"MEUSE-ARGONNE – AMERICAN ARMY AND WORLD WAR ONE" Romagne-sous-Montfaucon by mtncorg

For the US Army, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive – 26 September to 11 November 1918 – was the time to show if the effort General Pershing had gone to in creating it, were worthwhile or not. If the grading scale was done on casualties incurred, then the Americans failed losing 117,000 men during the two-month long battle – the Germans lost some 20% less. Maybe, if the attack had taken place earlier in the war, the Americans could have come up with the same results the British had at the 1916 Somme or the French in 1915 Champagne, but it was getting very late for the German cause by the end of September 1918. Nor was the American offensive the only thing the Germans had to worry about as the British and French were attacking on other battlefields at the same time. The American contribution was in its numbers and numbers – even with the Americans suffering 20 % more casualties was something the Germans had run out of. The first day or two took the Americans through the first German defenses, but the second positions – the Kriemhilde Stellung – was a much more developed line bristling with concrete blockhouses and well-placed machine guns.

Freddie Stowers-Medal of Honor; Meuse-Argonne Cem

The American advance slowed to a slog some 7-10 miles into the German lines in front of this new position. Later in October, the Americans shifted the focus of their attack to the Meuse heights above the right bank from which German artillery had been pounding away at American forces from the flank side on the other side of the river. Finally, mid-October saw renewed assaults breach the German lines and a final push in early November sent the Germans into a full-scale retreat with the fall of Sedan by the war’s end and the capture of the vital – to the Germans – rail line which running back through Luxembourg supplied half of the German army. The end of the war was at hand.