26th Division

The 32nd Division

Chapter 4 The 5 th Division, 3 to 11 November

The Tours

Car Tour 1: The 29 th and 33 rd Divisions’ sector

Car Tour 2: The 26 th and 79 th Divisions’ sector

Car Tour 3: The 5 th and 32 nd Divisions’ sector

Car Tour 4: The 5 th Division – the Meuse Crossings

Walk 1: The 26 th and 79 th Divisions – Ormont Hill

The Henry Gunther Tour

Appendices

1. Order of Battle for operations on the Right Bank, First Army, AEF.

2. The French divisions employed in operations on the Right Bank.

3. The composition of an average American infantry division.

4. Some statistics.

5. The German and KuK outline Order of Battle for the Right Bank operations.

Advice to travellers

Acknowledgements

Select bibliography and suggested further reading

Series Editor’s Introduction

On a sunny day in June 2020, recently – or at least partially – liberated from M Macron’s Covid-induced house-arrest, I found myself standing on a concrete bunker, part of a modern water reservoir system, just east of Haraumont and more or less on the Kriemhild Line, part of the so-called Hindenburg system. The views obtained from here to the south and to the west, well across the left bank of the Meuse, are magnificent; for example, Montfaucon, getting on for thirteen kilometres away, is clearly visible. Although the AEF got close to the Kriemhild Line on the Right Bank – or the Meuse Heights – they did not occupy it until after the Armistice.

What was quite apparent from my perch is the view that German artillery observers all along the right bank of the river had over much of the ground across which Pershing’s First Army was advancing. After some initial impressive gains on the 26th and 27th September, the Americans were finding it increasingly difficult to make much meaningful progress. The situation was not improved by much until General Liggett took command of the First Army in mid October, Pershing having abandoned his quixotic, untenable attempt to be both Commander in Chief of the AEF and the field commander of the USA’s (then) only Army, a huge formation, vastly bigger than any other Army formation on the Western Front.

As Maarten points out (and as was clear to me from my first visit to the area with the Meuse Argonne Offensive as its object), the German artillery on the Meuse Heights, an area known as the Right Bank during the Battle of Verdun 1916, had wonderful fields of fire across the river. A place like Montfaucon, for example, would be well within range of their bigger calibre guns; whilst these guns would be pretty well immune to counter battery fire, protected by the topography, with its ravines, its folds in the ground and good reverse slope positions. Any advance, particularly on the right of the First Army, would have to take place under the gauntlet of this fire. The Germans also had good artillery coverage of the American attack on the left, from the high ground to the north of the Argonne Forest; but that is a different story.

One of the hardest lessons that the German army learnt from the Battle of Verdun came early on in that offensive. If things had gone very well, the problem of the French artillery on the far side of the Meuse, the so-called Left (or west) Bank, might not have been too significant. As things worked out, the initial counter battery fire was quite inadequate and the reinforced array of French artillery on the Left Bank became of such significance that the Germans were left with but little alternative than to extend their offensive to that side of the river as well in early March.

In September and October 1918 the situation was comparable: this time the advance would be on the Left Bank and the Right Bank would be covered by the French XVII Corps (under American command), not by an infantry attack but by what turned out to be a rather pathetic display of counter battery fire. The Germans were initially quite convinced that the American attack would be on their Right Bank positions and that the initial assault across the river was just a diversion: to them it would make more strategic sense. However, it did not take them long to realise that it was no diversion and they reacted accordingly. Their consolation was that the Americans had failed to make massive gains in the opening few days of the Offensive and, like the Germans in February 1916, they were now confronted by accurate, incessant and deadly flanking fire from across the Meuse.

Eventually Pershing had to tackle the problem; some rather more significant attacks in October pushed the Germans back somewhat on the Right Bank, but this was a matter of removing outpost positions, not dealing with the real problem. It was in the dying days of the war that more significant progress was made – by which stage, in any case, the German positions on the Left Bank had more or less collapsed. The Hindenburg Line had not been completely breached in this area by the time of the Armistice. If the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in general is relatively little known about today, not least in the United States itself, the AEF’s fighting on the right bank appears as but a footnote to it. Even in Pershing’s two volumes of war-time memoirs the total space taken up by it would probably come to less than the equivalent of a single page – and much of that was devoted to the activity of one of his beloved regular army divisions, the 5th. The men of all sides who fought and died here in these twilight days of the war deserve far better.

