Rock of the Marne: The American Soldiers Who Turned the Tide Against the Kaiser in World War I
368
Rock of the Marne: The American Soldiers Who Turned the Tide Against the Kaiser in World War I
368Hardcover
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Overview
The soldiers of the Third U.S. Infantry Division in World War I were outnumbered and inexperienced young men facing hardened veterans, but their actions proved to be a turning point during the last German offensive of World War I.
In stopping three German divisions from crossing the Marne River, these heroic American soldiers blocked the road to Paris east of Château-Thierry, helped save the French capital and, in doing so, played a key role in turning the tide of the war. The Allies then began a counteroffensive that drove the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line, and four months later the war was over.
Rock of the Marne follows the Third Division’s Sixth Brigade, which took the brunt of the German attack. The officers, many of them West Pointers and elite Ivy Leaguers, fighting side-by-side with enlisted men—city dwellers and country boys, cowboys and coal miners who came from every corner of America along with newly planted immigrants from Europe—answered their country’s call to duty.
This is the gripping true account of one of the most important—yet least explored—battles of World War I.
INCLUDES PHOTOS
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780425275566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 650,323 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Also by Stephen L. Harris
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
World War I Timeline
PROLOGUE: “WE’RE HERE FOR BUSINESS”
CHAPTER 1: “THEY MAY KILL US, BUT THEY CANNOT WHIP US”
CHAPTER 2: “GOIN’ TO HELL”
CHAPTER 3: “BAD MILITARY ETHICS”
CHAPTER 4: “THE FIRST AND PRINCIPAL DUTY . . . IS SECRECY”
CHAPTER 5: GERMAN PREPARATIONS
CHAPTER 6: “PRISONERS ARE URGENTLY NEEDED”
CHAPTER 7: “THE MARNE MUST BE DEFENDED WITH ONE FOOT IN THE WATER”
CHAPTER 8: “THE 38TH WAS GIVEN THIS ‘GATEWAY TO PARIS’”
CHAPTER 9: “TO KNOW THAT A SHOT IS AIMED CARRIES A DREAD”
CHAPTER 10: THE “FROSTY SONS OF THUNDER”
CHAPTER 11: “THE PERIOD OF WAITING”
CHAPTER 12: “AT LAST WE WERE READY”
CHAPTER 13: “WITH GOD, FOR KAISER AND THE NATION”
CHAPTER 14: “ALL THE DEMONS OF HELL”
CHAPTER 15: “IT WAS SOMETHING AWFUL”
CHAPTER 16: “OUT OF A NIGHT AS BLACK AS THE MOUTH OF HELL THEY CAME!”
CHAPTER 17: “THE RIVERBANK IS CARPETED WITH GERMAN DEAD”
CHAPTER 18: “THERE THEY ARE! SHOOT THEM! SHOOT THEM!”
CHAPTER 19: FRIENDLY FIRE
CHAPTER 20: “THEIR DEAD MINGLED WITH OURS ALONG THE TRACK”
CHAPTER 21: “WE’VE GOT TO FIGHT, BOYS, SO WE MIGHT AS WELL START IT OURSELVES”
CHAPTER 22: “THEN I HOLD MY LINES”
CHAPTER 23: “WHILE WE ARE YET ALIVE, LET’S GIVE ’EM HELL!”
CHAPTER 24: “THIS IS THE ROCK OF THE MARNE”
EPILOGUE: “DANGER BE DAMNED: WAR IS ALWAYS DANGEROUS”
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Sources and Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
The First World War (1914–1918) was the war that changed the world.
Empires were lost, monarchies overthrown, borders altered and new countries and new governments came into being. Horrific weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time—heavy artillery that fired from miles away, flattening towns and villages and even reaching into the heart of Paris; airplanes that dropped bombs from the sky; and poisonous gases that soaked the battlefield. Ten million people lost their lives. Millions more were hurt, either physically or mentally, soldiers and civilians alike. It was so ghastly it became known as the war to end all wars. And by the time it was over the United States had become a world power.
The cause of the war is still debated, but the assassination on June 28, 1914, of the heir to the Austria-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serb terrorists in Sarajevo, led to its start. His murder upset the balance of power between two groups—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, later known as the Central Powers, and the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Great Britain, later the Allies. Relying on German support, Austria declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia mobilized against Austria, causing Germany to declare war on Russia and two days later to declare war on France. Then, attacking on two fronts, the Germans checked the Russians on the Eastern Front and, in an effort to reach Paris, swung through neutral Belgium on the Western Front. Because the Germans had invaded Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany. This declaration drew Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India into the conflict. Italy tried to remain neutral but eventually sided with the Allies. Meanwhile, the crumbling Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Other nations also joined the fight, opening multiple fronts—including the Balkans, Egypt, Palestine and Arabia and even Persia. The United States, however, stayed out of the war.
On the Western Front, after the First Battle of the Marne, where the French stopped the Germans from reaching Paris, the war bogged down into trench warfare. Victories were measured in yards captured. The number of casualties was gruesome. The battles became legend: Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, Caporetto, Gallipoli, Verdun, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Passchendaele, Soissons, the Meuse-Argonne, the storming of the Hindenburg Line and, the turning point of the war and the subject of this book, the Second Battle of the Marne.
At sea, Great Britain strung a naval blockade around German ports. Germany responded with unrestricted submarine warfare. Its U-boats torpedoed merchant ships and then on May 7, 1915, without warning, sank the British luxury liner Lusitania. Among the 1,198 passengers and crew lost were 128 Americans. Reaction in the United States became so hostile against Germany that unlimited submarine warfare stopped.
The year 1917 finally brought the United States into the war. Germany not only resumed unrestricted submarine attacks, sinking more American ships, but also in secret negotiations tried to provoke Mexico into invading the United States if Mexico’s neighbors to the north entered the war against the Central Powers. For the United States it was the last straw. On April 6, it went to war against Germany.
At the time, America was totally unprepared. It had a regular army of 127,588 soldiers and 76,713 National Guardsmen. When General John J. Pershing was put in command of the American Expeditionary Forces, he called for an army of over one million men. Building up that army, training it and then getting it to France in time to play a major role in the war was an extraordinary feat. It took almost a year before the United States had sufficient troops on the ground in Europe and elsewhere to make a difference in the outcome of the war.
In the spring of 1918 it made its presence known to the Germans at Cantigny, Soissons and Belleau Wood, and then, on July 15, Americans, fighting alongside the French, hurled back German armies attacking across the Marne River and in the Champagne region. With the Germans stopped, Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander, ordered a masterful counteroffensive that eventually drove the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line. There the Allies succeeded in storming the line.
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Germany capitulated and an armistice was signed. World War I was over.
WORLD WAR I TIMELINE
1914
June 28. Heir to the Austria-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated in Sarajevo.
July 28. Austria-Hungarian Empire declares war on Serbia.
July 31. Russia, an ally of Serbia, mobilizes its military.
August 1. Germany declares war on Russia.
August 3. Germany declares war on France.
August 4. Germany declares war on neutral Belgium and invades the tiny country in a right-flanking move designed to defeat France. Because of the invasion, Great Britain declares war on Germany.
August 22. Battle of the Frontiers. In an offensive move near the German border France loses 27,000 men.
August 26–30. Battle of Tannenberg. On the Eastern Front the German army, led by Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, defeat the Russians.
September 5–10. First Battle of the Marne. French soldiers stop the Germans from reaching Paris.
