Military History | 4th Division Monument, Manheulles — A Mass of Powdered Stone
· 1919
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Military History | 4th Division Monument, Manheulles — A Mass of Powdered Stone
kevin
The Fourth Division's officers watched Manheulles from observation posts on the heights before they took it. The division's history describes what they saw two kilometres across the line: "a few shattered walls still left standing to show where the town had once been," a mass of powdered stone. The division had orders not to attack without express instruction from the V American Army Corps. The instruction came, and at ten on the morning of 14 September 1918 the reserve company of each battalion went forward behind a barrage. D Company entered the village, captured three of the German soldiers falling back from it, and found field kitchens with the noon meal still cooking on them.
Manheulles stayed just inside the American line into November, and the American Battle Monuments Commission's guidebook records that its exposed position drew frequent and heavy shelling. The commission printed a photograph of a German command post taken here on 14 September: a road running between roofless walls.
The monument at the eastern exit of the village is one of three. The division's history records a convention at Neuenahr, in occupied Germany, on Sunday 29 June 1919, which voted one stone for each of the division's major engagements, and a party of the 4th Engineers built them before the division sailed. The commission's 1938 table dates all three "soon after the Armistice." Each is a pyramid-topped shaft on a triple base, with the divisional insignia sunk in bronze and a tablet reading 4TH DIVISION / UNITED STATES ARMY / 1918.
The village was rebuilt. The stone stands on the north side of the D903 where the road from Fresnes-en-Woëvre comes in, on a road that now carries the numbered milestones of the Voie de la Liberté.
📸 Cover: "German Command Post at Manheulles Captured by the 4th Division on September 14, 1918", plate on page 155 of the American Battle Monuments Commission's American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (1938) — the village in 1918, not the monument, for which no free photograph was found. Second image: page 153 of the same volume, the itinerary page that sends the tourist past the monument at the road junction. Both are works of the United States Government, public domain, via the Internet Archive.
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