Military History | 1st Division Monument, Cantigny — Surmounted by a Carved Eagle of Stone
· 1919
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Military History | 1st Division Monument, Cantigny — Surmounted by a Carved Eagle of Stone
kevin
The First Division put up five monuments in France in 1919, all to one design: a small concrete shaft carrying a carved stone eagle, ringed by bronze plates. One of them stood outside Cantigny, in the Somme, about half a mile southeast of the village on the road, where the division had taken the place on the morning of 28 May 1918, in what the commission later called the first offensive operation carried out by a large American unit in the war. Its inscription gives the division's own count of that action: 199 killed, 867 wounded. The panels on its four sides and base carry the names of men killed and missing in the surrounding country.
No commission had approved any of it. Congress created the American Battle Monuments Commission four years later, in 1923, and when it began surveying what was already on the ground it named these shafts approvingly: its 1925 annual report listed the monuments it judged better than the rest, and "five First Division monuments in the form of a shaft with an eagle on top" were on that list, alongside the Missouri monument at Cheppy and four Tennessee monuments.
Approval and permission were different things. Meeting in March 1926, the commission resolved to build its own memorials and thereafter to approve only ones it considered useful to their communities: bridges, fountains, civic buildings. Its own monument at Cantigny, a stone shaft with eagles at the four upper corners, went up in the village. And in the 1938 guidebook where it tabulated the five First Division shafts, the commission wrote that further American monuments abroad "would not be in good taste and should be prohibited."
The Cantigny shaft stood in a field off a busy road, up a steep embankment, until 2018, when the village gave land and it was moved into a road triangle among the houses and rededicated for the battle's centenary. It stands about 250 metres from the government monument meant to make it unnecessary.
📸 Cover: "Typical 1st Division Battlefield Monument", plate on page 521 of the American Battle Monuments Commission's American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (1938) — representative of the five shafts, not the Cantigny one itself. Second image: "American Monument at Cantigny", plate on page 482 of the same volume. Both are works of the United States Government, public domain, via the Internet Archive.
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