1915
February 4. German submarines blockade Great Britain, warning that any ship on course toward England is a target.
April 25. The Allies open a failed nine-month campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula, resulting in 200,000 men killed or wounded.
May 7. German U-boat sinks the Lusitania. 1,198 passengers, including 128 Americans, drown.
August 20. As anger grows in America, Germany halts unrestricted warfare against merchant ships.
December 19. General Sir Douglas Haig takes command of the British Expeditionary Force.
1916
February 21–December 18. Battle of Verdun. The longest battle of the war results in nearly one million casualties.
April 9. The Canadians win the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
May 31–June 1. Battle of Jutland. The navies of Great Britain and Germany fight to a draw in the war’s only major engagement at sea.
July 1–November 18. Battle of the Somme. The British offensive against the Germans fails to make a breakthrough. Casualties reach more than one million.
November 7. Woodrow Wilson reelected president with the slogan “He kept us out of the war.”
December 7. David Lloyd George is new prime minister of England.
1917
January 19. British uncover and translate German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann’s telegram urging Mexico to invade the United States.
February 1. Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare.
March 15. Russian tsar Nicholas II abdicates.
April 6. The United States declares war on Germany.
April 16–29. Battle of Chemin des Dames. France makes little gain against the Germans, 250,000 casualties.
April 29–May 20. More than half-a-million French soldiers mutiny.
May 10. General John J. Pershing takes command of the American Expeditionary Forces.
May 18. The United States passes the Selective Service Act to draft able-bodied men for the armed services.
July 3. The first American soldiers land in France to a rousing welcome.
July 31–September 10. Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele. Again no Allied breakthrough as the dead and wounded on both sides tally 700,000 men.
October 23. U.S. troops in combat for the first time.
November 7. Led by Lenin, the Bolsheviks overthrow the Russian government.
December 3. Russia’s new government signs an armistice agreement with Germany.
1918
January 8. President Wilson sets forth his Fourteen Points for world peace.
March 21. The Somme Offensive, the first of five German offensives planned by Ludendorff before the Americans become a factor in the war, is launched against the British on a sixty-mile front.
April 3. Ferdinand Foch is named supreme Allied commander.
April 9. The Lys Offensive begins against the British, this time in Flanders.
April 12. General Haig galvanizes his armies by ordering them to fight “with their backs against the wall.”
May 27. The Aisne Offensive, Ludendorff’s third of the year, led by his First and Seventh Armies, crushes the French Sixth Army at Chemin des Dames.
May 28–29. Battle of Cantigny. General Pershing rushes his Second and Third divisions north to reinforce the French. The Second Division captures the village of Cantigny against veteran German forces, boosting the Allies’ morale.
May 30–June 17. Battles of Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry. A U.S. Marine brigade attached to the Second Division and reinforced with elements of the Third Division stops the Germans at Belleau Wood while the Third’s Seventh Machine Gun Battalion halts the enemy at Château-Thierry.
June 9–13. The Noyon-Montdidier Offensive, Ludendorff’s fourth of the year, is stymied by the French under General Henri Pétain.
July 15. Ludendorff’s fifth offensive, named Friedensturm (“Peace Assault”), opens in the Marne-Champagne sectors.
July 15–17. Second Battle of the Marne, the turning point of the Great War, is fought with Americans playing a key role.
July 16–17. The Bolsheviks murder Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
July 18. Field Marshal Foch opens French counteroffensive that starts to drive the German armies back toward the Hindenburg Line.
August 8. Allied counteroffensive on the Somme pushes the Germans into retreat.
September 26–November 11. The Meuse-Argonne offensive, including the storming of the Hindenburg Line, brings an end to the war.
November 11. At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month the Allies and Germany sign an armistice agreement and after four years and thirty-seven million casualties peace comes to the Western Front.
1919
May 7–June 28. Treaty of Versailles.
PROLOGUE
“WE’RE HERE FOR BUSINESS”
On the morning of May 29, 1918, an urgent memorandum from General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces headquarters at Chaumont, France, carried an ominous warning to the Third U.S. Infantry Division, then in training nearby at Châteauvillain and its suburbs. “The 3d Division has been ordered to hold all units now in the divisional area in readiness to move this afternoon or tonight by motor truck or train to the north for the purpose of furnishing bridge guards for the bridge across the MARNE.”
No destination was mentioned, but it was soon learned it was Château-Thierry, which had so far escaped much of the carnage of the First World War. The French there were in dire trouble as the Germans launched their fourth offensive of the year, termed “Operation Blücher,” with the goal to defeat the British Expeditionary Force by forcing the French to move their reserves to the south, thus weakening the British army in Flanders and giving the Germans a tremendous advantage in manpower.
On May 27, a day after the start of Operation Blücher, one of the worst disasters struck the Allies. The French Sixth Army, under command of an arrogantly incompetent General Denis Duchêne, had blundered on the heights overlooking the Ailette River at Chemin des Dames. Ignoring orders from General Henri Pétain, his superior, to employ a defense in depth, known also as an elastic defense, against the German First and Seventh Armies, he bunched up seven divisions, three of them British, on the front line like sardines in a can. It left him no rear reserves and no chance to counterattack. The Germans hit Duchêne with a terrible artillery bombardment until his army was no more. According to supreme Allied commander Ferdinand Foch, the soldiers had simply “melted away as fast as they were flung into battle.” Quickly taking advantage of Duchêne’s blunder, the Germans drove his battered survivors back across the Aisne River for twelve miles and opened up a twenty-five-mile-wide breach in the Allied line. Three days later, the German Seventh Army reached the Marne River at Château-Thierry—Germany’s deepest penetration into France since the start of the war. The German advance had extended the battle zone to the Marne, forming the “Marne Pocket”—an enormous triangular-shaped salient that was delineated by Château-Thierry as its apex and the city of Soissons to the northwest and the city of Rheims to the northeast. Each side of this triangular salient measured more than forty miles. The strategic military importance of Soissons and Rheims were their two key rail junctures; for a German army stretched too thin, capturing the railways in the Marne Pocket was a top priority. It would enable the rapid shifting of Germany’s forces to critical areas.
After the battle of Chemin des Dames, the triumphant men of the German Fifth Grenadier Guards boasted to a captured lieutenant colonel of a beaten French infantry regiment, “Tomorrow we shall march to Paris.” The proud lieutenant colonel, remembering the First Battle of the Marne, shot back, “No sir. To Paris? Never! Think of 1914! The Marne!” First Lieutenant Kurt Hesse of the Fifth Grenadiers, a regiment of picked storm troopers, remembered the officer’s grave and dignified reply. “We respected his pride and—had a moment of reflection. Then, however, joy over the glorious success of the day prevailed. The Marne had been reached . . . from Chemin des Dames, across the Aisne and the Vesle, to the legendary stream. Scarcely any losses. The enemy, on the contrary, had suffered most serious damage. ‘Let us advance on Paris!’”
Across the river, General Pétain wondered if his “feeble French units,” as Foch now described them, could hold the Marne.
“No doubt,” recalled Foch, “the [German] high command intended to open up the road to Paris at all costs.”
The French capital was a tempting forty miles away.
In fact, the French government was preparing to flee to Bordeaux. A rumor reached the German high command that, according to a Seventh Army intelligence report, “large banks are sending all their valuable papers to cities in the west of France. Many people are leaving Paris with their belongings. The Paris, Orleans and Lyons railroad station [sic] decline to accept any more freight for transportation.”
