On September 7th, 1918, the 79th Division was called to the front to take part in the biggest battle the US would fight until D-Day: the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.[1] By September 15th, it had relieved the French 157th Division (which included two African American divisions that had been assigned to the French) in what was renamed the Avocourt-Malancourt sector.[2] Although the Americans had been assigned the Meuse-Argonne region because it was deemed relatively quiet compared to other areas of the Western Front, that had not always been the case.
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German Troops Assault Le Mort Homme, Verdun, 1916 (Colorized)
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Unfortunately for the 79th division, the 1¾ mile sector it occupied put it up against some of the best defensive ground in eastern France. The hilltop town of Montfaucon (French for “Mount Falcon”), the focal point of the division’s initial assault, was part of a ridgeline that ran north to south that had numerous draws and spurs[4] running off its east and west flanks. The spurs provided the Germans with excellent machine gun positions, as the Americans would first have to force their way up one spur, capture it, make their way down its opposite side, cross the bottom of a draw and then assault up the next spur all the while completely exposed to the enemy machine guns ahead of them.[5]
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Terrain in Front of the 314th Regiment (Courtesy of Hathi Trust)[link]
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To make matters even worse, the Germans were using their signature defense-in-depth tactics they had adopted all along the Western Front, nicknamed the Hindenburg Line. Instead of a defined defensive line, they instead used a deep defensive zone filled with numerous mutually supporting pillboxes and strong-points. These defensive tactics helped to significantly reduce the effectiveness of artillery bombardments by spacing out the defenders and made a direct assault far more difficult. Although an attack would be able to penetrate the German lines, it would soon get bogged down by mutually-supporting machine gun positions and forced to retreat by a well-timed counterattack.[1]
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