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As we left off in Blog 23, IR 169 was detailed to the 5th Reserve Division on 21 July 1917 to take part in a counterattack designed to push French troops of the northern face of the Californie Plateau/Winterberg. The Germans were successful in driving the French back to the southern edge of the plateau when struck by massive French artillery fires that targeted both friendly and enemy troops alike. The Germans fell back to the northern portion of the Winterberg, where a bitter stalemate resumed in the most horrendous conditions.

Leutnant Lais, as second in command of IR 169’s 2MGC, was fortunate to avoid the worst of the initial phases of the battle. As the battle was raging on the plateau, Lais was ordered to take a MG platoon to guard a section of artillery that included two batteries of 21 cm mortars and one battery of 42 cm mortars located between the village of St. Thomas and the Ailette Creek, two miles northeast of the Winterberg peak. The 42 cm battery was segregated by barbed wire, with access tightly limited to assigned battery personnel.

Further to the rear, the Germans put into action one of their super-heavy ‘Big Bertha’ howitzers, gigantic cannon that could propel a 1,800 lb, 16.5 inch caliber shell a range of nearly eight miles. The German Army only fielded a dozen of these guns in the entire war. Its investment in this fight signaled the imperative placed on holding the Winterberg. The firing of the Big Bertha left a powerful impression on those veterans who experienced its mighty blast. Lais described how the cannon’s roar came with a thunderous muffle that swayed large tree trunks and trembled their branches. The resulting detonations rattled the earth, and as Lais declared, announced that “Lucifer had come to the Berg!” In his immediate vicinity, Lais observed the heavy mortar batteries fire in support of the 5th Guards and Reserve Division’s attack. Elsewhere, German 15 cm howitzers joined the action as the crest of the Winterberg was again consumed in blaze of smoke and dust.

Up on the Winterberg, the plateau was transformed into a moonscape of giant shell craters. There were no fixed trenchlines, so the men did their best to scrape and connect individual fighting positions among the shell holes. The French launched violent counterattacks as a desperate struggle fell over the entire plateau, where squads and platoons fought from crater to the next. Hand grenades were the weapon of choice and were thrown in copious quantities. After the first day of fighting, the Germans exhausted their entire grenade stocks, leaving them to toss captured French grenades, which lay about in the hundreds. The infantryman preciously conserved their rifle ammunition and resorted to hand-to-hand combat fought with spades, shovels, knives, bayonets and rifle-butts.

The Ailette marshland behind the Berg became the German’s logistical Achilles Heel. French artillery precisely targeted the primitive plank bridges over the swamp, strewing the mire with splintered boards and shattered bodies of dead supply carriers. On the hilltop, food, ammunition, and most importantly water, fell to critical levels. Men were practically dying of thirst as their tongues stuck to the roof of dry mouths. One item that was not in short supply were the many dead of both armies that had fallen in weeks of unrelenting combat. The constant fighting prevented the burials or evacuation of the bodies, leaving them to decay and ferment in the burning July sun. The omnipresent, toxic odor was truly unbearable. Smoking was forbidden, as the consequence of lighting a cigarette invited a barrage of grenades. Men resorted to placing tobacco ripped from cigarette rations into their parched mouths for a moment’s relief from the taste and smell of rotting corpses.

Communication with the front began to fail. Dispatch carriers were killed in the shelling and field phone lines were ripped apart and could not be repaired. A signal light connection from atop the Berg to the relay station to the west was briefly established. No sooner had the first message been transmitted when a direct artillery hit took out the far station. Carrier pigeons were deployed, but none managed to land in designated locations. German commanders, both on the hill and in rear areas, lost all sense of situational awareness on the locations of both friendly and enemy forces.

The fighting in these squalid conditions sustained over three days without relief. On the fourth night, it appeared that commanders on both sides gave up hope on sorting out whom was fighting where. French and German heavy artillery joined forces in mutual frustration and randomly fired with all their collective might onto the plateau, with the consequence of killing their own men be damned.

Next Post: Leutnant Lais and his MG platoon arrive on the Winterberg.

Pictures: (Pictures were taken from my June 2019 visit to the battlefields.)

(1) Winterberg Map. (see www.ironregiment169.com for online version)

(2) Northern Slope (German side): The Ailette marshland is at the bottom of this steep rise.

(3) Possible tunnel entrance (northern slope). The Winterberg was honey-combed with tunnels.

(4) Trenches. Remnants of trench lines and shell holes still abound.