Foch immediately met with Pétain. They anxiously went over the dire situation facing the Allies. Foch made it clear that it was most crucial that the “enemy’s advance on Paris must be stopped . . . especially in the region north of the Marne,” even if it meant a “foot-by-foot defense of the territory.” Orders, he said, must be drawn up “prescribing exactly what the troops must do, and see that these orders are strictly carried out by removing any commanding officer who shows signs of weakness.”
North of the Marne, a confident General Erich Ludendorff—Germany’s military mastermind since 1916—strongly believed another offensive offered a great opportunity to end the war. At a secret conference with Germany’s imperial chancellor Georg von Hertling and field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, they agreed “our first step is to strike with all our might once more,” and then the “depressed” Allies would certainly sue for peace. Hertling believed that by the first of September the Allies would be sending peace proposals to the German government.
No wonder Ludendorff named his next offensive Friedensturm (“Peace Assault”).
—
After the disastrous battle of Chemin des Dames, a shaken French General Jean Marie Joseph Degoutte, who in a few weeks would be counted on by Foch to stop the Germans at the Marne River east of Château-Thierry, leaned over a table covered with a tattered map showing the enemy’s threatening advances on the Western Front. He began to weep. Like many on the Allied side, Degoutte, soon to replace the disgraced Duchêne as commander of the demoralized French Sixth Army, had to wonder if, in fact, the Boche could ever be stopped. After all, back on December 15, 1917, Germany’s armistice with Russia had freed up nearly fifty divisions for the Western Front. Now the enemy held a commanding numerical advantage over the Allies. There just weren’t enough French and British troops to stem the tide, and the battle-worn veterans that were available had almost no strength left to go up one more time against the superior German army.
The Allies needed bodies! The fifty-two-year-old Degoutte knew it. Foch and Pétain knew it. And so did the British high command. To bolster his razor-thin ranks, Degoutte used soldiers from Africa—the Moroccans and the Senegalese. But what about the Americans? When it came to needed manpower, Degoutte had to wonder about them, as did almost every desperate French, Belgian and English citizen. More than a year had passed since the United States had declared war on Germany, and still, except for one division, the Americans seemed not ready to fight. Would they be ready before France had to sue for peace? A British soldier, watching from shore the ship carrying the Third Division into the great port of Le Havre, summed up the feelings of the Allies when he yelled up at the Americans leaning against the ship’s railing. “Hit’s ’igh time you fellas wuz gitten ’ere!” The rebuke stung the soldiers. Then one of them shot back in a Yankee drawl, “Say, if you guys over here had only amounted to somethin’ on your job, we wouldn’ta had to come!”
The rejoinder set the officers from the Sixth Brigade howling with laughter. Mused the commander of the brigade, Brigadier General Charles Crawford, “The heart of Europe had spoken to America and the heart of America had replied.”
But the Germans were betting that the Americans were arriving too late and that their inexperience would make them easy prey when they reached the front lines. After striking quickly at the Rheims salient thirty-five miles east of Château-Thierry, followed by another strike on about August 1 against the British to the west in Flanders, code-named Operation Hagen, where they’d threaten the six main Channel ports, including Dunkirk, the Boche planned to turn toward Paris and end the war before the United States became a factor.
Although the number of U.S. soldiers on the Western Front was increasing by ten thousand a day, the AEF commander was not going to let them fill the gaps in the Allies’ line willy-nilly—soldiers here, soldiers there. General Pershing’s goal was to build his own army and have it fight under its own flag. That took time. Maybe by late fall his army would be ready, certainly by the spring of 1919.
After the Chemin des Dames debacle, he sent a sobering cable to Secretary of War Newton Baker. “The attitude of the Supreme War Council, which has been in session since Saturday, is one of depression. The prime ministers and General Foch appeal most urgently for trained or even untrained men. . . . It should be most fully realized at home that the time has come for us to take up the brunt of the war and that France and England are not going to be able to keep their armies at present strength very much longer.”
As Pershing saw it, the time was soon coming when the Americans would be called upon to win the war. Thus, he would only allow fully manned and trained divisions to be attached to the French and English, and temporarily. He had offered that deal to the Allies in March, but for some reason they hadn’t taken him up on it. Now, with the German armies preparing to cross the Marne at Château-Thierry, it was time to hold Pershing to that offer. General Pétain pleaded for at least two divisions to be sent north. The enemy had to be stopped at the river. Once across, Paris was in peril. With the government about to flee the capital, Pershing knew that “at this moment the morale of the Allies required that American troops make their appearance in battle.” Only two of his divisions were near enough to the Germans—the Second and Third.
Because the Third Division, at Châteauvillain, was closest to Château-Thierry, Pershing ordered it to leave at once for the Marne.
For the stout, bespectacled sixty-year-old commander of the Third Division, Major General Joseph T. Dickman, an ex–cavalry officer who spoke French, German and Spanish fluently, organizing and moving more than twenty-five thousand men by train or other means of transportation at a moment’s notice was no easy task. It would take at least a day or two to locate enough trains at nearby rail yards and round up enough motor trucks and load them with troops and supplies and, as he put it, “all the paraphernalia of the panoply of war.” The best the 1881 graduate of West Point could do in such a short time was to send his Seventh Motorized Machine Gun Battalion along with some troops from the Fourth Infantry on ahead. At the time, the machine-gun battalion was the AEF’s only motorized battalion on the Western Front. He knew his decision meant that 24 officers and 353 of his men would have to make a stand against the entire German Seventh Army poised on the outskirts of Château-Thierry.
“The progress of events now became rapid,” Dickman wrote. “The French were driven from the Chemin des Dames, and the Germans were headed for Paris. The 3d Division was destined for a quiet sector north of Toul, in conformity with the practice of giving the divisions some trench experience. My preliminary reconnaissance with a view of relieving the 26th Division took place at Boucq on May 28; but recall came by telephone and our destination was changed.”
At 10:30 a.m. on May 30, Decoration Day, Dickman sent out his first field order of the war. To Major Edward G. Taylor, he wrote, “7th Machine Gun Battalion will proceed at once by road to CONDE-en-Brie.” The rest of the division and artillery, and all but one detachment of the Sixth Engineers, would follow in a day or two.
The Third Division, barely three months in France and with hardly any training, even back at Camp Greene, North Carolina, where the brutal winter of 1917–1918 had curtailed much of its instruction, was off to the front. Of all the American divisions in France, the Third was least likely ready for combat. Warned a French staff officer, “They have had absolutely no front line experience and should therefore be used with judgment.”
At 2:55 that afternoon, four hours after Major Taylor had received Dickman’s field order, the convoy of the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion pulled out of Laferté-sur-Aube near Châteauvillain for its 110-mile journey to Condé-en-Brie, a small village on the confluence of the Surmelin and Dhuys Rivers. The convoy was comprised of seventeen squads, nine in A Company and eight in B Company, forty-eight half-ton Model T Ford motor trucks (each one overloaded by five hundred pounds), six other trucks, five touring cars (all built in England with steering wheels on the right side) and twenty-four Indian motorcycles (several equipped with sidecars). None of the machine gunners had seen or even driven any of the vehicles until May 24—six days before their departure. The battalion had to be canvassed for experienced drivers. Others had to be trained in a hurry.