This is a fascinating battlefield of the First World War to visit. There has been very little intrusive development and there are significant vestiges of the war, as well as physical reminders in the form of earthworks and of concrete structures of various kinds. The country offers a wide range of high ridges, forestry and then the great contrast of the Woevre Plain. It is one of the few parts of the battlefields that German military cemeteries outnumber the allied ones. Maarten’s tours, on foot and in a vehicle, are extensive and fascinating. As an aside, I would strongly recommend that anyone making a detailed visit to this (largely) American battlefield reads Christina Holstein’s Verdun 1917: The French Hit Back in this series, in particular the coverage of the various, often quite successful, endeavours of the French army to eat away at the gains made by the Germans on this side of the river in 1916. It provides a very useful background to the situation that would face the AEF in autumn 1918.

Finally, a note of thanks. I turned up at Maarten and Didi’s wonderful bed and breakfast on 14 March 2020 for a planned stay of eight nights or so, during which I would accompany Maarten on the tours and walks in this book. On 17 March, at noon (we got back just in time, the church clock ringing the hour, having done much of Car Tour 4), we went into a very strict lockdown. They were finally able to wave a doubtless heartfelt goodbye to me on 13 June! To you, ‘the staff’; and to friends made in Nantillois – especially the Deputy Mayor, Patrick Salaûn, who had the church open for me every Sunday and some days during the week, my enduring thanks. Didi and Maarten have now transferred to more palatial quarters in Montfaucon and I look forward to my next visit; but I shall always have very pleasant memories of my enforced, extended stay in the beautiful rural backwater that is Nantillois.

Nigel Cave

Ratcliffe College, October 2021

Northern France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Starting points of the walks and car tours.

Introduction

With the extensive media coverage of the centenary of the First World War, more people have found their way to the American battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne; however, a significant part of the offensive, which took place on the right bank of the Meuse, is still largely neglected even by those interested enough to come to the area. The lack of grand monuments of the AEF, such as the Montfaucon Memorial and the magnificent Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, is a possible cause; whilst there is an all but total lack of typical tourist infrastructure, such as signposts, cafés or lodgings. This guide aims to fill much of the gap, showing that this part of the battlefield is very well provided with relevant points of interest. It is easy to make a detour to the area from wherever you stay on the left bank or from the cities of Verdun and Stenay.

The book is split into two parts: the first gives an outline of the history of the campaign, generally by chronological order and divisional sector; the second is made up of self-guided tours to the battlefield. The short narratives in chapters 2, 3 and 4 are based on original divisional and regimental histories, gas reports etc. and are supplemented by a thorough investigation of the battlefield by the author. The points of interest in the tour section are easy to find with the aid of GPS coordinates and clear directions, accompanied by excellent, clear maps by Bart Metselaar. Many sites are relatively unknown to the general public and are often hidden in the woods. Therefore, certain points of interest can only be located with the help of a GPS device; the references are given at the start of each tour. Divisions are considered from west to east and from south to north; and in chronological order.

The impact of the First World War on the United States should not be underestimated, even though its role in the conflict is not widely known. In America, it redefined women’s rights, race relations, mass production in factories, the nature of jobs, civil liberties and America’s role in the world amongst many other things. It was a major step in America’s rise to super power status, quite a change when one recalls that a mere fifty years earlier the Civil War (1861-1865) had torn the country in two. From 1915 to 1918 the US, a former colony, came to the aid, first financially and later militarily, of the ‘old continent’ and the (at the time) dominant powers of ‘western civilization’. To achieve its coming of age a high price had to be paid. 1918 alone caused more military American deaths (116,516, of which 53,402 were in combat) than, for example, US involvement in the Vietnam War (58,220), which lasted from 1965 to 1975. The Americans in part owe today’s prosperity to those who sacrificed their lives for freedom back in 1918.

President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).

After nearly three years of attempts at remaining neutral, with varying degrees of success and whilst in fact tacitly supporting the Allies from the side lines (not least because it was economically very profitable to do so), President Wilson was forced into taking action. He had won re-election – just – in November 1916, at least in part by use of the slogan ‘he kept us out of the war’. If some 2,000 Californians had switched their vote, then he would have lost the Electoral College in what turned out to be a far closer election than almost anyone had anticipated. And yet, within only a few weeks of his inauguration for his second term, he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

President Wilson addresses Congress to call for a declaration of war on Germany, 2 April 1917.

The return of a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans on 1 February 1917 and the consequent sinking of neutral US shipping by German submarines made war more likely, despite a strong isolationist wing in Congress and in particular in the Senate. However, the revelation of the text of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram by the British (all telegraph lines from Europe to North America, the trans Atlantic cable, ran via Great Britain) revealed a German plot to persuade Mexico to wage war on the United States. Whilst these factors might well have been enough to sway the average American, there was also the pressing financial case in favour of an intervention on the side of the Entente powers. Since 1915, the US had lent vast amounts of money to the Allies. Even the Germans were lent about forty million dollars (by some calculations 700 million dollars in 2020 terms); but this was dwarfed by the hundreds of millions lent to the Allies. In short, there was a lot of capital already invested in the Allied cause.

