This week, after nearly four months of withstanding the might of the Kaiserschlacht, the German
Spring Offensives, week after week after week, the Allied counter attack finally comes.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week there was a lot of action far to the east in Siberia, but it was primarily
a week of planning, as the Germans finalized plans for their next Western Front Offensive,
even in the face of a deadly flu epidemic.
That offensive, which would be known as the Second Battle of the Marne, kicked into gear
this week.
The Germans were going to attack with Crown Prince Wilhelm’s 49 divisions.
One of the goals was to open a second railway line to the Marne, and also to draw off Allied
reserves from Flanders in the north for an attack up there that would happen in just
a few days.
The Allies knew exactly when this week’s attack was coming, though, so French and American
artillery bombarded the German front lines and jumping off points half an hour before
the German bombardment began.
The German barrage was still pretty strong, though, for example raining 17,500 rounds
of gas on the sector of front held by the American Rainbow Division.
Then the Germans went over the top east of Reims... and found that the French trenches
weren’t exactly trenches.
Well, okay, they WERE trenches, but they were only lightly manned, and the German bombardment
had been wasted on them.
The Germans overran these and killed what few defenders there were, but the “real”
trenches further back were basically untouched, and of course, full of French soldiers.
French General Philippe Petain, after pushing so hard for so long for the French to use
a defense in depth system to neutralize the German shock troop advantage, had finally
gotten his wish and General Henri Gouraud had implemented it, and as the Germans advanced
on the manned trenches, they came under heavy fire from French and American artillery.
The Chief of Staff of the Rainbow Division, Douglas MacArthur, said, “When they met
the dikes of our real line, they were exhausted, uncoordinated, and scattered, incapable of
going on without being reorganized and reinforced.”
That was east of Reims.
West of Reims where the French under Jean Degoutte, and the French and Italians under
Henri Berthelot were using the old system with the men too far forward, the Germans
were quickly successful, though their failure in the east meant that those successful troops
were dangerously exposed, so they called off the attack in the west.
But it had to keep going somewhere, because it was essential to draw Allied reserves away
from Flanders before the German attack up there.
On the 16th, the German bombardment was renewed, now against the French and Americans in Champagne
- including half a million gas shells.
Over the next two days, it seemed like the Germans would break through - and that could’ve
been the decisive breakthrough, but (Gilbert) in one sector French gunners knocked out all
20 German tanks, in another fewer than 4,000 Americans- outnumbered three to one- held
their ground in vicious hand to hand fighting, while overhead, 225 French bombers with 40
tons of bombs dropped them on the bridges the Germans had set up across the River Marne.
Near Chateau-Thierry, the American 3rd Division managed to blow up every single pontoon bridge
the Germans set up in the whole sector, earning itself the sobriquet “the Rock of the Marne.”
But the Germans kept on coming, pouring into the river in the face of machine guns and
infantry, to the point that, by noon that day, as American General Joseph T. Dickman
would write (Gilbert), “There were no Germans in the foreground of the Third Division except
the dead.”
The Americans also took heavy casualties holding back the tide.
On the 17th, Italians troops that had been brought in stopped the Germans at Nanteuil-Pourcy.
On the morning of the 18th, German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff had a conference
with his command where he the first thing he did was dismiss any possibility of an Allied
counterattack in the south.
Then they talked about tactical options if the British in Flanders used the same new
defense system the French just had.
And then around noon came the word that Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foch had in fact
launched an Allied counter attack.
It kicked off with a 2,000 gun artillery barrage along just over a 40km front.
French General Charles Mangin led 23 divisions - four of them American - following nearly
500 tanks in an attack to try and recapture Soissons and seal off the German salient.
David Stevenson writes in “With Our Backs to the Wall”, “Not for the last time,
the Germans were wholly surprised.
Part of the reason was overconfidence: Crown Prince Wilhelm had thought the Allies too
weak both to defend Reims and to counterattack.”
But the Allies had agreed that surprise was absolutely crucial for success, so concentrating
the forces leading up to the attack was done in just four days - well, nights, since it
was all done in darkness, and the tanks were hidden in the forest.
This counterattack was huge, on a total front of over 100km by four armies, but the spearhead
was the 1st and 2nd American Divisions and the 1st Moroccan Division, who were largely
Senegalese.
