Nightlife was vivid. Venery reigned. All the women looked pretty in the dark streets. The boulevards were enchanting in the blackout. In shuttered halls entertainers sang to packed benches “Suis dans l’axe du gros canon.”
The celebration of Bastille Day on July 14 was the climax. The morning shone bright and clear. French airplanes filled the sky over the city. The streets were full of flowers. There was a smell of strawberries in the air.
A brilliant military parade was deployed down the Champs Elysées. All Paris dressed in its best to crowd the wide sidewalks.
Preceded by the Garde Republicain in their gleaming helmets, riding their fine horses, detachments from all the Allies, carrying their national colors and led by bands playing their national airs, marched in dress uniforms from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. There were French Chasseurs Alpins in bérets and black tunics, British Lifeguards, Italian Bersaglieri in roostertail hats, Portuguese, an anti-Bolshevik unit of cossacks in astrakhan, representatives of the Bohemian and Slovak regiments that had thrown off the Austrian yoke, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Greeks in their stiff white kilts. The United States was represented by units of the 1st Division.
Towards midnight American M.P.’s with a tense look on their faces darted out from their headquarters on the rue St. Anne. They went through hotels and nightspots rounding up officers and men on leave. All leaves were cancelled. The offensive had begun.
Colonel Billy Mitchell was in Paris that afternoon trying to speed up the shipment of planes promised his brigade which was now attached to Hunter Liggett’s I Corps. He was eating a late snack before hurrying back to his headquarters at Coulommiers about thirty miles to the eastward. In the restaurant he met a Red Cross man who was a friend of his and as they sat eating they speculated on the location of the coming offensive. It had to be against Reims because the Germans would not dare advance further south without having the use of the trunk line of the railroad to Paris.
As they talked they heard a rumbling sound. Guns to the north. Mitchell glanced at his wristwatch. It was 12:10 precisely.
Out on the street they could see a great flicker and glare in the northern sky. Mitchell told the Red Cross man to come along with him if he wanted to see the greatest battle in history.
They jumped into the air service colonel’s fastest staffcar. A little before 3 A.M. they were at Mitchell’s headquarters.
At the airdrome they could look about them. The flash of guns lit up the clouds. The colored signals from bursting rockets and the white glow of starshells hovered over the whole length of the lines. Searchlights dissected the sky. There was a continual buzz and whine of airplanes overhead. The thud of airplane bombs sounded out now and then against the pounding surflike roar of artillery.
Since few Americans as yet had training in night flying, Mitchell telephoned his pursuit and observation groups to be ready to operate with the first light. The news from his French liaison officers was disturbing. The French air division’s orders had gone astray and their planes were not ready for combat. The Germans were attacking along the Marne. The only immediately available aviation on this part of the front consisted of American pursuit and observation groups, and a British brigade.
After a few winks of sleep Mitchell took up one of his pursuit planes and flew to the American lines beyond La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. The morning was overcast, the ceiling low. No German planes bothered him. Except for the artillery fire all along the lines he could see nothing particular going on.
Then he turned east and flew through low scudding clouds with occasional patches of clear sky up the valley of the Marne. Approaching the Jauglonne bend he met a few Fokkers but they paid no attention to him. To see anything he had to fly under the clouds. The river here was hemmed in by high hills. East of Dormans he found himself skimming above violent artillery fire. The Germans were crossing the river on five bridges. They were crossing in perfect order.
He was flying at about five hundred feet. There was no antiaircraft. “Looking down on the men marching so splendidly I thought to myself what a shame to spoil such fine troops.”
He cruised a little further up the river, then swung north towards Reims. A terrific battle was going on in that vicinity. The air hummed with German planes. He spun around and headed back to the bridges. There seemed to be hand to hand fighting on the hill just south of a pontoon bridge swarming with boche.
“The opposing troops were almost together. This was the nearest to a hand-to-hand combat than anything I had seen so far. I thought they were Americans and later found it was our Third Division.”
Mitchell had to duck into the clouds to escape a swarm of boche planes on the way back to his airdrome. He sent out his whole pursuit group to attack the bridges, and relayed the information to the nearest available French on the Champagne front east of Reims. They turned out in force, and, in spite of the distance they had to come, disturbed the perfect order of the Germans. By the end of the day American, French and British planes had dropped a recordbreaking fortyfour tons of explosives on the Marne bridges.
The Americans that Colonel Mitchell saw so heavily engaged were companies of Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander’s 38th Infantry, from General Dickman’s 3rd Division. Since the division’s first precipitate appearance at Château-Thierry the combat units had had six weeks, under pretty continuous German shellfire from commanding positions on the northern bank, to dig into entrenchments along the river between Château-Thierry and the Jauglonne bend. They formed part of the French Sixth Army.
This time there was no surprise. In a raid across the river a couple of weeks before, the French had captured a German engineer officer with meticulous plans on him for two of the crossings, and the Americans had made prisoners of a boatload of patrolling krauts during the preceding night. The only unknown factors were the day and the hour of the attack.
McAlexander’s men had been digging riflepits down to the water’s edge, stringing barbed wire and making all the defensive preparations they had been taught by their French instructors. Due to a startling failure in liaison they had not understood the new tactics promulgated by Foch and Pétain by which the Germans were to be made to expend their artillery preparation on lightly held front positions while the real defense line was to be established several thousand yards to the rear. When the German attack came the Americans stayed put.
The boche managed to move up a stunning preponderance of artillery. Starting at midnight they shelled with high explosives. Then they drenched the whole countryside with gas and smoke bombs that smothered most of the French and American batteries. The gas and smoke mingled with the morning mist to form a dense fog so that the Germans could launch their pontoons, which had been hidden by the reeds and bushes, without being detected. They were halfway across the river before the Americans caught sight of them.
“Day was just breaking,” wrote a lieutenant who was in one of the outposts, “and through the mist, fog and smoke one could see the boats and rafts loaded to the gunwales with enemy infantrymen and machinegunners set out for the southern bank … Men of the 38th, who had escaped the hours of shelling, met every attempt with rifle and automatic weapon fire. Scores of these boats were shattered or sunk or else disabled and sent drifting harmlessly down the river. Hundreds of Huns jumped into the water and were drowned. Those who reached our side by swimming were either killed or captured.”
Soldiers wounded in the early morning remained in their riflepits firing as best they could until they were killed. One man was found dead with his rifle and pistol empty, and in front of him a heap of twelve dead Germans.