In 1917, because of the war, the American economy became the biggest in the world. In fact, the foundations of America’s prosperity – and certainly the strength of those foundations – were laid during the Great War; and it was her coming of age, albeit somewhat hesitant, as an international power, a process which reached its fruition after December 1941 and then in the post Second World War settlement.

At the same time, on the Western Front, things were still stuck in a bloody stalemate. 1916 had not been a particularly good year for either side, although perhaps marginally better for the Allies than 1915 had been; yet the number of casualties was mounting horrendously, with Verdun and the Somme remaining even today bywords for mass slaughter. However, a major Allied offensive was scheduled to commence in early April, around Arras (the British) and what was promised to be a decisive French attack, the Nivelle Offensive, largely centred on the Champagne. To balance this, there had been a revolution in Russia in March, which had overthrown the Tsar and the imperial regime and was replaced by a provisional government that was prepared, however, to continue with the war. It was quite obviously in the interests of American industrialists, bankers and investors to support the allies, for if they lost the war, large parts of the US economy would go bankrupt, and that was just the obvious outcome. Something had to be done.

All of these factors led President ‘He kept us out of the war’ Wilson to call on a special joint session of Congress to approve a declaration of war on Germany, which duly followed four days later, on 6 April 1917, and the creation of the AEF, the American Expeditionary Forces, under the command of General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing. Wilson’s rigorous prewar policy of no military involvement in the war in Europe meant that the army of the United States, in particular, was in an (arguably culpable) utterly unprepared state for a massive overseas commitment.

General John J. Pershing.

The USA mustered more than 4.7 million servicemen by the end of the war; an astonishing achievement. Of course the AEF contributed to the German defeat in 1918, but the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers that poured into France monthly served as the straw that broke a severely weakened camel’s back. The Germans knew that with the American declaration of war, over time the balance of power had definitely swung in the Allies’ favour. By launching their Spring Offensive in March 1918, they hoped to beat the French and British armies before the Americans had arrived in overwhelming numbers. By the end of June 1918 several American divisions had been actively involved in engagements on various parts of the Front, such as in Flanders, Cantigny, the Aisne-Marne, Château Thierry and Belleau Wood. The AEF had played its part in first holding the Germans and then in working to push them back. By August 1918 the Germans had simply run out of manpower, certainly manpower enough to face the coordinated attacks of the Allied armies all along the Front. They started a retreat that would end on 11 November 1918 with the Armistice.

American soldiers embark for France.

Yet in contrast to these vital contributions to this war, the Great War has become a forgotten war for many Americans, despite all the attention during the centenary years. One of the many reasons for this (apart from the fact that a very high proportion of Americans have their origins in the country as immigrants after the war), is that the USA did not suffer in the way that the Europeans and often their colonies or dominions did. The US effectively fought for about six months whereas the British, French and Germans lost a good part of a male generation during over four years of conflict. This is by no means to belittle the American sacrifice; if nowadays the same casualty rate in six months was suffered in another theatre of war somewhere in the world, people would be both absolutely horrified and provide a more than understandable reason for public outrage and mass protest. However, if you contrast 4.7 million draftees to 103 million American citizens in 1917, it means that after the war only a few million American families would have first-hand recollections of the war. Another plausible reason is that the Second World War, besides the Civil War and perhaps Vietnam, is THE war that first comes to the mind of the average American today. D Day, Bloody Omaha, the Battle of the Bulge and even the Hollywood vision of war; these are all etched in the collective American (and European) minds and are a part of our joint legacy. One other factor in this seeming collective amnesia about the war is that for every military fatality of the war, in the period 1917-1919, give or take, ten Americans died of the Spanish flu, thus a considerably greater personal disaster to a much higher proportion of the population of the USA.

The biggest offensive launched by the Americans as an independent Army during the war was the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which lasted from 26 September 1918 to 11 November 1918. The aim of the offensive was to break through the powerful German Kriemhild defences and then to force a break through in the direction of Sedan, a major railhead and vital for the German supply chain. Geographically and strategically, if such an outcome could be achieved in the Meuse-Argonne area, it would lead, practically inevitably, to the evacuation of northern France by the German army. The only other line of retreat for the Germans ran through and over the Ardennes, difficult and hilly terrain that was not easily passable in winter. If the Americans succeeded, it would greatly speed up the end of the war.

Map of the Western Front between 1915 and 1918; the