Military History | Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Amiens — Erected by the Citizens of Amiens
· 1919
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Military History | Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Amiens — Erected by the Citizens of Amiens
kevin
Two rows in the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 table of American memorials in Europe credit a donor who was not American. The later, dated 1923, is the sculptured group in the Place des États-Unis in Paris: "Erected by the French." The earlier is on page 526, and the whole entry is five columns wide. Unit: 6th Engineers. Location: "Cathedral at Amiens (Somme)." Character: "Tablet." Date erected: 1919. Remarks: "Erected by the citizens of Amiens to commemorate the dead of 6th Engineers lost in defense of that place."
That place was the city itself. Headquarters and Companies B and D of the 6th Engineers had been sent to the British Fifth Army in February 1918 to build bridges near Péronne. When the German offensive of 21 March broke through, the commission's account records, the British "assembled every available man" to hold the old French trenches ten miles east of Amiens, with orders to defend to the last man. That force of about 2,200 held eight miles of trench: British army troops, tunnelling, workshop and electrical companies, detachments from five schools, later 300 convalescents and 400 Canadian railwaymen, and the two American engineer companies. It was known as Carey's Force. The engineers moved into the Bois des Tailloux on 27 March and were relieved on 3 April.
The tablet is inside the cathedral, fixed to one of the great piers on the right-hand side. A carved eagle and a shield stand above the text, nine gilded stars separate the English from the French, and the engineers' castle and a US roundel sit at the foot. No name and no number is cut anywhere on it. A traveller from Vernon County, Wisconsin, copied the English down on 23 August 1922 and printed it in his hometown paper.
📸 Cover: the tablet in Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens, photograph by Carcharoth (Commons), 17 May 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 412, the map "6th Engineers (3d Div.) in the Somme Defensive, March 27-April 3, 1918", cropped to the map and its legend - a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive.
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