 By early summer of 1918, a considerable number of Americans are going to be training with the British. The agreement was to train American forces. It was not necessarily for American forces to go into combat. However, with their proximity to British forces and with the crisis of the German offensives in the spring of 1918, it is understandable that the British are desirous to commit American forces. As the crisis continues into May and June, Persian starts wanting to withdraw some of the forces. The one place we do see American soldiers who are going to go into combat with the British early on is going to be at the small village of Hamel. This ended up meaning that the 131st Infantry, a regiment from Illinois, was going to participate in the attack at Hamel. The British broke up several American companies attaching each platoon to an Australian company. And the British commander on the spot makes the decision that he was willing to risk his career and go ahead with the attack against the wishes of Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces. Because he believes so strongly that this attack would work and that the Americans were going to play a vital part in it. The attack itself goes very well. A little over an hour it achieves all of its objectives. Working alongside the tanks, the Americans and the Australians go forward. In many cases, American officers were killed and Australians stepped in seamlessly to lead American units and they were able to get to their objectives and then hold them against German counterattacks. Up until August of 1918, all of the combat that the Americans participated in, they're doing so as part of larger allied units. And this is one of the reasons why the coalition aspect of the war is so important, is that really the United States, for all intents and purposes, is having to function within the boundaries of the coalition and they cannot simply go it on their own. Americans in the French have been conducting the reduction of the Marne salient operation. General Foch, who is now promoted to Marshal of France, he has called for his salience strategy of attacking salients along the western front to improve allied logistics in preparation for an offensive that will win the war, ideally sometime in early 1919. With the continued presence of American forces within the British zone, it is only natural that they are going to take part in those operations. Amiens began on the 8th of August 1918. It was going to be a massive offensive involving several corps. The entire British 4th Army and also the French 1st Army operating alongside to the right of the British 4th Army would be attacking as well. So two field armies attacking at Amiens. This battle had no preparatory bombardment, so much like at the 2nd Battle of the Marne, when the artillery opened fire, it was at the exact same time as the tanks and the infantry started moving forward. So the Germans had no chance to do anything and it was a disaster for the German Army. In earlier battles in the Corps, armies would be happy if they were able to advance a few hundred meters in a day, but in the first day of the Battle of Amiens the British were able to advance several kilometers. The one area where the British did not achieve all of their objectives on the first day of the Battle of Amiens was in the northern sector of the offensive, which was where the British 3rd Corps was operating. And attached to the British 3rd Corps as a reserve was the American 33rd Division, which included the same unit that had participated in the Battle of Mel a month earlier, the 131st Infantry. What happened in the 3rd Corps' sector is two days before the Battle of Amiens was supposed to begin, the Germans, not knowing that there was an offensive plant in that area, had launched a minor advance and they had taken a little bit of ground, but that had thrown the entire British offensive in that sector into confusion. And so that minor advance by the Germans on the 6th meant that the British 3rd Corps did not achieve all of its objectives on the 8th of August. And in the morning of the 9th of August it was determined that the British 3rd Corps did really have the strength to continue the offensive without extra reinforcements. So they looked to the American 131st Infantry to throw them into combat. So they were marched overnight and they were sent into battle in the afternoon of August 9th. The Americans went forward and attacked now alert, prepared German defenders. And they took heavy casualties, but fighting alongside British units overnight all of their objectives fall into allied hands. In fact, the American advance was so successful that they were able to take over a German battalion headquarters with all of the papers and maps and everything still intact. The Germans had evacuated so quickly they didn't have time to destroy everything. It helped support the rest of the general British attack at Amiens. And the Americans continued to fight as part of the British 3rd Corps for the next few days and into the middle of August. With the success, Wsch starts to reconsider. What he starts to see is that the Germans are weakening and his forces are getting stronger. So Wsch starts to consider the idea that maybe the time is now for the Allies to attack to not let the Germans free. This is really the beginnings of the operational method that Wsch is going to use to win the war on the Western Front. You use multiple