Military History | 3d Division Monument, Château-Thierry — Stone Monument of Medium Size
· 1961
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Military History | 3d Division Monument, Château-Thierry — Stone Monument of Medium Size
kevin
The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 guidebook printed a photograph of it: two white obelisks on an oval platform in an open square by the Marne, low walls to either side carrying the division's insignia. The table at the back of the same volume records it flatly — 3d Division, one monument, "Chateau-Thierry (Aisne), northwest of the main bridge", "Stone monument of medium size", 1923, "Erected by division to its deeds and dead." Elsewhere the tour directions add that a building holding a small museum of war relics stood beside it, and that the government's own monument on Hill 204 could be seen from the bridge in the distance.
The division had reason to mark that crossing. Its 7th Machine Gun Battalion reached the town late on 31 May 1918, as German troops entered the northern outskirts, and took positions on the south bank to cover the bridges. Two of its guns were still on the far side with French detachments during the night of 1 June, when the highway bridge was blown up by the French to prevent a crossing; those crews fought their way to the railway bridge and recrossed there. On the same pages that list the monument, the commission gives its opinion that further American memorials abroad "would not be in good taste and should be prohibited."
The book was two years old when the bridge went down a second time. Château-Thierry was fought over again in June 1940 and the monument beside it did not survive; accounts differ over whose demolition took it. Members of the 3rd Infantry Division Association rebuilt it in 1961, about two hundred metres west of the Place des États-Unis where the first one stood, on the north bank off Avenue Jules Lefebvre. The wall reads IN MEMORIAM 1917-1918 1942-1945. Traffic crosses now on the Pont Aspirant de Rougé, built in place of the bridge lost in 1940 and named, French accounts of the town say, for the officer whose men defended it.
📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (Washington, 1938) — p. 60, plate captioned "3d Division Monument at Chateau-Thierry". Second image: p. 58, plate captioned "Main Bridge at Chateau-Thierry, Blown Up by French to Prevent Germans from Crossing". Works of the United States Government, public domain.
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