If that wasn’t worrisome enough, the equipment to be carried included thirty-two air-cooled French M1914 Hotchkiss machine guns, which the men had only started to learn how to operate four weeks earlier. Enough ammunition had to be found to keep the Germans at bay until the rest of the division arrived at Château-Thierry. Also, crammed aboard each truck were five-gallon cans of gasoline, supplies and rations for three days, and each soldier’s backpack, some carrying personal belongings.
“By the dint of perseverance, by May 30th the train could be formed, started and stopped with occasional collisions,” wrote B Company commander Captain John R. Mendenhall from Indiana, a West Pointer, as had been his father and grandfather before him. A fellow captain of Mendenhall’s described him as a man with a “fine sense of humanity and sweetness” and a “brilliant young officer.”
The route took the machine gunners, led by motorcycle patrols reconnoitering and marking the way, northeast along the Aube River, then past Mer-sur-Seine and the villages of Anglure, Sézanne, Montmort and Orbays, still untouched by the war. Homes were neat and trim. Flowers were in full bloom, strawberries there for the picking and orchards filled with apples. Wheat grew in the fields alongside the road, ready to be harvested. It looked as if that part of the world was at peace.
At first the convoy’s speed was kept at twenty miles per hour, which turned out to be too fast. Many of the trucks could not keep up. Because of the overloading, springs squashed atop axles, tires blew out, and then the convoy began to separate, opening mile-long gaps between the vehicles. A slower pace of twelve miles per hour was agreed on. The steep hills were the worst. In some cases, the men had to climb out of their trucks and walk to the top of the hills, oftentimes pushing their vehicles.
“Delays were frequent,” Captain Mendenhall remembered. “Motorcycles proved invaluable in guiding and carrying spare parts to broken-down trucks.”
Lieutenant Paul T. Funkhouser from Evansville, Indiana, a twenty-three-year-old lawyer yet to practice his trade, led the way aboard his motorcycle. He kept riding back and forth to let the drivers know where to go, and then dashing off to the head of the column. Another motorcyclist was Private C. L. Stewart, who stayed in the saddle for twenty-four straight hours, even after he had suffered shrapnel wounds in the neck, back and both legs as the battalion closed in on Château-Thierry.
It was 9 p.m. by the time the convoy neared Sézanne. It had traveled almost one hundred miles in seven hours. Here it refueled, vehicles that needed it were overhauled, and the men took a well-deserved rest. Condé-en-Brie was not too far up the road. With any luck they’d be there by morning.
After the break, the journey started up again. Although it was the dead of night, no lights were allowed. Traveling became harder. The convoy again got stretched out. At daybreak, it began to run into thousands of refugees fleeing from the towns along the Marne. They came trudging toward the Americans, most of them with tears streaking their faces, carrying everything of value they could take with them. Oxen pulled hay wagons piled high with furniture, bedding, birdcages and chicken coops. Children walked next to their mothers, clutching their skirts. Men and women without animals to be hitched to their carts had strapped themselves in harnesses and now struggled mightily to pull their load along the dusty road. The stream of refugees was endless. The road was jammed with them, slowing the convoy to even more of a crawl.
Looking down from his truck, First Lieutenant Luther W. Cobbey from Cleveland, Ohio, saw “French women and old men leading cows and sheep; some with a few belongings loaded on one-horse wagons. Some pushing hand carts and moving in every conceivable way. Some carried bundles on their backs. These refugees took up most of the road. It was very hard for us to get our Company past.”
Recalled Mendenhall, “The expressions on the faces of the refugees were most pitiful and we began for the first time to realize something of the real meaning of war.”
He remembered, too, how they still managed to “smile and wave encouragement to ‘les Américains,’ who alone were moving north against the current of fear and depression.”
Mixed in with the refugees were retreating French and British soldiers, thoroughly demoralized and discouraged. Behind them came horse-drawn artillery. Up on the hills beside the road, light artillery batteries were being set up and the French fired at the unseen enemy somewhere up ahead. As the convoy drove on, the Americans heard the distant roar of incoming artillery.
At half-past noon on May 31, after being on the road for twenty-two hours with no sleep and covering 110 miles, the convoy entered Condé-en-Brie with radiators steaming and gasoline low. The village was under artillery attack. Amid the shelling, Major Taylor met with a French colonel who ordered his battalion to continue on to Château-Thierry and report to General Jean-Baptiste Marchand, commander of the 10th Colonial Division. Once again, the convoy was on the move, heading toward the Marne. As the shelling continued, the men loaded their machine guns—just in case.
But where was Château-Thierry? Since leaving Condé-en-Brie, Taylor and his men had been driving for more than three hours. On their journey, they had been lost several times and they didn’t want to get lost again now that they were so close to the fighting. Still driving past the endless stream of refugees, Taylor and his officers were surprised to see several American war correspondents in the company of the retreating soldiers. The reporters were equally surprised to see American soldiers.
An officer hollered to them, “Where’s Château-Thierry?”
“Just up ahead,” one of the reporters answered. “Are you here for pleasure or for fighting?”
“We’re here for business!”
One hour later, the exhausted men of the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion finally reached their destination. It was 3:30 in the afternoon.
—
Château-Thierry, a small city of gray-stone buildings and red-tiled roofs, straddles the Marne. As the river cuts through Château-Thierry, a canal paralleling it forms a big city island of crisscrossing streets of shops, restaurants, residences and a park. The largest portion of the city is on the north side, where the French and Germans were now fighting street-to-street, house-to-house. A bluff dominates the north side, with an ancient, fortified castle built in 720 by Charles Martel, considered one of France’s greatest hero's and the grandfather of Charlemagne. From the top of the castle, the Germans had a sweeping command of the entire city and surrounding countryside. When the Germans first reached the outskirts of Château-Thierry, Lieutenant Kurt Hesse thought the “ground before us looked like a paradise. The sun shone brightly, and a cool breeze was blowing through the valley. This was a different atmosphere—not war, but peace.” A park guarded by two towers led up to the ancient castle.
Dominating the south side of Château-Thierry, which was level ground, was an extensive system of rail yards. The tracks of the Paris-Metz railroad passed through this area. Two bridges crossed the Marne and a third crossed the canal. There were no other bridges for five miles in either direction, making Château-Thierry the key location for crossing the river. The bridges over the Marne were named for their location: West Bridge, East Bridge. On the north bank, the West Bridge exited into a large square. Beyond the square stood the park and then the bluff and ancient castle. The East Bridge, on the right, was about four hundred yards distant, near a police station and sugar refinery. On the other side of the bridge, from east to west, ran a river road with green, waist-high wheat fields between it and the river. Where it flowed past Château-Thierry, the Marne was about fifty feet wide and too deep to ford. To stop the Germans from overrunning the city, the bridges had to be defended.
One mile south of Château-Thierry at a cantonment in the village of Nesles, two of Major Taylor’s company commanders, Mendenhall and Captain Charles Houghton, reported to General Marchand, a legendary French officer, while the rest of the strung-out convoy arrived in bits and pieces. A dashing figure with a resplendent beard, the fifty-four-year-old Marchand had fought in Africa in the 1880s, had been part of the conquest of Senegal and had stayed on to explore sources of the Niger and Nile Rivers. In Africa, he had faced down the great British soldier, Lord Kitchener in a territorial dispute in eastern Africa, almost starting a war with England. The general explained that he was in total command of the defense of Château-Thierry and directed Mendenhall and Houghton to bring up their guns immediately, “to occupy positions on the south bank of the Marne, to cover the approaches to the bridges and to"protect"the withdrawal of the French to the south shore, after which these bridges, now being mined, would be destroyed.”
