In the National Archives Catalog, I found this item: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/55219337. In it, the description states that the town of Ivory, Meuse, France was in a state of preservation compared to another town from German bombing due to the presence of Germans buried there. Was this a common occurrence? Did the German soldiers figure this out themselves or were they informed? Or is this just conjecture from the photographer?
Also, what does the S.R.C. at the end of the photographer's name stand for. Thank you.
I'll let military historians answer about examples of armies refusing to damage areas where their own people were buried, but here are some thoughts about the comments made by US Army photographer Lieutenant Paul Weir Cloud, from the S.R.C., ie Signal Reserve Corps. Cloud was a professional photographer, before and after WW1. He took this fantastic picture of a French army tanker wearing a face protection made of mail.
Ivoiry (not Ivory) was a very small village in the Meuse department, 35 km north-west of Verdun. I say "was" because now it is just a hamlet of Epinonville, just 1 km away. But even in 1918 it was already small with just a handful of houses, a church (Saint-Nicolas), and a train station (which had been bombed by French aviators in August 1915). A post office directory from 1894 indicates that it had 142 inhabitants, vs 923 for Montfaucon. According to local historian Guy Pierre, Ivoiry had been occupied by the Germans since the beginning of the war, and its church used as a convalescence place for their soldiers. They also stole the church bell (L'Est Républicain, 12 November 2018).
On 26 September 1918, the Allied launched the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which combined American and French troops. The hilly ground, the heavy rain, and the shelling and machine-gun fire by the Germans holed up in the hills above made progress difficult and forced the Americans to retreat or find shelter, but they eventually took Ivoiry and Montfaucon on 27th September. There are several accounts of the (short) battle in Ivoiry, notably in the book written about the 37th Division, which mentions that German artillery observers used Ivoiry's church tower to observe the valley. The memoir of Ray N. Johnson, a machine gunner of the 145th Infantry Regiment, Heaven, hell, or Hoboken (1919) includes a couple of pages about the short battle to take Ivoiry. He notes how the men "found slight cover in the half demolished buildings of Ivoiry" and that "all night long the shells crashed down among the buildings". Guy Pierre, in the article cited above, says that the church was damaged and rebuilt after the war.
Cloud's photo shows the church tower still standing and houses that seem unharmed from afar, and he compares the situation of Ivoiry with that of the town of Montfaucon, where the damages were indeed massive. However, Montfaucon was an important stronghold for the Germans: situated on the top of a hill, it was heavily fortified and well defended by German troops. On 26-27 September, Montfaucon was flanked by several divisions of the V Corps of the American Expeditionary Force and was subjected to tough fighting until it was captured. The next page of the cited book shows a house in Montfaucon that had been fortified with concrete by the Germans. It thus makes sense that the destructions in Montfaucon were heavier than in the villages in the valley below. Ivoiry was not spared, as shown by the testimony of Johnson, but it seems to have seen less fighting and shelling.
A final comment on the presence of buried German officers in the church Saint-Nicolas in Ivoiry. Today, there is a small German military cemetary near Epinonville (pictures), with 1131 tombs. A German website dedicated to WW1 claims that the precise origin of the cemetary is unknown due to the lack of written references. Several German field hospitals were established in the area, as early as September 1914, to treat the wounded from the fighting in the Argonne forest and later in Verdun. Soldiers were first buried on the spot, and cemetaries created in the forests. As these were destroyed by artillery, later cemetaries were set up near resting places, such as Eclisfontaine, 3 km west of Ivoiry. There is no mention of Ivoiry on the German website, but we know that it did serve as a resting place, so perhaps a cemetary was put there. The regimental history of Landwehr Infantry Regiment No. 125 says that "even there [in resting places], later, in 1918, the enemy sent its shells and disturbed the peace of the dead here too." After the war, these improvised cemetaries were reorganized by the Volksbund (German War Graves Commission) and its likely that the current cemetary in Epinonville was created sometimes after 1923 after collecting bodies scattered in the area.
So it seems that there was indeed some concern in the German army about the desecration of their cemetaries by Allied artillery (as shown by the LIR 125 history), and that they tried to set up their cemetaries in zones that were better protected from shelling. If this is the case, the relatively low damages suffered by Ivoiry and neighbouring villages were not due to the presence of German cemetaries. It's the other way round: the cemetaries were put in areas that were thought to be less exposed. I doubt that Lieutenant Cloud made up the hypothesis he wrote in the note: it may be something he heard from his fellow soldiers, who themselves may have picked it up from some of the German prisoners taken by the Allied in September-October 1918. But this just me speculating: people more familiar with military history may conclude differently. Cloud took his picture on 27 October 1918, just before the final offensive that would end the war two weeks later.
In 1923, an American lady from New York, Mrs Charles H. Ditson, paid for the replacement of the stolen church bell, in memory of US Army colonel Frederick Galbraith, who had liberated Ivoiry with his men on 27 September. It was one of the 40 bells offered by Americans to French villages through the Angelus Fund. The Saint-Nicolas church in Ivoiry remained fragile: it was destroyed by a tempest in 1974 and never rebuilt. All that remains is a door arch and a few stones.
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