Military History | Château-Thierry American Monument — The Reduction That Was Only Half Made

In October 1926 the American Battle Monuments Commission told its consulting architect that the design for the monument on Hill 204, the cote 204 above Château-Thierry, was to be reduced "as much as possible without disturbing the general effect." Paul Philippe Cret's double colonnade had just been chosen unanimously by the commission and by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. The objection was arithmetic. The ABMC had ranked its three commemorative monuments by the number of American troops it counted in each operation — 1,200,000 at Montfaucon, 600,000 at Montsec, 300,000 here — and its chairman, General John J. Pershing, held that the Meuse-Argonne was "by far our most important operation and the memorial to commemorate it should be the most imposing."

Here the order met resistance. Major X. H. Price, the officer in charge, was not in favour of a reduction. In January 1927 the Fine Arts Commission answered that the monument "is none too large to be effective in the landscape", and that if the approved size was not to be built, an entirely new design should be submitted. Cret proposed an average of the original and the reduced schemes; the commission approved it. That compromise is what stands: twenty-four channelled piers rising sixty feet above the platform, along a terrace Cret's own outline put at four hundred and twenty feet, with Alfred-Alphonse Bottiau's figures of Columbia and Marianne on one face and an eagle on the other.

Building ran from 1928 to 1930, the bids $80,000 over the allotment, and the monument was dedicated on 7 October 1937, the last the ABMC dedicated. A German attack forced the staff out on 18 May 1940 and the ridge was occupied; returning that July, an ABMC officer counted thirty-two places where bullets had chipped the stone and found the basement room ransacked. France listed the monument and its two boundary pillars as a monument historique on 11 July 2018, the year a visitor centre also opened below the terrace. Admission is free, and from the terrace the view down the Marne valley is the one the argument was about.

📸 Cover: the eagle façade and colonnade, with the division names cut into the terrace wall — Art davis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the colonnade with Bottiau's Columbia and Marianne — Antoine Fleury-Gobert (User:Zeugma fr), CC BY-SA 3.0.