At 6 p.m., the convoy “rushed” into Château-Thierry, wrote Lieutenant Cobbey, “going under shell fire for the first time.” When it reached Rue Carnot, the city’s main street that ran straight as an arrow toward the West Bridge, the Americans grabbed their Hotchkiss machine guns, ammunition strips and rations, everything but their backpacks, and leaped from the trucks. Rifle fire crackled in the distance as the Germans forced the French back across the Marne. Joining a contingent of Senegalese soldiers from Marchand’s 10th Colonial Division, the men of the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion dashed to their assigned positions in the besieged city as artillery shells fell around them, blowing holes in buildings and littering the streets with rubble and, in time, wounding fourteen Americans.
Taylor had divided Château-Thierry into two sectors. A Company, Houghton commanding, was assigned the West Bridge sector, where it took up positions in houses, yards and a warehouse along the riverbank and at both ends of the island. Mendenhall’s B Company had charge of the East Bridge sector. One platoon of fourteen men and two machine guns from A Company, led by First Lieutenant John Ter Bush Bissell, a Pittsburgh native and 1917 graduate of West Point, and Sergeant Harley Phillips, crossed the West Bridge to the north side of the river to cover the withdrawal of a French Senegalese unit as ordered by Marchand. Bissell, who had a quiet demeanor, had studied at Hamilton College before entering West Point. He came from an old New York Dutch family on his mother’s side. A great-great-uncle had graduated from West Point in 1821 and had been killed in action at Monterrey during the Mexican War. Another uncle lost his life at the Battle of Cold Harbor in the Civil War. As Bissell’s team ran over the bridge and set up one machine gun by a tower near the entrance to the park, it received only scattered gunfire from snipers. The other machine gun was held in reserve until a better spot was found where it could be used with deadly force. If attacked, Bissell was to fight a delaying action, pass information to the rest of the battalion over on the south bank as to what was happening and, if forced, fall back across the river.
Six other machine-gun squads were posted along the south bank, at the edge of the island and to the right of the West Bridge.
B Company covered the East Bridge to"protect"the battalion’s flank in case the Germans tried to cross there. Cobbey moved two machine-gun squads into a two-story brick house at the edge of the river. He placed one gun by a first-floor window, covering the bridge, manned by thirty-year-old Sergeant Ezra M. Muse, a cashier and paymaster at Richland Mills back in his hometown of West Columbia, South Carolina. The second gun Cobbey put into a shed attached to the house.
Lieutenant Charles Montgomery slipped into a sunken garden south of the bridge and set up his guns. Funkhouser, commanding three machine guns, positioned them in a wooded peninsula east of the bridge on the Crézancy Road. The other machine-gun squads were holed up in the sugar refinery.
The remainder of the battalion stayed in reserve at Rue Carnot, up the street about a quarter of a mile from the West Bridge.
“Orders were issued to remain concealed and fire only on orders of the officer,” recalled Mendenhall. Night fell, utterly dark, and the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion, now without sleep for almost forty-eight hours and without enough food to quiet growling stomachs, waited for the dawn.
—
On June 1, the first light of morning came at 3:44. A mist covered the river, nearly obscuring a battalion of Germans marching in a column west along the river road toward the East Bridge. Their spirits had to be soaring. To the northwest, the Germans were about to drive the French into Belleau Wood and to the west move into the village of Vaux. Next they planned to capture Hill 204. Château-Thierry would then be completely cut off. As they marched along, the Germans were unaware that they were in danger. When they were five hundred yards away, the Americans fired on them. The surprised soldiers broke and ran, taking shelter in the wheat fields.
“They were screened from view, but not from fire,” noted Mendenhall.
The Germans, in short leaps and bounds, worked their way toward the East Bridge. Because of their positions, Cobbey and Funkhouser and their squads were the only machine gunners in the entire battalion that could stop them.
“The Dutchmen made nine attempts to effect a crossing,” Cobbey reported. “They would come up and be driven back by the machine gun fire from the four guns that Paul and I had. We accounted for a good many Dutchmen during this attack.”
But the German firepower increased, including an artillery bombardment that eventually killed First Lieutenant Thomas W. Goddard, the first officer in the Third Division to lose his life in battle, and three enlisted men, while they were unloading ammunition. Gas bombs hit the Americans. Command posts were driven into cellars where wet-blanket partitions were strung up to avoid the use of gas masks. The intense shellfire worked the machine gunners “into a high state of nervous tension,” wrote Mendenhall. “This was evidenced by sharp commands, impatience bordering on intolerance and an inability to grasp new situations quickly.” And for some reason, Major Taylor failed to command.
Meanwhile, as Lieutenant Bissell and his platoon on the north bank of the river were aiding the withdrawal of French troops, word reached Taylor that the German Seventh Army, impatient to get across the Marne, planned a major attack on Château-Thierry. Artillery fire increased and heavy-caliber cannons were used for the first time. Americans and French on the south bank regrouped. All reserve weapons were brought up to the river and the men were placed in new positions.
Under heavy artillery fire and with buildings aflame, the main German force massed in front of the mined West Bridge, packing the square and the streets leading into it. On the bridge itself, French and Germans were locked in frightful hand-to-hand combat. On the south bank, the men of A Company had to hold their fire until the bridge was cleared of French soldiers. But General Marchand could not wait for his men to get safely over the bridge. He had it blown up. “With a deafening explosion,” wrote Mendenhall, “the bridge flew into the air, carrying both French and Germans with it.” Hundreds of soldiers who were not killed by the explosion drowned.
The moment the bridge was destroyed, the Americans fired into the jammed square. “The Germans . . . waiting to rush the bridge instead melted into the dark,” Mendenhall recounted, “leaving many mute witnesses to American marksmanship.”
Not realizing the bridge was gone, other Germans kept charging into the square, only to get mowed down. “Twice again the Germans massed in the square, their higher commanders either not realizing that the bridge was gone or believing that it could still be crossed on the wreckage. Each time by the light of burning buildings they dispersed with great losses.”
To General Marchand, the blowing up of the bridge was the turning point in the defense of Château-Thierry. “At the moment when the Germans arrived on the large bridge and believed themselves to be in possession of the same, a terrific explosion destroyed the entire central portion and threw into space some Boche corpses. The American machine guns held the south bank. They formed a"protect"on for the withdrawal of the troops retiring from the northern section. The courage of the Americans was beyond all praise.”
At nine-thirty in the evening and with his wires cut, Mendenhall sent runners with oral messages to his platoon commanders in the East Bridge sector, ordering them to move where they could cover his company’s right flank. His messages were misinterpreted. Believing he had called for a withdrawal along the riverbanks, the platoons pulled back.
The runner reaching Cobbey told the lieutenant to “retreat with all possible speed; that the Germans had crossed the river and were on our side.” Cobbey followed the instructions “given which were nothing less than to ‘beat it.’” He pulled his platoon back several kilometers outside of Château-Thierry and took a position on a hill that overlooked the Marne. Here he found Funkhouser with his platoon. They put their guns into position and awaited the German attack. With the river in their sector left unguarded, Cobbey and Funkhouser knew the Germans had a great opportunity to cross the Marne and take Château-Thierry. But luck was on their side. By 1 a.m. the Germans had yet to take advantage of the American withdrawal.
