The Yanks Are Coming! (11 page)

At 3:45 a.m. on 6 June 1918, the Marines plowed through a wheat field against the stinging lead of German machine guns and shrapnel. When someone yelled to First Sergeant Daniel Amos “Pop” Hunter, “Hey Pop, there's a man hit over here!” the thirty-year veteran, directing his troops with a cane, replied, “C'mon, goddamnit! He ain't the last man who's gonna to be hit today.”
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Among those hit was Sergeant Hunter himself: “Hit twice and up twice, hit the third time, he went down for good.”
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Through sheer diligence the Marines kept moving against the confusion and havoc wreaked by expertly fired machine guns, seized Hill 142, and held it against counterattacks. As Marine Captain John Thomason recounted, “The Boche wanted Hill 142; he came, and the rifles broke him, and he came again. All his batteries were in action, and always his machine guns scoured the place, but he could not make head against the rifles. Guns he could understand; he knew all about bombs and auto-rifles and machine-guns and trench-mortars, but aimed, sustained rifle-fire . . . demoralized him.” Thomason took the Marine Corps attitude: “the rifle and bayonet goes anywhere a man can go, and the rifle and the bayonet win battles.”
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Its wisdom was proved at Hill 142.

The price was high, more than a thousand men. For that, the Americans had gained Hill 142, the periphery of Belleau Wood, and the ruins of Bouresches, which had been shelled by both sides and taken, methodically, by Marines using grenade, rifle, and bayonet to root out rubble-guarded machine gun nest after rubble-guarded machine gun nest—the mopping up was not completed until 13 June,
when Harbord could report, “There is nothing but U.S. Marines in the town of Bouresches.”
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INTO THE WOODS

Belleau Wood, meanwhile, remained a devil's den. The German commander, Major Josef Bischoff, a veteran of fighting in West Africa, was as much at home in the forest as in the jungle, and made the tangled woods a nightmarish shooting gallery; his defense of the woods was so gallantly conducted that he was decorated for his efforts, even if they were ultimately unsuccessful. Marine Lieutenant Victor Bleasdale, a former sergeant who had enlisted in 1915, fought in the Caribbean before the Great War, and eventually made colonel, paid the Germans this compliment: they “had some splendid snipers. Those sons-of-bitches seldom missed. They killed a guy I was talking to. I was leaning over, talking to him when the sniper shot him right in the face.”
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But if the Germans were as skilled and tenacious as ever, they found the Marines more ferocious than the accommodating French. One German soldier wrote, “The Americans are savages. They kill everything that moves.”
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From the American perspective, that was the point; they intended to give as good as they got; and the Germans had a reputation for feigning surrender, firing on the wounded, and using Red Cross armbands under false pretenses. The Marines refused to follow Fritz in deceit, but they met him full bore in the brutal business of killing.

There was heroism aplenty, including the advance of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines across four hundred yards of open wheat fields. Sergeant Dan Daly, who had already won two Medals of Honor—one during the Boxer Rebellion in China, one in Haiti—roused his men to the charge, shouting, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you
want to live forever?”
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Lieutenant Lemuel Shepherd (a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a future Marine Corps commandant) was wounded twice in the fighting at Belleau Wood. He remembered the machine guns there as the hardest thing he ever faced—in four decades of service that included two world wars and the Korean War. In his charge through the wheat fields, he was accompanied by his dog, Kiki, who kept him company after Shepherd was shot in the leg and couldn't move. Shepherd wasn't so much worried about his leg—or about getting lost in the wheat, where some casualties bled to death before they were discovered—as he was overjoyed that Kiki hadn't been hit too.

The heroism of the Marines made good press—in part because they were accompanied by Floyd Gibbons of the
Chicago Tribune
, badly wounded and a hero himself, who praised the Marines in red-hot commentary, and in part because Pershing's censors had forbidden reporters to specify any branch or unit of the Army. The Marines, however, weren't part of the Army and could at least be identified as Marines, which meant that when ink was spilled, Marines tended to sop it up. General Degoutte assisted with the Marines' publicity when he declared after the battle that the “Bois de Belleau” should henceforth be named in official papers “Bois de la Brigade des Marines.”

