The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the largest and costliest battle in American history. From 26 September 1918 until the Armistice on 11 November, more than a million soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces under General John J. Pershing, with some 135,000 French troops, fought through the Argonne Forest and the heights along the Meuse, losing more than 26,000 killed and 95,786 wounded. Their advance toward the vital railway at Sedan helped wear down the German army and force Germany to seek an end to the war.2
In the autumn of 1918 the United States fought the biggest battle in its history. For 47 days more than a million American soldiers attacked through forests, ravines and fortified hills in northeastern France, and when the guns fell silent at 11 o'clock on 11 November they were still pushing forward. General Hunter Liggett, who would lead them for the last month, called the ground a natural fortress beside which the Virginia Wilderness, where Grant and Lee had fought, was a park.3
America's army goes to war
The United States entered World War I in April 1917 with a small regular army. In nineteen months it raised a force of four million men, and by the autumn of 1918 General John J. Pershing commanded some two million in France. He had insisted from the start that they fight as an independent American army rather than be fed piecemeal into French and British units, and on 10 August 1918 he formed the US First Army.4
The war had turned that summer. Germany's spring offensives had cost it nearly a million casualties without winning the war, and the Allied counterattacks on the Marne had begun to push it back. American divisions had already fought at Cantigny, on the Marne and at Belleau Wood.5
The plan
The Allied generalissimo, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, now planned a great series of converging offensives across the Western Front. The Americans, attacking alongside the French Fourth Army between the Meuse and the Argonne, were to drive north toward Sedan and Mézières and cut the railway that fed much of the German army in France. Pershing wanted first to strike the St. Mihiel salient, and the argument with Foch grew so heated that Pershing later admitted he had considered punching him in the jaw. In the end both gave way: Pershing could reduce St. Mihiel, which he did from 12 to 16 September, but he had to be ready to attack in the Meuse-Argonne by 26 September.6
That meant one of the great staff feats of the war. Some 220,000 Allied soldiers had to be moved out of the sector and more than 600,000 Americans and 3,823 guns moved in, over a handful of poor roads, while some of the divisions were still fighting at St. Mihiel.7
A natural fortress
The ground was made for defense. On the left lay the Argonne Forest, a plateau of dense woods cut by steep ravines; in the center the Barrois heights, running from the butte of Montfaucon through Romagne and Cunel to the Barricourt Heights; on the right, the heights along the Meuse, from which German guns could fire into the flank of any advance. Across it the Germans had built four defensive belts up to 24 kilometers deep. The strongest was the third, the Kriemhilde Stellung, part of the Hindenburg Line, a warren of concrete shelters and machine-gun nests running from Grandpré across the Côte Dame Marie, Romagne and Cunel to the Meuse.8
26 September
At 2:30 on the morning of 26 September 1918, 2,711 guns opened three hours of preparatory fire. Captain Harry S. Truman, a battery commander in the 35th Division and a future president, wrote that the sky was red from one end to the other from the artillery flashes. Then the infantry went forward, with 419 tanks in support, among them the Renaults of Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton's 1st Tank Brigade.9 › 26 September in military history, 1918
The first day brought gains of up to five miles along the Meuse but much less in the Argonne. Montfaucon, the key height in the center, was assigned to the 79th Division, which had arrived in France only in July and had had less than a month of unit training. It lost its barrage in the woods and fog and was caught in the open by machine guns; one officer wrote that each gun had to be charged from the front and both flanks at a cost of ten to twenty men. Montfaucon did not fall until the next day, 27 September. Behind the front, monumental traffic jams on the few cratered roads nearly brought supply to a standstill, and the wounded waited ten to twelve hours for a field hospital.10
The Lost Battalion and Sergeant York
