The Yanks Are Coming! (10 page)

Ludendorff's offensive, codenamed Michael, was directed at the British along a fifty-mile front stretching south from Arras to La Fère on the Oise River in northeastern France. Under a cloud of poison gas, the Germans hit the Limeys—with General Hutier's Eighteenth Army, on the southern end, making by far the biggest gains, more than nine miles the first day—eventually driving forty miles into France, effectively crippling the British Fifth Army of General Sir Hubert Gough.
¹⁷
The French government once again prepared to evacuate itself from Paris, as booming long-range artillery shells came raining toward the capital.

But by 9 April 1918, the Allied lines had stabilized; the crisis seemed to have passed. Ludendorff then launched a second grand offensive, this time on Flanders, farther to the north, on a line extending slightly above Ypres in Belgium, to destroy the British army and isolate the French.
¹⁸
British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig issued his famous rallying cry to his troops that though their backs were to the wall, they had to fight it out—to the last man if necessary—lest they be driven to the sea and the war be lost.

Pershing had hoped to amass a well-trained million-man army before hurling his doughboys against the enemy, but circumstances had changed. His best-trained troops took up positions in the line. Their first major action took place south of Ludendorff's offensives, in what was supposed to be relatively quiet Lorraine, northeastern France, at the blown-out village of Seicheprey. Two companies from the 26th “Yankee” Division, formed from New England National Guard units, held the town. The division was newly arrived at the sector, having just replaced the American 1st Division, which was moving north, to where the action was hot—though the New Englanders
found Seicheprey hot enough. They engaged in small skirmishes with the Germans, the fights growing in size as the Yankees frustrated German attempts to capture prisoners for interrogation (though the Germans got a few), and inflicted embarrassing losses on the Kaiser's troops, who were rightly proud of their professionalism, military intelligence, and ability to infiltrate Allied lines almost at will.

On 20 April, the Germans, hoping to expose American inexperience, walloped Seicheprey with artillery.
Sturmtruppen
then burst among the New Englanders with weapon barrels spewing flame and lead, driving the doughboys out—though only temporarily. The Yankee division counterattacked and retook Seicheprey. But the Germans had scored the propaganda victory they wanted, at least for domestic German consumption: the troops the British were counting on to save their bacon were
schwein
well and truly ready for the slaughter.

The New Englanders of the 26th Division thought differently. They were not shaken by the experience, they were exhilarated by it. They had met the enemy and seen him off—a test of their mettle and a preview of the big show to come. Yes, they had been taken by surprise—but the Germans had crept in under cover of fog, and German artillery had ravaged the American 26th Division's communications. Yes, the 26th had suffered the worst casualties so far for the American Army—more than 650 men, including 136 taken prisoner—but the division had been outnumbered five to one, fought back hard, and recovered its ground in a counterattack. The Germans had hit them with everything they had, and what was the result? Aye yuh, the Yanks were back where they started, still holding the ground at Seicheprey. American newspapers treated the action at Seicheprey as proof of the hard-as-flint New England spirit. Pershing and his generals thought its temporary loss an
embarrassment that needed to be expunged, and looked for a chance to strike back—not with the New England troops but with the 1st Division farther north.

At the end of the Flanders offensive, Ludendorff's armies had moved another twenty miles forward, but the British had regrouped, dug in, and were waiting for the next German lunge. Also digging in was the Big Red One, the American Army 1st Division. It was the best-trained division Pershing had to put an American marker against Ludendorff—and it was a division that Ludendorff targeted for special attention by German artillery. The division took the place of two French divisions
¹⁹
at Montdidier in northern France and was charged with launching the first American offensive of the war, meant to distract Ludendorff when he made his next major assault on the Allied line. When that assault failed to materialize on the Allied schedule, Pershing and Pétain found an objective for an American attack: Cantigny, a village on high ground that needed to be denied to German artillery spotters who were sending death and destruction into the American lines. The attack would be led by the six-foot-two, 220-pound former West Point football player Colonel Hanson Ely, a man as physically imposing as he was militarily efficient. He would have the 28th Infantry Regiment at his command.

