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Apocalypse In The Chateau-Thierry Region

The 7th Machine Gun Battalion was the first to reach Chateau-Thierry on the afternoon of Friday, 31 May, and a handful of doughboys - armed with two Hotchkiss machine-guns and led by Lieutenant Bissell, a recent graduate of West Point - rushed immediately across a bridge and to the outskirts of the town, despite their long, tiring journey. That night they marched into Chateau-Thierry, where some elements of a battalion of French colonial infantry were desperately hanging on, fending off the German vanguard. Still other French troops were already fleeing, clogging the roads. The Americans were too late, said the poilus; but the Americans still kept coming, spoiling for a fight.

By 2 June the whole of the 3rd Division's infantry had caught up and the French commanding officer, General Mondesir, now had 17,000 US troops to hold back the Germans. Chateau-Thierry was held. By 6 June the doughboys were themselves on the offensive, together with French units; the 3rd Division recaptured Hill 204, just outside Chateau-Thierry, and thus secured for the Allies domination of the town, while the fight for Belleau Wood and the village of Bouresches was that same day commenced by the 2nd Division. From this moment on the lines were stabilized and the German offensive here went no further.

On 1 June the 2nd Division deployed near the village of Lucy-le-Bocage, strung across the Paris-Soissons highway in support of two French divisions that had orders to fall back through American lines. With his troops providing such support for the nearly broken French divisions, Pershing was in an obdurate mood.

It seemed that the Germans, pushing towards Chateau-Thierry, which was just forty miles north-east of Paris, would soon be in possession of the French capital. The AEF's 2nd Division- comprising the 9th and 23rd Infantry Regiments, and the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments - had been designated to relieve the 1st at Cantigny, but such was the sense of apocalypse in the Chateau-Thierry region that it was ordered into the line to the left of Chateau-Thierry itself, near the village of Vaux and a small forest nearby, Belleau Wood. The names of these villages were to be burned for ever into the memories of those who fought there, as indeed would the chaos of orders, countermanded and yet again countermanded, with the French commanders continually contradicting themselves in the flux of battle, horrified that they might go down in history as the ones who lost Paris.

It rained incessantly throughout the days of the to-and-fro struggle over Belleau Wood, an insignificant piece of woodland in the middle of France, where the doughboys were under constant artillery fire and periodic strafing by German aircraft, who appeared to have complete supremacy.

The marines had a professional esprit de corps, even though there were few veterans in their ranks. Private Malcolm Aitken had arrived at Brest on 6 May; a month later he was in the thick of the fighting at Belleau Wood where 'there was none of this "gallant charge, with officer, drawn sword leading, and the Colors the center of things".'

Aitken, Francis and the rest of them ditched their packs, keeping only their blankets and emergency rations. In the last month they had neither shaved nor bathed; they had taken a drenching from the skies every single day. They marched on towards their unknown destination until, after several more miles, they were handed two more bandoliers of ammunition. Eventually they reached Lucy-le-Bocage, where Brigadier-General James Harbord, whom Pershing had placed in command of the marine brigade for this operation, had established his HQ. Francis found that 'Lucy' was a hot spot.

Francis found himself a dugout, no more than three feet deep, and settled down in six inches of water to try to get some rest. The 2nd Division were now in support of the French, who were making a stand along the line of the villages of Bouresches, Belleau, Torcy and Bussiares. Between 2 and 4 June the Germans launched sporadic night raids on the French and Americans. Francis and his comrades fought for their survival.

By the night of 5 June the line being held south of the Marne from Chateau-Thierry for almost ten miles east comprised the 3rd Division (AEF) in Chateau-Thierry; the 39th French Division; the 2nd Division AEF, and finally, on the far east of the line, the 167th French Division. The 2nd Division was now part of the 21st French Army Corps, under Major-General Jean Degoutte.

On 5 June senior US and French officers on the ground debated what to do. Harbord and his senior staff had no maps and little or no knowledge of the local situation; they had simply been thrown in to plug a gap. One French colonel suggested to the commander of the 5th Marines, Colonel Wendell C. Neville, who wore his Medal of Honor with some pride, that the best thing to do was to retreat. This was an unfamiliar word to Neville, who replied: 'Retreat, hell. We just got here.’

If there was to be no retreat then, said Degoutte, there must be a counter-attack. The 2nd Division was ordered to cross the wheatfields separating their higgledy-piggledy trenches and shallow dugouts at 5 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, 6 June. They were to seize the crest upon which sat the town of Bouresches and Belleau Wood. There were no tanks or flamethrowers available for the attack, and only a relatively thin rolling artillery barrage; the infantry would have to press it home. There were to be three attacks altogether - on 6, 9 and 12 June - before the marines were relieved on 17 June. They were then dragged back into the attack to try to finish the job on 25 June. Rarely had a square mile of forest seen so much bloodshed.