Funkhouser looked at Cobbey. “Don’t you think we had better go back into Château-Thierry and find out whether the Germans are actually in the town?”
The two lieutenants and a runner then slipped back to the bridge and discovered that no Germans had crossed. They went straight to the battalion command post to find out why they’d been ordered to retreat. Cobbey was stunned to find Taylor so disengaged with the battle. “The major denied any knowledge of our retreat, and showed no interest in the matter,” Cobbey later wrote. “He didn’t seem to give a darn what we had done or might do.” Taylor’s superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Fred L. Davidson, in a special operations report sent to General Dickman two weeks later, noted that there “seems to have been a lack of positive orders issued by the battalion commander, the companies being left too much to their own initiative.” Taylor’s adjutant, First Lieutenant Erskine J. Hoover, according to Davidson, was “obliged, in many instances, to personally issue orders in the name of the battalion commander in order to get action of some sort.” Afterward, Taylor was removed from command, never to be seen again. Major Roland F. Walsh replaced him.
Acting on their own, Cobbey and Funkhouser brought their platoons back into town and repositioned their machine guns,"protect"ng the East Bridge sector.
It wasn’t long before the Germans charged the bridge.
From inside the sugar refinery, the machine gunners cut them down. Several times the Germans rushed the bridge and each time they were repulsed. They got close enough so that the Americans not manning machine guns shot them dead with pistols. Harold E. Marble from Brockton, Massachusetts, was stunned when their French machine guns got so hot they had to cease firing until the weapons cooled down. “I was never so scared for a while in my life,” he confessed years later. “I’ll admit it, but soon I got used to watching those smoking, overheated guns turn from a vivid red to a dull, ashy gray.”
In Funkhouser’s new position he stopped a German attempt to cross the river on a pontoon bridge. “By machine fire he chased some of the Dutchmen away who were half dressed and who had stripped in order to get into the river to place the bridge,” Cobbey commented. “The attempt to cross the river stopped about seven o’clock that evening.”
—
Stranded on the north bank were Bissell, his men and a number of French soldiers. In the inferno of flames, machine-gun bullets ripping into bodies and ricocheting off buildings and zinging across cobblestone streets, with Bissell leading them, they fought their way east, trying to get to the other bridge that was"protect"d by Cobbey’s two machine-gun squads. If they couldn’t cross the bridge, then they’d have to swim for it.
Cobbey, peering into the night, spotted men trying to cross the East Bridge. It was too black to make out who they were. Behind the men he heard the rattle of machine guns. Thinking they were Germans, he had his men open fire.
Over the noise someone called out, “Cease fire!”
Fearing it might be an enemy ruse, Cobbey did not want to take a chance and stop firing. He told his men to keep shooting while in the darkness he slipped away to the edge of the bridge. He yelled across to determine who was there. He discovered to his surprise that it was Bissell and the remnants of his platoon and many Frenchmen ready to swim the river. He hurried back to his squad, picked out a few men and took them back across the bridge. They carried Bissell’s wounded and dead to the south bank of the Marne.
“Going back to the guns we were able to open up fire in time to stop a crossing by the Germans who had been pressing Lieut. Bissell from the north side,” recalled Cobbey. “Their attempt lasted an hour.”
Mendenhall later wrote, “Lieutenant Cobbey unhesitatingly crossed the bridge in the face of the enemy fire, found Lieutenant Bissell with his men preparing to swim the river and dissuading them led them back over the bridge to safety. This act of hero'sm was characteristic of all our men.”
Bissell brought some bad news with him. A French officer north of the Marne had told him that two enemy divisions had crossed the river and annihilated A Company. If true, that put Cobbey’s B Company in extreme danger. Mendenhall ordered B Company to withdraw, almost leaving the East Bridge unguarded. In the house by the bridge, Sergeant Muse remained at his post by the window. He refused to leave because he had a clear view of the bridge and could stop any Germans trying to cross. As he wrote later to his father, “Don’t worry for I am tough and can stand it if anyone can.” Mendenhall then reported to Major Taylor, who informed him that Bissell’s report was “erroneous.” The Germans had not crossed the West Bridge because it had been blown up. He ordered Mendenhall to get his men back to the river and to take up their old positions.
The battle continued into the next day. The men still had no sleep, or at best caught only naps when they could. Their support came from the Colonials, Senegalese sharpshooters the Americans found strangely fascinating. “These men scarcely removed from their savage state . . . have remarkable eyesight,” described Mendenhall. “With faces scarred in fantastic patterns and polished ivory ornaments in their ears and noses, they took keen delight in exhibiting strings of shriveled brown human ears from their German victims and worn on a string around their necks.” They were an uncomfortable crew to have around, he admitted, “for one was never sure just what they intended to do.”
Robert Dinsmore from Gulfport, Mississippi, temporarily attached to the machine gunners as an interpreter, wrote to his hometown newspaper, maybe with some embellishment, “Well, I’m a southerner and always will be, but I stood side by side with these black Senegalese French negroes and laughed when they cut the Germans’ heads off with their sugar cane knives.”
The machine gunners out in the open had to find cover under railroad cars whenever German airplanes flew over, directing its artillery where to drop their shells.
—
Try as they might, the Germans could not breach the American’s stout defense, supported by the Colonials. Two of the hero's were privates from New Jersey, James Punco and Charles Gallagher. When the French were unable to shore up a breach in the defense because they were getting killed, Punco, saying it “don’t look good to me,” scooped up the tools and with bullets flying past him, rushed to the break. Gallagher followed him. They repaired the wire entanglements. Punco received a wound in the leg and Gallagher was shot six times. Both men survived, but Punco later had his leg amputated. The French gave him the Médaille Militaire and Gallagher the Croix de Guerre.
In the early morning of June 4, the East Bridge was finally blown up. For remaining at his post, Sergeant Muse received the American Distinguished Service Cross. A few hours before the explosion, one company from Third Division’s Ninth Machine Gun Battalion and two French machine gun companies arrived at Château-Thierry. They then relieved the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion, which had been in a constant battle since May 31.
Wrote Mendenhall, “The relief, late in arriving, was barely completed by dawn. There had been no let-down in the fireworks and some guns, too hot to dismount, were left behind. Finally, in Liberty three-ton trucks instead of Fords, the battalion rumbled past the southern edge of the city, made a dash down the dangerous Rue Carnot and, in short order reached the woods of Nesles. Just as we entered the woods we heard a dull detonation to the north. The east bridge had been destroyed. The Marne was barred!”
When the machine gun battalion had returned to their trucks they found to their dismay that the Senegalese had looted their backpacks; they’d been cleaned out by the very French Colonials they’d put their lives in jeopardy to help. And adding more insult to the Americans, later while they paraded by Marchand their entire dinners were stolen.
In his special operations report to Dickman, Lieutenant Colonel Davidson, the division’s top machine-gun officer, wrote, “It is believed that the 7th Machine Gun Battalion was to a great degree responsible for the final check of the late German drive.” He did not mention the looted backpacks.
From his headquarters, General Marchand had high praise for the battalion, from the day it arrived to the day it was relieved. He penned, “Immediately the Americans reinforced the entire defense, especially at the approaches of the bridge. Their courage and skill as marksmen evoked the admiration of all.
