French folding postcard map of Verdun and the Meuse River, number 9 from the series Les Cartes du Front. Montfaucon is in the upper left and St. Mihiel at the bottom.

Les Cartes du Front

Verdun et Côtes de Meuse

Echelle 1:32,000

Routes

Chemin de fer

Canaux



Maps of the Front

Verdun and the Hills of the Meuse

Scale: 1:32,000

Roads

Railways

Canals



1. - Les Flandres

2. - Artois, Picardie

3. - Aisne, Champagne

4. - Argonne et Meuse

5. - Lorraine

6. - Vosges et Alsace

7. - Route des Dame et Plateau de Craonne

8. - Région de Perthes

9. - Verdun

10. - Somme et Santerre

11. - Plateau d'Artois

12. - Belgique - Flandres



A. Hatier. Editeur.8.Rue d'Assas, Paris.



Outer front:

Correspondence of the Armies

Military Franchise

Other views: Larger, Larger, Back

Thursday, September 26, 1918

"At dawn on September 26 nine American divisions, amounting to two hundred and forty thousand men, jumped off into the old nomansland of the defense of Verdun. They had quietly replaced the French holding troops during the night, while one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war combed the German positions. The front on which they were to advance extended twentyone miles from the Meuse to the western fringes of the plateau of the Argonne Forest where they were to keep contact with Gouraud's Fourth Army advancing through the plains of Champagne east of Reims.

Pershing's objective was to cut, in the vicinity of Sedan, the trunk line of railroad which furnished the Germans their chief lateral communication across their entire from from Metz to Valenciennes on the edge of Flanders. Giraud's objective was the same railroad a few miles further west at the important highway center of Mézières."

Quotation Context

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the first of four offensives Allied Commander-in Chief Ferdinand Foch had determined on September 23, 1918: a Franco-American attack beginning on the 26th in some of the killing fields of the 1916 Battle of Verdun. The Meuse River flows through the city of Verdun; the Argonne and its forest lie to the west. American Commander in Chief John J. Pershing commanded the offensive, General Henri Gouraud the French Fourth Army on his left in Champagne. Although Henri Giraud would become a French general I don't believe he was one in 1918, but that this is a an error and that Gouraud is meant.

Source

Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, pp. 407–408, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Tags

1918-09-26, 1918, September, Pershing, Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Meuse-Argonne, Argonne, Champagne, Reims, Rheims, Montfaucon-Verdun-St-Mihiel-Cotes de Meuse