Reply To: Centennial Gaming in the Great War – Returns!

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Thanks very much, @damon – this is actually a really great post because it hist something we weren’t able to include in the article series (one of the main purposes of these support threads) – specifically – Part 04.

This covered the Blücher-Yorck Offensive, which British historians I record as the Third battle of the Aisne.  We focused on the virtual destruction and later recovery of the French 6th Army along the Chemin des Dames ridge, the breakthrough between Soissons and Reims (where these burial sites were rededicated), and the employment of US 2nd and 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd Infantry containing the 4th Marine Brigade (5th and 6th Marine Regiments) at Belleau Wood.

So if this battle was fought by a French army with some smaller US reinforcements, where are these British majors coming from?

The defense of the Aisne area was in the hands of General Denis Auguste Duchêne, commander of the French Sixth Army. In addition, four divisions of the British IX Corps, led by Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Hamilton-Gordon, held the Chemin des Dames Ridge; they had been posted there to rest and refit after surviving the “Michael” battle.

So we completely “missed” British participation in this battle, focused instead on their April-May 1918 fighting in Flanders, Amiens, Villers Bretonneux, and Ypres.

And of course, the fact that neither @neves1789 or I had that many British WW1 miniatures didn’t help.  🙂