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Leathernecks Would Ever Forget

Together with the 36th Division, the 2nd Division was loaned to the French to reinforce an offensive in Champagne between the Argonne Forest and Reims. From 24 to 30 September, the Marine Brigade traveled by rail with its parent division to take up a position behind the French Fourth Army. The keystone of the German front in this sector was Blanc Mont Ridge, a heavily fortified eminence that dominated the last natural defensive position south of the Aisne, some sixteen miles to its rear. Its capture would compel the enemy to fall back all the way to the river.

Lejeune met his new commander, one-armed, red-bearded Gen. Henri Gouraud, at Chalons-sur-Marne on 25 September. Lejeune formed an excellent opinion of the French officer, and thus two days later he was shocked to hear rumors that Gouraud planned to use American units piecemeal. As Pershing had done on so many similar occasions, Lejeune bridled. The 2nd Division, he argued, should be kept intact. "General," he promised, "if you do not divide the Second Division, but put it in line as a unit on a narrow front, I am confident that it will be able to take Blanc Mont Ridge, advance beyond it, and hold its position." He would soon be called on to make this promise good.

The Fourth Army had begun its attack on 26 September, the same day on which the AEF launched the Meuse-Argonne offensive. During the opening days of the attack, French troops advanced three and a half miles, but by 28 September XXI Corps had ground to a halt against German trenches and concrete pillboxes on the desolate, chalky ground at the foot of Blanc Mont. After another conference with Lejeune, Gouraud decided to give the 2nd Division a chance to show what it could do. During the night of 1-2 October, the Americans entered the front line.

Spearheaded by the 2nd Division, XXI Corps renewed its attack on 3 October. The 4th Brigade (Marine) attacked on the left and the 3rd Brigade on the right. A company of French tanks supported each brigade. The artillery barrage began at 5:45 A.M. Lieutenant Thomason recalled that "the heavens seemed roofed over with long, keening noises - sounds like the sharp ripping of silk, magnified, running in swift arcs from horizon to horizon.... Almost, one expected to look up and see them, like swift, deadly birds, some small, some enormous, all terrible." Following the barrage within 330 yards of the first objective, by mid-morning units of the 2nd Division had advanced three and a half miles. Three Medals of Honor were won during the day's fighting: two by Marines and one by a soldier, all for the singlehanded destruction of machine-gun nests.

The Yanks resumed the advance on 4 October. Unfortunately, the French units on the Marines' left failed to keep pace and the brigade was repeatedly required to beat off German counterattacks on its exposed flank. At 6:00 the next morning the 6th Marines and the French 17th Infantry captured the machine-gun strongpoint on Blanc Mont, taking more than two hundred prisoners and sixty-five machine guns. The next day the Marines pushed down the ridge into the hasty fortifications beyond. Lejeune's promise had been kept.

On the night of 6 October the 2nd Division was relieved by the U.S. 36th Division. The battle had cost the Marines 2,538 men killed and wounded. The grateful French presented two thousand Croix de Guerre to the officers and men of the division and appointed Lejeune a Commander of the Legion of Honor. Pershing later praised the victory as having been won "against a persistent defense worthy of the grimmest period of trench warfare." But however impressive its resistance appeared, the German Army was approaching exhaustion. Although Lejeune's troops had been opposed by elements of eight divisions, only two of those divisions were considered fit for combat by the German high command. By mid-October the Central Powers had begun to disintegrate. Bulgaria surrendered on 29 September; the German government dispatched the first of a series of armistice notes to President Wilson on 4 October; Turkey dropped out of the war on 31 October; Austria-Hungary, on 3 November; and on 7 November, the mutiny of the German High Seas Fleet sparked a revolution ashore. Yet even with the inevitable end in sight, the combatants continued to flail away at each other, with deadly results.

At 5:30 A.M. on 1 November, the American Army attacked in strength, with the Marines moving forward on the left of the 2nd Division. The next day, the division's 3rd Brigade took the lead. In a daring thrust on the night of 3-4 November, soldiers of the 9th Infantry, followed by the 23rd Infantry and a battalion of the 5th Marines, marched for six hours and fifteen minutes in total darkness and driving rain to surprise sleeping German units four miles behind the front without suffering a single casualty. The intrepid doughboys and Leathernecks missed capturing a German general and his headquarters by a bare fifteen minutes.

The advance continued although rations ran short. Marines foraged for discarded German rations, scrounged food from French civilians, and even devoured the remnants of a cabbage patch planted by the retreating enemy. Lejeune ordered a night march it brought spectacular results. By 6 November the AEF was close enough to the vital railroad to take it under artillery fire. But while the enemy's resistance crumbled, it never collapsed. In the last eleven days of the war, 273 Marines were killed and 1,363 were wounded.