attacks, rapid succession so that you deny the enemy any time to recover. After the battle bombed up the pressure and they keep attacking the Germans, after the 4th Army's attack had lost momentum, the British move and they shift the axis of advance to the north. The British have five field armies so they just go from one army to another and each one launches another attack. In one of these attacks, the American 27th and the 30th divisions get called into action and they take part in fighting near the village of Wormiesel and they help to capture these villages in late August and early September, 1918. And this is as part of the E-Police offensive which is essentially the German Georgia offensive in reverse. So the German Georgia offensive in April had captured a large amount of ground near the Ypres aliens in the northern part of the British line and the E-Police offensive pushed the Germans right back out of what they had captured. They win battle after battle. They keep attacking against the Germans and keep pushing them back until the Germans are forced to withdraw back to what is really their last resort, the Hindenburg Line. So in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, the Germans began to contemplate what they would do if they lost a major battle. What they decide is as a way of kind of insurance is they would construct a massive defensive line which would run along the entire western front and they would construct this far to the rear of where their soldiers are currently fighting. So while they're defending the front line trenches, there they go tens of kilometers behind the lines and they construct this state of the art defensive system. Now the Hindenburg Line is strongest opposite the British army. That's because it's built along the St. Quentin Canal. This is a 18th century canal that runs parallel to the western front and the Germans build up their defenses on either side of the canal so that they can defend on the far side and if things go really bad, they can retreat onto the other side and then hold the canal indefinitely. I mean, how are the Allies going to succeed in crossing this canal with its banks that are 16 meters high? There's only one real weak point in the St. Quentin Canal position on the Hindenburg Line and that is where the canal goes into a tunnel, a 7 kilometer long tunnel called the Bellicorps Tunnel. It's essentially a massive bridge, a 7 kilometer wide bridge over the St. Quentin Canal. While they would have to be bridging the canal under fire if they attacked elsewhere, over the Bellicorps Tunnel they could just push over it. Now the Germans weren't stupid and they recognized that the Bellicorps Tunnel represented a weak point in their line so they put their best troops out there to defend it and build up elaborate defenses along it. So it's not until late September that the British are ready to carry out this attack and it's scheduled to coincide with the other Allied attacks that really kick off Fosch's Grand Allied Offensive. So first you have the Americans going forward on the 26th of September and the Muses are gone and then next day start their attack against the Hindenburg Line and the Americans are there taking part in that. The Americans had been intended to push forward and gain a jumping offline that would be closer to their objectives prior to the opening of the actual attack. So for the 30th Division this goes okay. They're able to achieve their jumping offline. They're able to push past the outpost positions of the German troops and they gain the line where they're supposed to be. The 27th Division runs into a lot heavier resistance and they aren't able to reach their jumping offline in this preliminary operation. The British are not really going to be adaptable enough that they can adjust their artillery fire plans to account for the fact that the Americans are a lot farther from their front line than they were supposed to be. So when the artillery bombardment begins it's a rolling barrage when that opens up on the first day of the British offensive against the Hindenburg Line the American 27th Division is way far back from where that artillery is falling. Ideally a rolling barrage is within 100 meters of the infantry. It's supposed to be following the infantry along accompanying them, guiding them through the German positions. That isn't going to work when the Allied infantry has to go an extra a few hundred meters in order to catch up with the rolling barrage. And so the 27th Division has tremendous trouble on the first day of the attack on the Hindenburg Line. They take very, very heavy casualties and the fighting is incredibly confusing. Once they do break the Hindenburg Line and they breach the Bellicorps Tunnel defenses that dislocates the entire German Hindenburg system because now the defenders along the line elsewhere are going to be flanked and so they are forced to withdraw. So the next thing they have to withdraw to is something that they're going to have to hastily improvise. The plan is still for the Americans to go on the offensive as well. So the target of this offensive is going to be a salient in the line around the French town of Saint-Mahill. It had existed since 1914 and threatened the French rail line and it runs just south of the front. So reducing the salient was a major strategic objective for the Allied forces in the area and it was a really good set-piece operation that the Americans could undertake.