The garrison of Seicheprey was wiped out. When finally dislodged by a counterattack, in which the adjoining French division had to be called on for help, the boche carried off a hundred and eightyseven prisoners, including five officers. The casualties were heavy all around. The German radio exulted in the defeat of the Yankees and a corresponding gloom filled Allied headquarters.
A year, a month, a week and a day after the declaration of war the Americans scored their first victory.
Between April 7 and April 16 the 1st Division went through an intensive course in training in open warfare in a hilly region sprinkled with old Norman keeps around Gisors to the northwest of Paris. Pershing wanted to shake loose any trench warfare habits the men might have picked up from associating with the French in the eastern sectors. Then in three days the division was marched seventyfive kilometers up into the rear of the Sixth French Army. The night of the twentysecond the advanced brigade relieved the French division which was holding on by its eyelashes in front of the village of Cantigny.
It was a springtime landscape of long gently sloping green hills. The tileroofed houses of Cantigny clustered prettily around its chateau on the slope of a hill that hid the strategically important valley beyond, where a main line of railroad ran through Montdidier in the direction of Paris. Since the French had only fallen back into that region three weeks before they had not had time to construct their usual elaborate system of entrenchments and dugouts. The front was a line of occupied shellholes running through a wheat field. It wasn’t a sector, the defensiveminded French officers told the Americans, but something that might be made into a sector.
Cantigny and the ridge behind it dominated the countryside. Its possession was essential for the counterattack Pétain’s headquarters was planning in the direction of Montdidier. The French had recaptured Cantigny twice and had twice been driven out. The shallow valleys and the plain in front of the village was under continual shelling by the wellplaced German artillery. Ravines and patches of woodland were continually saturated with poison gas. The first weeks were spent by the Americans in counterbattery fire and in digging down into the soft chalk subsoil. The flimsy houses of the region were no protection at all. Lathe and mud-plaster walls went up in dust with every shell’s concussion. Headquarters and posts of command had to be established in the wine cellars and storage caves which luckily abounded under every farmhouse.
The boche had command of the air. His sausage balloons placidly directed the fire of his gunners. Since there was as yet no effective American airforce the division had to depend on French planes for protection and observation. At night the Germans bombed at will. The Americans’ only experience with their British allies was a lone plane which appeared over their lines one day and resolutely strafed the trenches with machineguns. The Americans thought he must be a Heinie using a British plane for deception, but when a French aviator shot the stranger down he turned out to be a Britisher sure enough. He’d lost his way and thought he was machinegunning a boche position singlehanded. A few days later a British liaison officer appeared redfaced and profuse with apologies.
Life was sheer hell in the Cantigny sector. The Germans had plenty of gas and the American artillery had none. All movement had to be at night. Kitchencarts and watercarts drawn by a single mule could only be moved up after dark through the slimy chalk of the access trenches so the food was cold and the water muggy before it reached the men in the advanced positions. Watering horses and mules was a risky business as the boche knew the locations and no matter how often the hour was changed seemed to be always ready with a few wellplaced shells. Stretchercases had to be taken to the rear through long slippery cuts in the chalky hills. Field hospitals and ammunition dumps were often under fire. While their attack on Cantigny was being planned the Americans were suffering sixty casualties a day merely holding their defensive positions.
From buck private to General Bullard there was no difference in opinion: the Germans had to be driven out of Cantigny. While the staff, working in a deep stinking cellar under an old manor house back near the demolished railroad station, planned the attack, the men in the front lines executed small nightly patrols, and what they called silent raids, without artillery buildup, in the nomansland between the two armies. There the Americans rapidly gained the ascendant. Prisoners were brought in. Bits of information were picked up from which the staff could plot out the terrain to be covered in the coming attack.
The 28th Infantry was selected to make the assault. For several days they practiced in a position twenty kilometers to the rear where the topography of Cantigny was duplicated as nearly as possible. Meanwhile the French moved up a hundred and thirtytwo seventyfives, thirtysix one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter howitzers and thirtyfour trench mortars in addition to the regular divisional artillery. A dozen tanks and a contingent of flamethrowers were ready to support the infantry. The division was furnished with an unlimited supply of gas and high explosives. The French were as anxious as the Americans that there should be no slipup in the Cantigny operation.
May 27 in cooperation with the Crown Prince’s offensive away to the east on the Chemin des Dames, the Germans in Cantigny put on a heavy bombardment with gas and explosives. This was followed by a number of raids on the Americans and on the French to the right and to the left of them. In repulsing one of these raids the French made a small advance. They had already captured a wooded hill to the northwest. Though casualties were considerable the arrangements for the American attack were in no way disrupted.
The night that followed was calm and clear. At 4:45 on the morning of the twentyeighth, when the mist was rising out of the valleys, the artillerymen of the supporting batteries verified their adjustments by firing a few rounds at their assigned targets. An hour later every gun behind the 1st Division broke loose. French airplanes took control of the air. Areas where German troops were expected to be massed were heavily gassed. At 6:45 the seventyfives changed their angle of fire to a rolling barrage which moved at the rate of a hundred meters in two minutes. Behind it the infantry advanced supported by machinegun units and mortars. The French Renault tanks operated without a hitch. Flamethrowers followed to clean out deep shelters and trenches. By 7:20, exactly on schedule, the entire objective was gained.
Strong points were established in the cemetery and in a wood on the ridge north of the town and in the shelter of the stone walls of the château. Every German in Cantigny was dead, wounded or captured.
Two hundred and twentyfive prisoners were marched to the rear to be shown to General Pershing and members of the French Army Command who had come up for the show. In the actual attack casualties were light indeed. The success seemed almost too good to be true.
General Bullard remarked in his notes that his Commander in Chief seemed unimpressed by the 1st Division’s fine performance. Pershing was worried for fear they might not hold their gains.
He had hardly left Bullard’s command post when a written message came from him emphasizing his orders that Cantigny must be held at any cost. Some French general must have raised a doubt in his mind. Bullard remembered Pershing’s having asked him whether the French ever patronized him. “Do they assume superior airs with you?”
Bullard answered no sir they did not; he’d been with them too long and knew them too well.