The bulk of the tanks were light Renaults, armed with machine guns, that could go, like,
13-14 km/hour, and they attacked out of the mist.
The German lines broke and they were driven back some 7 km. 20,000 Germans were taken
prisoner, as well as 400 big guns.
As the week came to an end, though, Mangin was stopped before he could reach Soissons,
and there were some seriously heavy Allied casualties - for example, the Italian Corps
fighting on the 19th lost a third of its strength, but after just the first two days, now the
Germans might have no realistic hope left of taking Reims, and the German threat to
Paris would then be no more, but more importantly, if the Marne salient became unholdable, Ludendorff
would have no real choice but to postpone the Flanders offensive indefinitely.
There is a story from this week, maybe true maybe not, of a ruse devised by a couple of
American engineers.
A briefcase with fake plans for the counterattack was handcuffed to a man who had died of pneumonia,
right?
Then they put him in a vehicle that looked like it had run off the road at a German-controlled
bridge.
The Germans found the plans and believed them, then adjusted their own plans to stop the
fake Allied plan.
So when the Allied attack came, it came elsewhere and hit an exposed part of the German lines,
leaving them no choice but to retreat.
Again, I don’t know if this is true or not.
Something that is true from that front is that on the 16th, a German Flying Ace named
Hermann Göring shot down his 22nd plane, and three days previously had taken command
of the Richthofen Squadron.
That squadron was named after Baron von Richthofen, the Red Baron, who’d been killed in April.
There was Central Powers action on other fronts this week as well.
On July 13th, using mainly German troops, General Liman von Sanders attacks British
General Edmund Allenby’s bridgehead on the east bank of the Jordan River, Northeast of
Jericho, but Australian troops push back the attackers.
This attack worried the British command though, who thought that if Sanders made such an attack
on the Arab Revolt forces east of the river and won, the British flanks would be exposed
and their plans for an autumn offensive ruined.
One Central Powers offensive had hit some snags, though.
Nuri Pasha’s Army of Islam was advancing at a crawl through the Caucasus toward Baku.
The summer heat, the lack of sufficient drinking water, and poor supply lines would’ve slowed
any army, but his was now wracked by an epidemic of dysentery.
By the time his forces reached Kurdamir, he estimated he had only 4,000 soldiers that
were really fit for active fighting.
Add to that that the Azeri militia were deserting in droves, so he had only around 8,000 men
at the moment available to try and take Baku and its oilfields, but he would try at the
end of the month.
As for those defending the city.
On the 15th, after skirmishing west of it and nearly being encircled, Colonel Bicherakov
comes to the conclusion that his Cossacks, even bolstered by the Armenians and the Red
Guard, cannot stop the Ottomans with their artillery in the open field.
They retreated toward the city’s environs to plan the defense there.
And here are two notes to end the week.
On July 16th, 1918, Tsar Nicholas Romanov and his family were executed at Yekaterinburg,
capital of Red Ural, by order of the Ural Regional Soviet.
Deposed by the February Revolution last year, Nicholas had been the force that guided Russia
into this war four years ago.
There was also news this week from another initial guiding force of the war; on July
15th, after the huge failure of the July Austrian offensive in Italy, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf
is dismissed and placed on the retired list.
He is also raised from Freiherr to Graf, so like from Baron to Count, but for Conrad this
war is over.
And this week of the war ends, with yet another German offensive, but a mighty Allied counter
attack that, as the week ends, is a success.
A German failure in the Middle East, setbacks in the Caucasus, and the death of a Tsar.
Well, he was no longer the Tsar.
You know, when you think about it, there’s nearly no one left.
The leaders - the men who guided the world into this war or led the armies, or both,
3 years and 50 weeks ago - they’re almost all gone.
Call the roll: Nicholas, Conrad, Franz Josef, Moltke, Joffre, French, Putnik - they’re
all gone.
Only Enver Pasha and Kaiser Wilhelm remain at their posts from those 1914 days, and even
the Kaiser’s power has been reduced by army command.
It’s now different men, fighting with different weapons and different tactics, and it’s
also a totally, totally different world.
If you want to learn more about the Allied tactics in response to the German spring offensive
1918, you can click right here for our special episode about that.
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