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Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share in the guilt for the dead. -- General Omar Bradley |
The first sustained American offensive of the war, although a minor action in itself, the Battle of Cantigny was fought on 28 May 1918, the second day of the great German offensive comprising the Third Battle of the Aisne.
A regiment of the American 1st Division (some 4,000 troops), under Major-General Robert Lee Bullard, captured the village of Cantigny, held by the German Eighteenth Army commanded by von Hutier and the site of a German advance observation point, strongly fortified. Aiding the attack, the French provided both air cover in addition to 368 heavy guns and trench mortars, plus flamethrower teams. The advancing American infantry were preceded into the village by twelve French tanks following a two-hour advance artillery barrage. In taking the village the Americans expanded their front by approximately a mile. A minor success, its significance was entirely overshadowed by the battle underway along the Aisne, some fifty miles to the north-west. In the face of seven fierce counter-attacks that day and the next the U.S. forces held their position with the loss of 1,067 casualties; they captured around 100 German prisoners. The American success at Cantigny was followed by attacks at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood in the first half of June. |
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This Day in History
1775:
The American Revolution begins as fighting breaks out at Lexington, Massachusetts.
1861: Residents of Baltimore, Maryland, attack a Union regiment while the group makes its way to Washington. 1861: President Lincoln orders a blockade of Confederate ports. 1927: In China, Hankow communists declare war on Chiang Kai-shek. 1938: General Francisco Franco declares victory in the Spanish Civil War. 1943: Waffen SS attack Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto putting down the uprising. 1951: I and IX Corps reached the Utah Line, south of the Iron Triangle. 1951: General MacArthur denounced the Truman Administration before a joint session of Congress for refusing to lift restrictions on the scope of the war. 1952: The U.N. delegation informed the communists that only 70,000 of 132,000 of the prisoners of war held by the United Nations Command were willing to return home. |