Military History | Audenarde American Monument, Oudenaarde — Who Fought in This Vicinity
· 1937
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Military History | Audenarde American Monument, Oudenaarde — Who Fought in This Vicinity
kevin
Two American divisions reached the approaches to Audenarde — Oudenaarde in Flemish — in the last days of October 1918, under a foreign commander. The 37th and 91st had been pulled out of the Meuse-Argonne and sent north into the Ypres-Lys offensive, which put them under the Group of Armies of Flanders, commanded by Albert I, King of the Belgians. They attacked eastward toward the Escaut, the Schelde to the people who live along it, on 31 October. The American Battle Monuments Commission's own account has the 91st Division occupying Audenarde on 2 November and finishing the next day, and the 37th forcing a crossing of the river southeast of Heurne under German fire the same day. Both were moving again on the morning of 11 November when the Armistice took effect.
The commission built the monument here itself, eight years after deciding that private American memorials in France were mostly to be prohibited because its own programme would be "complete in itself". What it chose to carve is bare. A gilded band across the top names three units, 37TH DIVISION, 91ST DIVISION and 53RD FIELD ARTILLERY BRIGADE. Below them, between two stone eagles and under a shield, is the whole of it: ERECTED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO COMMEMORATE THE SERVICES OF AMERICAN TROOPS WHO FOUGHT IN THIS VICINITY OCT. 30 – NOV. 11 1918. No commander is named, no army, no outcome, no river. The commission puts the number who fought in the area at about 40,000.
Harry Sternfeld designed it, a Philadelphia architect trained under Paul Cret at Pennsylvania, whose work the commission used elsewhere in France. Flanders' heritage inventory reads the result as sober interbellum geometry with art-deco ornament and dates the inauguration to 1937; the commission's own booklet dates the building to 1936. The golden limestone shaft stands on a stepped terrace on the Tacambaroplein where it meets Generaal Pershingstraat. The mature trees of the earliest photographs are gone, and apartment blocks now close the square.
📸 Cover: the inscribed face, photograph by Spotter2, 26 December 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the monument and its terrace the same day, same photographer and licence. Third image: "American Memorial near Audenarde, Belgium", Lot 6591-29, National Museum of the U.S. Navy, undated, public domain.
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