On 6 June Bouresches was taken after bitter fighting by the 6th Marines, who through sheer grit also managed to get a toe-hold in Belleau Wood. But this wooded area was devilishly well defended; machine-gunners had inserted themselves in perfect, naturally created defensive holes in small nooks and crannies of rocky boulders, or were completely masked by dense undergrowth which had been untouched in centuries.

On the left of the assault the 5th Marines struggled to advance a kilometre towards the village of Torcy, taking Hill 142 by midday. Many legends were forged at Belleau Wood on 6 June, and none quite so long-lived as that surrounding a 49-year-old gunnery sergeant with the 73rd Machine Gun Company of the 6th Marines. Daniel Joseph Daly was a small man, just 5 feet 4 inches. But he was clearly tough, thanks to nineteen years with the marines; he had twice been awarded the Navy Medal of Honor, at Peking in 1900 and in 1915 for service in Haiti. Daly's legend was forged by a journalist, the ubiquitous Floyd Gibbons who was to lose his left eye later that day while getting too close to the action at Belleau Wood. Gibbons was with Daly's unit when it attacked the Germans on the morning of 6 June. Almost instantly the marines were pinned down in the open wheatfields that lay between their lines and the wood. Gibbons then captured the story of 'Devil Dog Dan', as Daly was christened on that day:

A runner came scrambling through the brush, and handed the old Gunnery Sergeant a sheet of paper. He read it quickly, then glanced along the line of the dug-in platoon. He stood up and made a forward motion to his men. There was slight hesitation. Who in the hell could blame them? Machine gun and rifle bullets were kicking up the dirt, closer and closer. The sergeant [Daly] ran out to the center of his platoon - he swung his bayoneted rifle over his head with a forward sweep. He yelled at his men: 'Come on, you sons-of-bitches! Do you want to live forever?'

Where Daly led, the marines followed."

But by 10 June the Germans were still stubbornly clinging on to Belleau Wood, and the marines were almost exhausted. Brigadier General Harbord called for relief; his brigade had been in constant action for thirteen days, with little water and no hot food. At AEF headquarters at Chaumont, Fox Conner, head of Operations (G-3), instructed Major Richardson, Chaumont's liaison officer with Degoutte: 'On that question of relief, leave that matter entirely to the French. Do not insist on any relief. The reports that we have show that conditions are not very bad.'

Degoutte thus informed Harbord that there could be no question of relief until 25 June. Harbord exploded and, thanks to his longstanding friendship with Pershing, got his way and managed to have Conner's decision overruled. The 7th Infantry of the 3rd Division was then lent to General Omar Bundy, the 2nd Division's commander, for six days. On the night of 15 June this regiment started moving into Belleau Wood, which although reported clear of the enemy on 12 June was not wholly and finally captured until fourteen days later, thanks to the participation of the 9th and 23rd Infantry Regiments of the 2nd Division. Lieutenant Colonel John P. Adams, commanding the 7th's 1st Battalion, informed Harbord that the battalion's attack would commence at 3.15 a.m. on 21 June, but first he had some big demands to make. He asked for 1,000 hand grenades and other munitions, for food to be sent to the attacking company as it had not eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and for a heavy artillery barrage to be mounted against the wood: 'The wood is almost a thicket and the throwing of troops into the woods is filtering away men with nothing gained [ ... ] I can assure you that the orders to attack will stand as given, but it cannot succeed.'

Adams was right; the attack failed, as did that of the 7th's 3rd Battalion on 22 June, in which Sergeant Alison Page, the nineteenyear-old son of Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador in London, was killed. During its time at Belleau Wood the 7th, already hammered from its defence of Chateau-Thierry, lost what little ground the marines had first gained. On 21-22 June the 5th and 6th Regiments of marines went back into the wood, relieving the 7th Infantry. The marines found the Germans still grimly clinging on, as if aware that to concede ground now might mean having to do so all the way back to Berlin.

The already bitter fighting now became extremely callous. The doughboys were (unofficially) ordered to take no prisoners. This was one of the rare occasions when hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, knuckledusters and something the doughboys called a 'toad sticker' - a 6-8 inch triangular steel blade set on a knuckle handle - came into use. Private Aitken became 'quite adept' with the toad sticker.

On Sunday, 25 June Belleau Wood finally and lastingly fell into the hands of the AEF. Colonel Paul Malone, commander of the 23rd, reported his regiment on that day alone suffered 855 casualties, 334 of them from gas. He estimated 4,000 gas shells had been fired on his positions in the wood. The marines had certainly been savaged. Their two regiments, half the divisional strength (or roughly 13,500 men), had suffered 113 officers and 5,598 men killed, wounded and missing; the 9th and 23rd together lost 65 officers and 3,496 men.

Was it worth it? General Bullard thought so. 'The marines didn't "win the war" here. But they saved the Allies from defeat. Had they arrived a few hours later I think that would have been the beginning of the end: France could not have stood the loss of Paris.

Private Aitken was one of just twenty survivors from the 250 original members of Company D. At the start of the battle he was a mere novice; by its end he was a hardened veteran.

Gary Mead. . The Overlook Press, New York. 2000.

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