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Battles of the Aisne, (1914, 1917, and 1918), three indecisive but important operations in France during World War I, on a sector of the Western Front extending across the lower Aisne River roughly between Reims and Soissons.
The first battle (Sept. 12—28, 1914). When French and British forces, in the so-called First Battle of the Marne, had reversed the Germans’ initial thrust from Belgium into France, the Germans retreated northward from the Marne to a defensive position in the Aisne Valley. There the British attacked them in the central sector, from Soissons eastward to Villers-en-Prayeres, and the French attacked in the western and eastern sectors. Soissons fell to the French on September 13, and Reims the following day, while the British crossed the Aisne at several points; but the Germans, with reinforcements of artillery, succeeded in entrenching themselves behind Reims and on the Chemin des Dames, a road at the crest of a ridge north of the river. Frontal attacks against that strong position were subsequently abandoned by the Allies when both sides tried to turn one another’s western flank by switching their forces toward the English Channel. Static trench warfare set in on the Aisne and lasted for the next 18 months. The second battle (April 16—May 20, 1917). Costly and ineffectual offensives on the Somme River in 1916 made the Allies the more anxious to win the war quickly. They thus planned, for the spring of 1917, a convergent attack on the Germans’ great salient, which bulged from Lens in the north past British-held Arras and around Noyon to include the Aisne front. In February 1917 the British were to attack north of the Somme, and the French between the Somme and the Oise; these attacks were to be followed by a major French effort on the Aisne.
This plan, however, was modified and the offensive’s inception postponed when its French sponsor, Gen. Joseph Joifre, was replaced as commander in chief by Gen. Robert-Georges Nivelle, who insisted that the British take over both the Somme-Oise and the northern sectors so that more French troops would be available to ensure success on the Aisne. But the plan was frustrated unexpectedly by the Germans’ withdrawal, by mid-March, from the westernmost positions of their salient to the shorter and stronger Hindenburg Line, which ran from the Lens-Arras sector south- southeastward to the western end of the Chemm des Dames. Nivelle nevertheless launched his offensive against the ridge but could take only its eastern end. This disappointment and a concomitant series of mutinies in the French Army led to Nivelle’s being replaced by Philippe Petain, who halted the Aisne offensive. Not until October was the rest of the ridge taken by the French.
The third battle (May 27—June 3, 1918). This German operation, otherwise known as the Battle of the Chemin des Dames, was momentarily successful, being undertaken by the Germans as the consummation of a series of offensives planned by Gen. Erich Ludendorif for the spring and early summer of 1918. The Germans overran the Chemin des Dames from the north, took Soissons, threatened Compiegne (west of Soissons) and Reims, and pushed southward beyond the Aisne as far as Chateau-Thierry, before the SeconEl Battle of the Marne, in July, forced them back to the Aisne Valley.
