Military History | Tennessee Monument, Bellicourt — Small Monument of Cut Stone
· 1923
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Military History | Tennessee Monument, Bellicourt — Small Monument of Cut Stone
kevin
At half past five on the morning of 29 September 1918 the 27th and 30th Divisions, American units serving with the British armies in France, went forward in autumn mist and low cloud against the German positions above the St. Quentin Canal tunnel. The 30th Division's leading waves crossed the main German trench system and pushed on past the tunnel toward Nauroy. The southern mouth was blocked and Bellicourt was taken. German troops who had come back to the surface through underground passages the attackers knew nothing about then remanned machine-gun nests behind the advance, and scattered fighting went on across the zone all morning.
Five years later the State of Tennessee put up a small monument of cut stone on the grass beside the main road, a little over a kilometre south of the village. The American Battle Monuments Commission's own 1938 guidebook lists it as erected in 1923, to her troops of the 59th and 60th Brigades. A tapered shaft on a stepped base carries the dedication in English on one face and in French on another, with a bronze Great Seal of the United States on a third. Both texts say the same thing: that these were the Tennessee troops who broke the Hindenburg Line on that date.
The rules changed around it. The commission toured the battlefields in 1924 and reported that existing American monuments, whatever their emotional appeal, reflected poorly on the country's image, and the regulations it drew up that September restricted memorials to units smaller than a division. Its 1925 report all the same listed the ones it judged better than the rest, beginning with the Missouri monument at Cheppy and going on to four Tennessee monuments, "like the one near Bellicourt".
It stands today on the verge of the D1044, about thirty metres from the Touage de Riqueval and its free car park.
📸 Cover and second image: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (Washington, 1938) — p. 377, plate captioned "Monument Erected by the State of Tennessee South of Bellicourt", and p. 374, the map "27th and 30th Divisions in Somme Offensive September 24-30, 1918". Works of the United States Government, public domain.
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