Though he trained his men well and prepared to make up for a lack of numerical superiority with surprise, speed, and massive firepower (including tanks), Ely's operation started badly. On the night of 24–25 May 1918, one of his lieutenants of engineers, carrying maps of the American positions, lost his way in no-man's-land and was captured (and, unknown to Ely, killed) by the Germans.
²⁰
On 27 May, the day before Ely's planned assault, Ludendorff's third great offensive, Operation Blücher-Yorck, came crashing toward the Marne with an apparent objective of Paris, though the actual plan
was to draw French armies to the frightened defense of their own capital, and away from the British. As a diversion from that giant feint, the Germans raided the Americans in front of Cantigny.

The Americans repelled the raids against them and went ahead with their own assault. American-manned artillery pieces under the command of General Charles P. Summerall opened up before dawn, and at 6:40 a.m. on 28 May, Ely's units rolled forward led by French tanks.
²¹
Flame-throwing Americans burnt the Germans out of their defensive positions, and Cantigny was taken quickly and with relative ease. The doughboys braced themselves for the inevitable counterattack. It started that afternoon with a heavy German bombardment, against which the Americans had little defense because they had scant artillery of their own. The French artillery that was to support them had to be rushed away to meet the new threat on the Marne. By evening, the combination of German shells and machine gun fire had made Ely's position tenuous. But the Americans held nevertheless. They might have been battered to pieces, but they refused to give ground to the German infantry. For three days Ely and his men held on against earth- (not to mention nerve-) shattering bombardment and counterattacks, before it was deemed safe to send in a relief column and pull the 28th Regiment out. It had endured nearly 900 casualties (the division as a whole suffered more than 1,600), but in doing so it had demonstrated to the Germans—and to the French—that the Americans were no callow soldiers, but aggressive in attack and stubborn in defense.

CHAPTER FIVE

BELLEAU WOOD: “RETREAT, HELL. WE JUST GOT HERE!”

L
udendorff chose to redouble the threat to Paris. If he could seize their capital, surely the French would sue for peace, and imperial Germany, greatly enlarged by its annexations in the east, would be victorious. By 3 June 1918, Ludendorff's lunge had left Paris only thirty-five miles from his grasp. The French armies were reeling, and General Pétain needed help. He called on Pershing, and Pershing in turn called his 2nd and 3rd Divisions to Château-Thierry, straddling the Marne River.

The 3rd Division had been in France only since April, but advance elements of it were first on the scene. They discovered that the Germans had occupied the northern half of Château-Thierry, and the
best the Yanks could do at the outset was set up machine guns to help extract French troops, Senegalese colonials, caught on the north side of the river. All along the road to Château-Thierry, the Americans had been warned of the German juggernaut by refugees and streams of retreating French troops. But the Americans were unfazed—this was what they had come to do: fight the Germans. Though they were new to combat, the men of the 7th Machine Gun Battalion, an Army unit under the temporary command of a Marine Corps major, did their job beautifully.

“THE BEST BRIGADE IN FRANCE”

The 2nd Division raced to the scene in rattling
camions
driven by exhausted Vietnamese who were prone to swerve off the road and crash, asleep at the wheel. For the Marines attached to the 2nd Division—the 4th Marine Brigade, composed of two regiments, and a machine gun battalion—this was the most dangerous aspect of the war so far. To their frustration, the Marines of the AEF had been delegated as longshoremen and portside military police, a backhanded tribute to their naval heritage. They wanted to get in on the action. They would—in a big way.
¹

The Marines were commanded by James Harbord, an Army brigadier general who had been Pershing's chief of staff. Pershing had originally not wanted Marines in his army. But he told Harbord, “Young man, I'm giving you the best brigade in France—if anything goes wrong, I'll know whom to blame.” As Harbord noted later, “They never failed me.”
²

Harbord, recognizing the
esprit de corps
of the Marines,
³
donned Marine Corps insignia (the globe and anchor), and for extra dash wore a close-fitting French helmet rather than the British-inspired
broad-brimmed American one, which bore a passing resemblance to an overturned gold prospector's sifting pan. He was proud of his Marines—as well he might be. The 5th and 6th Marine Regiments were the best-trained units in the American Expeditionary Force, aggressive with the bayonet and famously proud marksmen. At the newly built Marine base at Quantico, they had been drilled in muddy trenches to get ready for the Western Front. But even Quantico's famous mud couldn't match the miserable, lice-ridden, dank, dark, waterlogged trenches of France, infested with monstrous rats that feasted on the dead and that Marines bayoneted or shot, treating them like mini-
Boche
.