To readers at home, early reports from Belleau Wood vindicated their faith in American pluck. German commanders were dismissive, but also insistent on proving that the Americans were no match for the German war machine. So the battle at Belleau Wood became a bloody proving ground. On 9 June, the Marines, now knowing full well the wood was no rural idyll, pounded it with artillery, and the next day they started probing the forest. Parts of it had, indeed, in General Harbord's words, been blown “all to hell.”
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But that did
not mean the forest was cleared of the tenacious enemy. In fact, he was still there in force, machine guns rattling in deadly staccato, forcing the Marines to engage in an arboreal version of house-to-house—make it copse-to-copse—combat, a hell of poison gas, explosions, red-hot lead, and bloodied bayonets, where it was all too easy to get lost amid artillery-shorn trees that left no landmarks, and where German machine gun nests were inevitably covered by other machine gun nests, so that it seemed as if the firing would never cease. This went on for two weeks, the Marines joined by the Army's 7th Infantry Regiment, until the Germans were pounded into submission by a second massive artillery barrage on 24 June. After that, it was a matter of mopping up, which makes the fight against the remaining German machine gun nests and trench mortars and infantrymen launching grenades sound easy. It was not, for those involved, though one newly captured Marine bluffed his way into accepting the surrender of eighty-two Germans by warning a German officer that an entire Marine regiment was on its way. The Battle of Belleau Wood cost the Marine Corps more casualties than any battle it had ever fought or would fight until the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. The “Devil Dogs”—a Marine nickname picked up at the Battle of Belleau Wood
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—suffered casualties of nearly 5,200 men; American casualties as a whole were just under 9,800. But on 26 June 1918, the Marine commander of the 3rd Battalion, Major Maurice E. Shearer, was able to report, “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.”
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CHAPTER SIX

CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, “THE ROCK OF THE MARNE,” AND SOISSONS

T
he misshapen croissant of Belleau Wood had been taken, and the American performance there had impressed the Germans. German intelligence noted, “The Second American Division [Army and Marines] must be considered a very good one and may even perhaps be reckoned as a storm troop. The different attacks on Belleau Wood were carried out with bravery and dash. The moral effect of our gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry. . . . The qualities of the men individually may be described as remarkable. . . . [T]he words of a prisoner are characteristic—‘We kill or we get killed.'”
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Still, “Hell Wood,” as the Marines took to calling the Bois de Belleau, was only one spinney of concentrated horror in a massive field of battle. Throughout the spring and summer, it was the Germans who had advanced, not the Allies, and where the German army had faltered, it was only because it had outrun Ludendorff's ability to reinforce and supply it. It had also, however, suffered a million casualties and was enduring an epidemic of influenza. Still, Ludendorff was determined to make good his gains and was convinced the Allies were in no condition to strike back. He had one of his best generals, Oskar von Hutier, expand the German salient into France until he was halted by a French counterattack. By the end of the second week of July, the Allied front line appeared to have stabilized. It had stabilized for the Second Battle of the Marne.

“YOU WILL BREAK THIS ASSAULT”

