At 5:30 a.m. on 26 September 1918, after a three-hour bombardment, three corps of General John J. Pershing's American First Army attacked between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest in northeastern France. It was the start of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest battle the U.S. Army has ever fought. Over 47 days almost 1.25 million Americans took part, and more than 26,000 of them were killed before the Armistice ended the fighting on 11 November.
An American army
The United States entered the war in April 1917 with a small army, and Pershing insisted that the American Expeditionary Forces fight as an independent army rather than be fed piecemeal into French and British units. Its first offensive, at Saint-Mihiel on 12 to 16 September 1918, had only just ended.1
The Meuse-Argonne was part of the great Allied offensive of autumn 1918. The American objective was the railroad hub of Sedan, through which ran much of the supply of the German armies in France. The ground between the Meuse and the Argonne was some of the strongest on the Western Front: dense forest, ravines and fortified ridges, with the German guns on the Heights of the Meuse looking down on the attackers.2
The first days
The attack went in at 5:30 a.m. on 26 September. The 79th Division had the critical task of taking the hilltop town of Montfaucon. The Americans took it, but the inexperienced divisions then stalled amid traffic jams, rain and fierce German resistance. Fire from the Heights of the Meuse slowed the Americans badly. By mid-October Pershing had handed the First Army to General Hunter Liggett and taken command of an army group as a Second Army was formed.3
Forty-seven days
The battle produced many of the best-known episodes in American military history. The 77th Division fought its way through the Argonne Forest itself; on 8 October Corporal Alvin York of the 82nd Division and a handful of men silenced German machine guns and took 132 prisoners. To the west, American divisions serving with the French took Blanc Mont Ridge on 4 October.4
A renewed attack on 1 November broke the last German lines, and within days the Americans had pushed through to the Meuse. The fighting ended at 11 a.m. on 11 November, when the Armistice came into force.5
The cost
The National Archives counts 26,277 Americans killed and 95,768 wounded in the six weeks of the campaign; the Army News Service, drawing on the Center of Military History, puts total American casualties at over 117,000, among almost 1.25 million troops who took part over the 47 days. Most of the more than 14,200 American soldiers buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, the largest American military cemetery in Europe, died in this offensive.6
Our article on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive tells the full story, and our life of Alvin York follows its most famous soldier.
Also on this day
- 1371: Battle of Maritsa. Near the Maritsa river, Ottoman forces under Lala Şahin Pasha met a Christian army led by the Serbian King Vukašin and his brother Jovan Uglješa, who aimed to stop the Ottoman advance.
