The Second Battle of the Marne

FOUR The Peace Offensive

f o u r The Peace Offensive If the situation in June looked bleak from the German side of the lines, there seemed little immediate cause for optimism on the Allied side either. On June 3, French forces completed the withdrawal of their units to the south bank of the Marne River. Engineers then destroyed the final bridge over the river in the hopes of slowing down German pursuit. Thousands of refugees with their “goats, dogs, kittens, burros, pigs, milch cows, and crates of chickens” wandered “in ragged columns” toward Paris, only to find more than one-third of the city’s residents gone and police urging the new arrivals not to stop in the capital because of major shortages of food.1 On June 4, French Premier Georges Clemenceau tried to rally the people of France with a speech in which he declared, “I will fight in front of Paris. I will fight in Paris. I will fight behind Paris.” It was a powerful speech from a charismatic and energetic man, but it was just words if the Allied armies could not stop the Germans. A measure of relief came on June 6 when the American 2nd Division attacked German positions on the southwestern end of the Marne salient. Three weeks of fighting around a mile-long hunting preserve known as Belleau Wood stopped German momentum and proved that the Allies, especially the fresh Americans, were capable of doing more than organizing retreats. Losses had been heavy, especially among the Marine Corps brigade, but the clearing of Belleau Wood marked a The Peace Offensive 79 significant setback for the Germans and provided some much-needed good news for the Allies. It also put the Allies in control of dominant high ground, positions critical for observation of German movements in the Marne valley. Notwithstanding Allied ability in June to stop the fourth German drive, known as the Noyon-Montdidier Offensive, the great question among Allied commanders revolved around what the Germans might do next. Few of them expected the Germans to stop and regroup; the pressure to win quickly was too great to allow them to take much time to pause. The longer the Germans waited, the more Americans would arrive in line and the deeper the Allied blockade would cut into the evergrowing problem of feeding German civilians.2 The imminent collapse of Germany’s allies provided another motivation to act quickly. Italy had shown signs of definite recovery from the Caporetto disaster of the previous autumn, foreshadowing even greater external pressure on the faltering Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the Middle East, British forces, with significant help from Arab irregulars, continued to move almost at will against Ottoman forces. Only a German victory on the western front could redeem these losses. More immediately, if Germany’s allies collapsed, then the Allies could redirect forces to the western front, or even create a new front on the undefended approaches from Austria. A resurgence by the Allies might even bring the Russians back into the war in an attempt to regain lost territory. Thus the Allies knew that another German offensive could not be too far off. Both sides clearly recognized that the coming battles would be large, bloody, and protracted. The practical question for the Allied high command revolved around where to send precious reserves. The battles of March through June had left almost all units well under their authorized strength and in need of reinforcement. Forty days of active defense had cost the British 239,793 casualties.3 Parts of the Allied line, especially on the British front, were only weakly held. Without reserves, true defense-in-depth networks could be neither built nor manned in sufficient strength. As the past few months had shown, the creation of such networks greatly increased the chances of stopping a German offensive; perhaps more starkly, the absence of such networks virtually guaranteed failure. With their backs on Paris and thus with less strategic space to yield, the Allies could not afford another massive retreat. Not unreasonably, each commander feared that the next German attack would come in his sector. Haig and the British command feared 80 The Second Battle of the Marne for the six main English Channel ports that were the BEF’s lifeline to its communications back to Britain. Rouen, the largest of the six ports, was out of Germany’s immediate reach, but the loss of even...