Ludendorff intended, yet again, to separate the British army from the French—to isolate the British Expeditionary Force and annihilate it, while continuing to threaten Paris. On 15 July 1918, the Germans struck through the gap between Château-Thierry and the Argonne Forest. The French knew they were coming; captured German prisoners had divulged all. A week before the German attack, on 7 July, the French general Henri Gouraud rallied his army with a message to rival Haig's “backs to the wall” order of 11 April: “We may be attacked at any moment. You all know that a defensive battle was never fought under more favorable conditions. You will fight on terrain that you have transformed into a redoubtable fortress. . . . The bombardment will be terrible. You will stand it without weakening. The assault will be fierce. . . . In your hearts beat the brave and strong hearts of free men. None shall look to the rear; none shall yield a
step. . . . Each shall have but one thought, to kill, to kill plenty. . . . Your General says to you, ‘You will break this assault and it will be a glorious day.'”
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The power of these words is intensified if one remembers that the French general, the youngest in the army (forty-six when promoted brigadier, now fifty), was commanding a sector stretching from Verdun to Amiens. He was a dashing veteran of Africa, from which he carried a limp, his right sleeve (the arm sacrificed at Gallipoli) pinned to his uniform, his beard a flaming red, his kepi at a rakish tilt. General Harbord said of him, “His manner, his bearing and address more nearly satisfied my conception of the great soldiers of the First Empire than any other commander I met in France.”
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When Gouraud referred to the French positions as a “redoubtable fortress,” it was not a mere rhetorical sally. He had put into practice General Pétain's doctrine of defense-in-depth: a front line of trenches packed with mines and mustard gas, meant to absorb the terrible German bombardment, and a line of isolated machine gun squads
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to direct responding artillery fire and alert the stronger subsidiary lines of the coming German assault—though in this case the Allied artillery struck first, on the night of 14–15 July. For weeks, the Germans and Americans had tried small raids across the Marne to capture prisoners until this full-scale collision. Now the Allied shelling was so fierce that some of the assembling German units were decimated and had to be replaced, a blow that more than made up for the risk of revealing the Allied gun placements. Gouraud assumed the enemy would try to force his way down the road to Châlons-sur-Marne. He entrusted the defense of that road to the American 42nd Division. Pershing doubted the 42nd was ready; Gouraud had no such doubts.

When battle came, the French and Americans in this sector bent but didn't break. They fell back no more than four miles, and the
Germans, seeing that their offensive was kaput and under threat of counterattack, gave up trying to dislodge them. A French major who saw the 42nd “Rainbow” Division in action wrote, “The conduct of American troops has been perfect and has been greatly admired by French officers and men. Calm and perfect bearing under artillery fire, endurance of fatigue and privations, tenacity in defense, eagerness in counterattack, willingness to engage in hand-to-hand fighting—such are the qualities reported to me by all the French officers I have seen.”
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At Château-Thierry, on a line extending northeast along the winding Marne River to Varennes, was the 3rd Division, commanded by General Joseph T. Dickman, a portly sixty-year-old cavalryman and thoroughly professional soldier. A graduate of West Point and honors graduate of Cavalry School, he had also been an instructor at the Army War College and had learned enough of five languages, he said, “that he might get the letter and the spirit of the various writings of European tacticians.”
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In the field he had practiced against the likes of Geronimo in the American Southwest, striking railway men in Chicago, proud Spaniards in Cuba, ungrateful rebels in the Philippines, and perfervid Chinese Boxers. In his position along the Marne, he was not inclined to budge one inch. He placed his units with skill—and against the advice of the French general Degoutte. Degoutte wanted a strong forward line, thinking that to defend the Marne one needed “one foot in the water.” Dickman knew this was nonsense; he was already an advocate of defense-in-depth, such as Pétain preached. Dickman said he would welcome ten thousand Germans coming across the river, because if they did, he would “kill every damned one of them.”
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Still, he made a few cosmetic changes to pacify Degoutte—though they were not cosmetic to the men in the forward trenches, who became the first line of defense against the Germans landing in
their pontoon boats. When the trenches were overrun, some of the Americans fought their way back in heroic mini-odysseys that seemed more like Indian fighting (though with grenades and automatic rifles) than the over-the-top slaughter of the Western Front.

Aside from such fighting retreats that yielded little to the Germans (Pershing's insistence that the doughboys be taught the tactics of mobile, open warfare paid dividends here), the Allied line was nearly impermeable, even as the fighting was bayonet to bayonet, as could be witnessed by American pilots overhead.

One particular hot spot was held by the anchor of Dickman's right flank, the 38th Infantry, which was positioned along the Marne River, guarding the Paris-Metz road, and straddling the Surmelin Valley, through which the Germans hoped to make a breakthrough. The 38th's fiery colonel was Ulysses Grant McAlexander. He recklessly exposed himself to enemy fire, spent nights in the front lines, and went on sniping expeditions. In one incident, representative of many, a captain asked McAlexander what he was doing in frontline fighting. McAlexander responded, “Well, Captain, I suppose I should be about twenty miles back with a bunch of orderlies around me and a telephone to tell you fellows what to do. But, hell, I want to see what's going on.”
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