On 2 October Major Charles Whittlesey's 1st Battalion of the 308th Infantry, 77th Division, with companies of other units, found a seam in the German line in the Argonne and pushed deep toward Charlevaux Mill. The units on its flanks had not kept up, the Germans closed in behind it, and by the next morning some 550 men, by the U.S. Army history's count (the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 guide says more than 600), were cut off on a hillside. For nearly five days the Lost Battalion held out under German attack and shellfire, some of it American. When the Germans withdrew on the afternoon of 7 October, 107 of the men had been killed and 249 more wounded or missing. Whittlesey and two of his captains received the Medal of Honor, as did two aviators shot down trying to drop supplies to the pocket.11
The next day, 8 October, Corporal Alvin C. York of the 328th Infantry, a Tennessee marksman who had first registered as a conscientious objector, found himself in command of the survivors of his patrol after their leaders fell. Under heavy fire he worked his way to a position from which he could enfilade the German machine guns, and he and his small band brought 132 prisoners back to the American lines. He received the Medal of Honor and became the most famous American soldier of the war.12
Breaking the Kriemhilde line
On 12 October Pershing ordered the reorganization of the American Expeditionary Forces. A new Second Army under Robert Bullard took over the eastern part of the American sector that same day, and on 16 October Pershing handed the First Army to Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett. Liggett took over an army in crisis. The struggle had already cost nearly a hundred thousand casualties, he estimated that another hundred thousand men were straggling behind the lines, the weather had turned cold and wet, and influenza was spreading through the ranks.13
The renewed attack opened on 14 October. On the 42nd Division's front, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur's brigade spent 15 and 16 October clawing the Côte de Châtillon from its defenders, and the division paid 2,895 casualties in three days. But the Hindenburg Line had been broken. By 31 October the Argonne had been cleared of German troops, the Americans had advanced about ten miles, and the French Fourth Army on their left about twenty.14
1 November and the drive on Sedan
Liggett spent the last days of October reorganizing, rounding up stragglers and preparing a set-piece attack. At 3:30 on the morning of 1 November his guns opened up, and when the infantry advanced at 5:30 they found the Kriemhilde line torn to shreds. The Americans had drenched the German batteries in the Bois de Bourgogne with more than 41 tons of mustard gas. The 2nd and 89th Divisions broke through to the Barricourt Heights, which brought Sedan and the vital rail line within range of American heavy guns, and that night the German Fifth Army began a fighting withdrawal to the north.15
The advance turned into a pursuit. American divisions raced each other toward Sedan, but the French would not be denied the honor of liberating it: Sedan was where Napoleon III had surrendered to the Prussians in 1870, and French troops entered the city on 9 November. By 10 November the Allies had reached Sedan and cut the railway there.16 › Hundred Days Offensive, 1918
To the eleventh hour
By then Germany was collapsing. Its allies had given up one by one, its sailors had mutinied, a German delegation crossed the lines on 7 November to ask for terms, and on 9 November the Kaiser abdicated. Pershing ordered his armies to keep attacking until the Armistice took effect, so that every German soldier killed or captured would be one fewer to face if the truce broke down. In the last two days the 2nd and 89th Divisions forced the Meuse under fire, and the 89th lost 2,391 men between 1 and 11 November. An artillery officer, Bob Casey, saw 34 men killed and 39 wounded around him in the last 23 minutes of the war. At 11 o'clock on 11 November 1918 the guns fell silent.17 › How World War One Ended
The cost and the legacy
In 47 days the Americans pushed the front back up to 48 kilometers, drew 46 German divisions into the sector (47 in Pershing's final report), inflicted about 100,000 casualties and took more than 26,000 prisoners and 874 guns (Pershing gives 847). The price was 26,277 Americans killed and 95,786 wounded or gassed, making the Meuse-Argonne the costliest campaign in American history; by comparison the Ardennes campaign of 1944 to 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, cost about 19,276 killed. The Army's historians conclude that the offensive was the most important American contribution to Allied victory and won President Wilson a major voice at the peace conference.18
Many of the dead lie at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, dedicated in 1937. Its 130.5 acres hold 14,246 graves, the largest number of American military dead in Europe, and the walls of its chapel bear the names of 954 men listed as missing.19
It was the American share of a wider Allied push, told in the Hundred Days Offensive. For more on the war's last year, see the greatest battles in American history, the story of the animals in war who served with the doughboys, and the World War I era page.20