“Crushed by our fire, the enemy hesitated and, as a result of counter attacks, vigorously supported by the American Machine Guns, they were thrown beyond the edges of the town.
“CHATEAU-THIERRY remained entirely in our hands.”
He went on to proudly state, “The episode of CHATEAU-THIERRY will remain one of the very fine deeds of this war. It is a pleasure for all of us to certify that our valiant allies with us participated in this event—our bonds of affection and of confidences will be strengthened by the same pride which we share in common.”
Although back in the United States, it wasn’t the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion getting credit for its heroic stand, but the Marines. One major newspaper trumpeted, “With the help of God and a few Marines we stopped the Germans at Château-Thierry.” Although it was at Belleau Wood where this action actually took place, northwest of Château-Thierry, and the Marines did it with the help of the Second Division as well as the Third Division’s Seventh Infantry
—
Now that the men of the Third Division had proven themselves to one French general, could they do it again to another before German military mastermind General Ludendorff could bring the Allies to their knees? This time the French general the Americans had to prove themselves to was none other than Jean Marie Joseph Degoutte of the newly refitted Sixth Army, one of the generals who Field Marshal Foch was counting on to stop the Germans and save Paris.
Could the doughboys of the Third Division do it once again?
CHAPTER 1
“THEY MAY KILL US, BUT THEY CANNOT WHIP US”
On the brisk morning of May 31, 1918, the nearly twenty-seven thousand troops of the Third U.S. Infantry Division, as inexperienced in the art of war as babes in the woods, rolled out of their training camps around Châteauvillain, on the Aujon River a dozen or so miles east of Chaumont, where General Pershing, able to play only a limited role in the coming battle, was fretting in his AEF headquarters about how his men would do in the coming days fighting under French flags and not Old Glory. If he’d heard a remark attributed to one of the division’s soldiers from the 38th Infantry, he’d have felt better.
“We was never sent to no trenches to learn fightin’. No, siree, no dugout warfare for this little old outfit. They didn’t have to bury us in a quiet sector in Alsace before turning us loose on the Boche. In May General Foch says to General Pershing, he says I need a classy regiment up on the Marne. So up we went.”
The Americans had been attached to the 38th French Army Corps, commanded by a general with the impressive name of Jean Frédéric Lucien Piarron de Mondesir, but who simply went by Piarron de Mondesir. The 38th Army Corps had been folded into Duchêne’s Sixth Army, following its disaster at Chemin des Dames, and sent to take over a defensive position south of the Marne around Château-Thierry. Duchêne had not yet been replaced by General Degoutte. The green doughboys were to help stem the German advance across the Marne River between Château-Thierry and the Surmelin Valley to as far east as Varennes. Their orders the moment they reached the Marne were simple enough—defend the passages over the river. On May 31, the newly promoted corps commander, General de Mondesir, wrote under the heading “Distribution of Elements of the 3d Division”: “The mission of the troops of the 38th Army Corps, namely: To defend the terrain with the utmost energy, no matter how great the violence of the enemy’s effort.”
Before Pershing’s order sending the Third Division north to the Marne, it had been learning from the French how to use their Chauchat automatic rifles—cheaply made weapons that oftentimes jammed when fired—and the proper way to toss hand grenades. From the English, they learned how to handle the bayonet. Smirked an American lieutenant, the English believed only the bayonet would win the war. “Our own officers, however, continued to stress rifle marksmanship.” The division had been marked for a three-week stay in a quiet sector north of Toul where it was to relieve the 26th U.S. Division and gain three weeks’ experience in trench warfare. But then that destination was changed and the division was to go to another location on May 31, this time to the Vosges Mountains in eastern France, near the border with Germany. A day before it was to leave for the Vosges, the new, most urgent order, to embark for the Marne was issued.
For many of the division’s soldiers, leaving the training area was a sad day because they had made friends with the French villagers, most of them women, old men or young children, some of the children orphaned by the war. A number of the officers, General Joseph Dickman included, when they weren’t training, were having a grand time hunting wild boar in the forests around Châteauvillain, and dining on sumptuous hunt breakfasts at some farmhouse or hunting lodge.
Fitchburg, Massachusetts, native Private Andrew McCabe, from the 38th Infantry’s B Company, liked his billets, except for the roosters. “Thirteen fellows besides myself are living in two large rooms and we have a large fireplace, a table, chairs and a real bunk,” he informed his family. “You can believe me, you have to travel some here to get a better place than that and besides we have one fellow who can talk French and you can not imagine how convenient that is for us. There is no chance of getting extra fatigue for missing reveille as the roosters wake you up before the bugle call every morning.”
He added, “I have seen very few persons but children, old men and women, but it seems that no one is too old to work and you see them doing all the farming and other work around.”
In the Thirty-Eighth’s K Company, Private Leroy D. Goodgion of Kingston, New York, described how the “people here seem to enjoy our presence and show their admiration by doing what they can. They are very courteous to us all, and in return for their good meaning we forward our courtesies the best we know how. Occasionally, we can understand a word or phrase when conversing, but generally avoid a conversation with the village belles, fearing we might accidentally use an improper phrase. Safety first!”
In a postscript, he wrote, “I think you may form a conclusion that I am on an excursion instead of serious affairs, namely ‘Fighting to free democracy from the hated autocracy.’”
Leaving was especially difficult for George W. Ridout, a chaplain from the Young Men’s Christian Association assigned to the 38th Infantry Regiment’s Third Battalion. Ridout, a handsome man approaching fifty years of age with dark, graying hair, thick eyebrows and long eyelashes, was dubbed “Holy Joe” by the troops. A Methodist minister who before the war had been a professor of theology at Taylor University, an evangelical college in Upland, Indiana, Ridout urged his followers in the battalion to always carry a copy of the New Testament in their left breast pocket, over their heart, because he believed that the holy book would"protect"them from harm. In the small village of Montribourg, where he lived during the division’s time of training, the residents there called him “Uncle George.”
Nearly all the villagers came out to see the troops off. Many of the women were softly crying. An American captain thought that “our leaving had served to remind them of the days when their own boys had hastily been called away years before. They recalled their many sorrows of the war.” The captain asked a French officer to find out why a certain women was crying. Her reply was, “It makes me sad to know that many of these American boys will soon have died for France.”
There were only a few incidents that upset the civilians. One was the theft of some wine, another a rude officer, and the third was when the men bathed in a little stream near a château that had been turned into a hospital to care for wounded French soldiers. It was run by a handful of Englishwomen who had to look out at the Americans frolicking in the water like otters.
In the village, Ridout had befriended a five-year-old girl, Louise, whose father had been killed in the war. “She was very shy and at first would not come near a soldier,” Ridout remembered, “but eventually I won her over and she would come to me and we would take walks in the flower-bedecked fields, and those two months I was in that little village little Louise helped me greatly to overcome homesickness. That little child seemed to feed my hungry heart.”
Louise was Catholic, as were most of the villagers. At night when she said the rosary she prayed for “Uncle George.”
“The day we marched out of that little village was a memorable one in more sense than one,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The village people hated to see us go; they said ‘au revoir’ to us with tears in their eyes, and the children cried too. . . . My little Louise clung to my neck and kissed me through her tears. We said ‘au revoir’ and departed and went from that little village where peace and quiet and contentment reigned, to be ushered upon another scene within a few days where the air was filled with booming guns, where war in reality was being waged, where there was hurry and confusion and congestion and the voices of the Captains giving orders, the whirling of the heavy wheels carrying supplies and guns and ammunition to the front.”