The 5th Regiment was stocked full of regulars, many of whom had seen action from China to Vera Cruz. Every Marine was a volunteer, and in the great buildup of the American Expeditionary Force, Marine recruiters filled their ranks with only the best. The 6th Marines, officered, for the most part, by Marine veterans and stiffened with a useful smattering of veteran Marine sergeants, was one of the most remarkable regiments in the war. As Marine Corps Brigadier General Albertus Catlin marveled, “If we had time and opportunity to pick our men individually from the whole of the United States I doubt whether we should have done much better. They were as fine a bunch of upstanding American athletes as you would care to meet, and they had brains as well as brawn. Sixty per cent of the entire regiment—mark this—sixty per cent of them were college men. Two-thirds of one entire company came straight from the University of Minnesota.” The lieutenants were heavily weighted to college athletes, and according to Catlin, it was American brainpower that won the battle: “when the final showdown comes, when the last ounce of strength and nerve is called for, when mind and hand must act like lightning together, I will
take my chances with an educated man, a free-born American with a trained mind.”
⁴

“A PRICE TO PAY FOR THE LEARNING”

The 2nd Division was ordered to Montreuil-aux-Lions, about nine miles west of Château-Thierry. Cutting through roads clogged with refugees—bedraggled civilians and defeated
poilus
convinced that the war was over and the Germans had won—the division marched to the sound of the guns. One of Pétain's staff officers, Jean de Pierrefeu, noted that “swarms of Americans began to appear on the roads . . . they passed in interminable columns, closely packed in lorries, with their feet in the air in extraordinary attitudes . . . almost all bare headed and bare chested, singing American airs at the top of their voices. . . . The spectacle of these magnificent youths from overseas . . . produced a great effect. . . . Life was coming in floods to reanimate the dying body of France.” It wasn't just the French who thought so. Vera Brittain, an English nurse, remembered that the Americans “looked larger than ordinary men; their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the undersized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed.”
⁵

The Marines and the French soldiers with whom they had trained—especially the 115th French Chasseurs Alpins, the “Blue Devils”—generally got along well, their friendship lubricated by a shared taste for
vin
and brandy. But the leathernecks were appalled at the demoralized, hollow-eyed,
sauve qui peut
attitude of the French soldiers streaming past them, which led to one of the great exchanges in Marine Corps history. When a French officer told Marine Captain Lloyd “Josh” Williams that the situation was hopeless and he must retreat, Williams replied, “Retreat, hell. We just got here!”
⁶

The American 9th Infantry was first into the defensive line backing up the French. French general Jean Degoutte had planned to shuttle American units into the ranks of battered
poilus
, but the Americans insisted on holding a position of their own. When Degoutte asked whether the Americans could really hold against the fearsome
Boche
who had shredded so many Frenchmen, Colonel Preston Brown responded, “General, these are American regulars. In a hundred and fifty years they have never been beaten. They will hold.”
⁷

The Marines were assigned to the sector of Belleau Wood, and they and the rest of the 2nd Division marched to their assigned places through German shellfire. As men fell to the blasts, Captain Lester S. Wass urged his Marines on, barking, “What do you think this is, a kid's game?”
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The Americans covered a French retreat, their deadly Marine marksmanship surprising the Germans, and when the French had cleared out—and new French units arrived alongside the Americans—Degoutte and General Omar Bundy, commander of the 2nd Division, decided to go in and take Belleau Wood and the town of Bouresches that lay behind it. The wood, a former hunting preserve, jutted out from the Allied line like an enormous green
croissant
, its total area perhaps half a square mile. The initial attack would be on Hill 142, fronting the northwestern side of the forest. The Marines' maps were inadequate. So were their tactics. Captain John W. Thomason recalled, “Platoons were formed in four waves, the attack formation taught by the French, a formation proved in trench warfare, where there was a short way to go, and you calculated on losing the first three waves and getting the fourth one to the objective. The Marines never used it again. It was a formation unadapted for open warfare, and incredibly vulnerable. It didn't take long to learn better, but there was a price to pay for the learning.”
⁹
The Marines went
into action armed with not much more than rifles and bayonets, crossing through fields of wheat and poppies, not knowing that the wood, which they and the French assumed to be lightly held, had over the last few days been planted with German machine guns.