The advance posts along the riverbank were overwhelmed. The Germans swarmed up the hill and met the main line of American defense behind the embankment of the Paris-Metz railroad, which was the German objective for the first rush.
The Americans held their position while the French on their flanks fell back according to plan on a further line of hills. McAlexander’s outfit found itself enfiladed by the boche on each flank.
The 38th did not budge. Their accurate riflefire caused heavy losses to enemy troops marching forward in formation on either side of them. Their most painful casualties came from a French barrage dropped between the railroad line and the river on the theory that all Allied troops had already fallen back. A lieutenant of the field artillery had several horses killed under him and was himself wounded in the numerous dashes he made back through the zone of fire to try to correct the range of the guns.
Costly as it was in lives, the 3rd Division’s obstinate resistance managed to throw two crack German divisions into confusion. The Americans ended the day with a third of their number killed or wounded but holding their positions along the railroad and with three hundred kraut prisoners on their hands.
At the same time some companies of the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard were receiving their baptism of fire on the crest of a hill two miles south of the Marne to the eastward. Again there was a misunderstanding of the new French tactics. The four companies stayed in their positions instead of retiring with the French before the German assault and were killed or captured to a man, except for one small group, led by officers who had never seen combat in their lives, who managed to fight their way back to the new French entrenchments.
The German penetration south of the Marne amounted to five miles in some places, but their pontoon bridges took such punishment from Allied aviation that by July 16 their advance had lost momentum and by the seventeenth they were stalled.
This German crossing of the Marne was intended as the western prong of a new pincers operation directed at the railroad center of Reims and the high ground to the south of it. While the western prong was making great sacrifices for an initial success, the eastern prong was faring badly indeed.
The American 42nd, the Rainbow Division made up of a conglomeration of National Guard outfits under General Menoher, was turned over to onearmed Gouraud’s French Fourth Army which was ordered to hold Reims at any cost. Here the liaison was good. Gouraud carefully instructed all the elements under his command as to the tactics about which he was particularly wellinformed.
In the Reims sector there was clear moonlight the night of July 14. Gouraud’s artillery laid down a terrific barrage at ten minutes before the time they knew the German bombardment was scheduled to start. The boche troops were taking punishment long before their zero hour.
The French and Americans knew exactly what to expect. Every detail had been correctly predicted. When the German rolling barrage moved forward and the storm troops jumped off they retired, leaving sacrifice groups to signal the whereabouts of the attackers, to a rear defensive position. When the boche reached the Allied front lines, a curtain of fire descended on them from the Allied artillery. The attacking waves never reached Gouraud’s fortified entrenchments. At ten in the morning the Germans were still trying to consolidate the gains that Gouraud had intentionally yielded to them. Next day a series of counterattacks pushed them back to their starting place. The 42nd Division’s part in this most successful defensive operation in the entire war cost them fortythree officers and sixteen hundred and ten men in total casualties.
Three days after the jumpoff both Foch’s headquarters and the German High Command knew that Ludendorff’s fifth offensive had failed.
The hour had come that Ferdinand Foch had been waiting for. For a month he had worked to concentrate a striking force in the wooded region around Villers-Cotterets. From there he would be in a position, if the boche should continue to attack Reims in preparation for a drive against Paris, to hit them on the exposed flank of their salient between the Marne and the Ourcq. The very success of Ludendorff’s drive south of the Marne, combined with his failure to budge Gouraud’s force defending Reims, to throw him off balance and to make the western flank of his armies south of Soissons more vulnerable. This was the moment for Foch to risk an offensive.
Fending off interference from his British allies and from his own generals kept him even busier than planning the logistics of his troop movements. Versailles was in an uproar.
The success of three German drives threw Lloyd George into a case of jitters. He was desperate to stop the drain on British manpower. He kept advocating drastic changes in military policy. He dreamed of restoring the old stalemate in France and Flanders. He advocated moves against Germany through Austria or the Balkans. He wanted expeditions to Russia to keep the Germans from mobilizing Russian manpower. At the same time he was appalled by the prospect of a new German attack on Haig’s shattered armies.
Every meeting of the Supreme War Council was angrier than the last. Backbiting and recrimination were the order of the day. Pershing was having to use all sorts of subterfuges to get the artillery and service troops he needed to complete his divisions shipped across the Atlantic. At Lloyd George’s insistence cables were sent Woodrow Wilson making the completely impractical demand that a hundred divisions of American infantry be dispatched immediately. At the same time he was importuning Haig to take back his XXII Corps which, according to the Beauvais and Abbeville agreements, the British field marshal was placing at Foch’s disposition.
Haig, who distrusted his own politicians even more than he distrusted the French, loyally stood by his commitments to Foch. When Lloyd George sent an emissary to try to make him change his mind, he wrote out his reply: “I take the risk, and I fully realize that if the dispositions prove to be wrong, the blame will rest on me. On the other hand, if they prove to be right the credit will lie with Foch. With this,” he added bitterly, “the Government should be well satisfied.”
In spite of continual private bickering between the two men, Foch had support from Clemenceau. Even so he was not yet master in his own camp. As late as the morning of July 15, when he was driving north to confer with Haig, he discovered, dropping in unannounced on the headquarters of his Tenth Army at Noailles, that Pétain, as commander of the French armies in the field, had issued orders to discontinue the concentrations of troops around Villers-Cotterets. Pétain, as always defensive-minded to the point of timidity, wanted to reinforce Gouraud at Reims.
“Let Gouraud take care of himself,” said Foch with his arrogant gesture of brushing away the cobwebs of human stupidity. He countermanded Pétain’s orders in the nick of time.
Possibly some rumor of Pétain’s intended dispositions reached German Intelligence and encouraged Ludendorff to weaken his flank south of Soissons and throw everything he had against Reims. The High Command’s strategic thinking seems to have been confused by the fact that the Germans had a double objective: to seize the Reims-Paris trunk line of railroad and at the same time to build up the reserves for Prince Rupert’s knockout blow against the British in the north which was set for two weeks after a German victory on the Marne.
Foch, always punctual, hurried from the Tenth Army to his meeting with Haig at nearby Monchy. That day he let the British commander in on just enough of his plan to keep him welldisposed. It wasn’t until the morning of the seventeenth, when Foch knew that the German drive was stalled before Reims and at least slowed across the Marne, that he sent Haig a message fully disclosing his intentions: early next day General Mangin of the French Tenth Army would attack south of Soissons with twenty divisions.