Dickman later recalled in his memoirs, “It is certain that we left behind us an enduring and favorable impression of the young American soldier from beyond the seas.” To his brother, Clem, he wrote on August 15, 1918, “You can set it down that the American solider is the best in Europe and that when it comes to the essential elements of discipline, such as respect for property and regards for women and children, sanitation and hygiene, he discounts any European troops I have seen. The French people are very glad to have the American soldiers occupy their premises, for they then feel safe and know that their property, what is left of it, will be cared for.”
Now the division, minus the Sixth Engineers and its Third Field Artillery Brigade, comprised of three regiments and trench mortar batteries, was on the way, headed north toward the crowded railhead at Montmiral, a key town ten miles from the Marne. The artillery brigade would not head out until almost a month later because it needed nearly one thousand horses to pull its guns, and rounding up that many horses took time. As it was, it was an odd caravan, if one could call it a caravan: quickly assembled troop trains, horse-drawn wagons, motorized trucks, motorcycles and, for the division’s top brass, a fleet of green Cadillac Type 57 motorcars. The Cadillac was the vehicle chosen by the AEF as its official car because its endurance proved better than any other similar motorcar. General Motors sent more than two thousand Cadillacs to France for military use.
All parts of the caravan traveled at different times and at different speeds. The division’s first units to board the lead train were the 38th Infantry’s K Company and two companies of the Ninth Machine Gun Battalion. They boarded the train at midnight after spending an unusually cold evening in bivouac, shaking and shivering and trying to keep warm. When Corporal William G. Fitzgerald of Ballston Spa, in upstate New York, and his fellow men in the 30th Infantry marched seven miles to reach the train, it was during the day and the temperature had climbed. “Many fell out, and also fainted from the heat,” he put in his diary. Standing only five feet, five inches tall, Fitzgerald added, “Packs weighed 125 pounds. All our equipment was carried, besides ammunition and extra shoes.” He’d had to leave his personal belongings with a Frenchwoman who lived in the house next to where he’d been billeted. The woman had befriended him, and when he had suffered from a sore throat when he first arrived at the training camp and couldn’t eat, she had “heated me some milk and I drank it.” His regiment rode in side-door Pullman cars.
—
On the road, in the lead Cadillac, scrunched among gas masks, steel helmets, pistols and maps, sat the division commander, who in the months to come would earn the affectionate nickname among his men of “Daddy Dickman.” He was almost sixty-one years old, and as he wrote to his wife, “My health is very good and I feel confident that I will be able to last until the end is over. There are very few officers of my age who are engaged in active campaigning.”
A native of Dayton, Ohio, he was the son of a Civil War captain in the 58th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. The 58th saw action at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. After Dickman had graduated from West Point, he served on the western frontier, chasing Geronimo and, allied with Mexico’s federal soldiers under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and troops of Texas Rangers, helping put down a Mexican insurgency led by Catarino Garza and his bandits. He also fought in Cuba during the Spanish American War on the staff of General Joseph Wheeler, where he had been cited for gallantry, and then in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion, as part of the Peking Relief Expedition and in the Battle of Pa-Ta-Chao. Dickman had been described by those who knew him well as aggressive, daring, positive, firm, modest and unassuming. An ex-Marine said the portly cavalryman had “a painter’s eye for landscapes, a gourmet’s taste for wines” and, when he got to the Marne and first walked the sector assigned to his division, “a soldier’s eye for the ground.”
Riding with him in the Cadillac was his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Sheldon and several other members of his staff. Sheldon was a native of Princeton, New Jersey, and a graduate of England’s Oxford University. He had joined the army during the Spanish American War as a second lieutenant. He later went to the Philippines and then China. He was described as a “bright, active, well instructed soldier” and a “tireless worker, supervising every detail he could handle.” By the end of June, however, he’d be replaced by the self-assured Colonel Robert H. C. Kelton from Pershing’s own staff. Behind Dickman and Sheldon, in the other Cadillacs, came the division’s brigade commanders and several of its regimental commanders, including the scholarly Brigadier General Charles Crawford of the Sixth Brigade. Crawford was raised on the plains of Kansas, and a West Point classmate described him as coming from “a vigorous Irish family that gave him an inheritance of a strong body, a keen and active mind, and courage for living life in the full measure of pioneer tradition.”
When America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on January 31, 1917, more than two months before it declared war, General Crawford, then a major and an 1889 graduate of West Point, had been stationed in the Panama Canal Zone with the 10th Infantry as inspector of troops guarding the canal’s vital points. He constantly checked all the locks in case of sabotage. The fear was that German sailors—there were eight German commercial vessels in the canal at the time, with crews totaling more than 150 men—might slip out of the jungle at night and blow up the machinery that ran the locks. The Americans quickly commandeered the vessels and imprisoned all German citizens, as well as Germans who had settled in the Canal Zone years ago and had married native women. At the time Crawford felt the imprisonment was a rash step. A month after the United States declared war, the 10th Infantry was transferred from the Canal Zone to Fort Benjamin Harrison, outside of Indianapolis. The First Officers’ Training Camp was organized, and Crawford’s job was to determine which noncommissioned officers of his regiment should be given commissions as officers. He was soon promoted to colonel and sent to a camp at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, assigned to the 60th Infantry. When the War Department almost doubled the size of a U.S. regiment, the 60th then became part of the 7th Infantry, and Crawford moved on to Camp Greene, North Carolina, and was tapped to command and train the Third Division’s Sixth Brigade. He’d already had experience training raw recruits. In New Mexico during the 1890s he had enlisted and organized a company of Apache scouts, and later was an instructor at the army’s Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
One of the things Crawford, who had been cited for his fearlessness under fire at the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War, stressed during training at Camp Greene was the soldier’s spirit. “The morale of a soldier,” he reasoned, “depends on his confidence that he can kill his enemy when his foeman comes within range of his rifle and that the closer he gets the more sure he is of killing.”
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Ever since the division had been organized at Camp Greene, on November 23, 1917, Dickman had had plenty of time—almost a half year—to get to know his senior officers well, Crawford among them, their strengths and their weaknesses.
All except one, a Johnny-come-lately to his division who had already led a regiment in combat, who admitted that his blood was flowing a little faster as the division pushed northward toward the enemy, a soldier destined to carry the nom de guerre “Rock of the Marne.”
What People are Saying About This
Praise for Duty, Honor, Privilege:
“By tracking the Silk Stockings from enlistment through training, battle and triumphant return to New York, Harris makes an inarguable case that these sons of privilege did not flinch in duty or honor. Clear, well-detailed writing.” –David Hinckley, New York Daily News
“Stephen Harris has written both a soldier’s story and a long overdue but bloody redemption of America’s most unfairly maligned infantry regiment. Well researched, well written, and entertaining.” –Rod Paschall, author of The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917-1918
Praise for Harlem's Hell Fighters:
“The story of James Reese Europe and the Hell Fighters is one of the best I know, and here it is told superbly. It is the story of bravery and courage, creativity and controversy, tragedy and transcendence. It reminds us, in nearly every line, of the extraordinary contributions African Americans have made—not just to American life, but to the very essence of what it means to be an American.” —Ken Burns, award-winning documentary filmmaker
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“If you never buy another book on Irish-American military history, get this one. It is magnificently written.” –Jack McCormack, Irish Edition