Few Leathernecks would ever forget the thrill of their first step onto the soil of France or their first time under fire. For others, the agony of old wounds or the sear of gas-scarred lungs lingered as painful reminders. The cost of being "First to Fight" had been heavy: 11,366 casualties.

Of the Marines who served in France, 1 out of 6 was wounded; 2,459 made the supreme sacrifice. Only 25 Marines were taken prisoner, however. Six Marines serving in the 4th Brigade won the Medal of Honor, and 744 received the Navy Cross or the Distinguished Service Cross. In addition, the citations the 2nd Division had received in the French Army's orders of the day entitled the members - present and future - of its units to wear the green-and-red fourragere of the Croix de Guerre. The 5th and 6th Marines wear it still. Of the 78,839 men who belonged to the Corps during the war, approximately 32,000 served in France.

Sadly, a second brigade of combat-ready Marines failed to see action. Early in 1918 General Barnett had ordered the organization and training of the 5th Brigade at Quantico; composed of the 11th and 13th Regiments and the 5th Machine Gun Battalion, it went to France under the command of Brig. Gen. Eli K. Cole in September. Pershing had accepted one brigade of Marines, but he made it clear that he could do without another. To its members' dismay, the 5th Brigade was broken up and assigned to rear-area duties or used as replacements for the 4th Brigade. Both Cole and Brig. Gen. Smedley D. Butler received orders to command AEF depot divisions or processing facilities. Butler managed to straighten out the problem-ridden Camp Pontanezen near Brest, but he felt left out. To his congressman father Butler fumed: "For over twenty years, I worked hard to fit myself to take part in this war ... and when the supreme test came my country did not want me." But at least Butler made it to France. His idol, Tony Waller, spent his war commanding the skeleton of the Advanced Base Force at Philadelphia and retired, a major general, in 1921. Two future commandants, Ben H. Fuller and John Russell, also failed to receive orders to France and served in posts in the Caribbean.

Butler blamed HQMC for his failure to gain a combat assignment. Others believed that the friction that had developed within the AEF was the result of anti-Marine Corps prejudice of senior Army officers. One of Lejeune's regimental commanders went so far as to refer to the Marines as "a bunch of adventurers, illiterates, and drunkards" in official correspondence. Another senior Army officer privately declared that the letters "USMC" stood for "Useless Sons-of-bitches Made Comfortable." The seeds of intense interservice rivalry had been sown on the Western Front, and the fruits of controversy would ripen during the interwar years.

Like the Corps's ground forces, its newly hatched aviation community had to overcome major obstacles to take an active part in the war. American intervention found the 1st Aviation Company located in Philadelphia with the Advanced Base Force. Renamed the 1st Marine Aeronautic Company, from October through December 1917 the Marine aviators flew antisubmarine patrols from Cape May, New Jersey. On 9 January 1918 the company deployed to Ponto Delgada on Sao Miguel Island in the Azores to patrol the waters of the eastern Atlantic with a force of eighteen single-engine seaplanes. The operations were generally uneventful and most of the aviators yearned to join the fight in France. Senior Marine Corps officers wanted to see Leatherneck aviators in France, too. The problem, predictably, was that AEF Headquarters wanted no part of naval aviation. In February 1918, however, the Navy decided to form a unit, designated the Northern Bombing Group, to attack the German submarine pens along the Belgian coast. The group would consist of a Navy night wing and a Marine day wing.

The Corps's pioneer pilot, 1st Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham, received permission to cull sufficient Navy pilot trainees from the pool at Pensacola to man the four squadrons of the newly established 1st Marine Aviation Force. Eager to join the fight, the Navy pilots - mostly wartime-only reservists - applied for transfers and accepted commissions in the Corps. Cunningham and his band of 149 aviators disembarked at Brest on 30 July 1918, only to discover that their bombers had been shipped to England. Rising to the occasion, Cunningham worked out a deal with the British to trade him bombers for American-built aircraft engines, at the rate of one for three, and, until he had enough planes to commence operations, to allow his men to gain experience by flying missions with the Royal Air Force. It was 14 October before eight DeHavilland (DH) bombers - lumbering, single-engine two-seaters with a top speed of 120 miles per hour - from Squadron 9 climbed into the air on the first all-Marine raid. By then the Germans had abandoned the submarine pens, so the Marines' target was the railway yards at Thielt, Belgium.

One plane was piloted by 2nd Lt. Ralph Talbot, who had become a naval aviator after completing his freshman year at Yale and then accepted Cunningham's invitation to transfer to the Corps. On the return flight, Talbot became separated from the formation and was jumped by a dozen German fighters. His gunner, Cpl. Robert G. Robinson, shot one down before being hit in the arm, stomach, and hip. Talbot downed another German with his forward-firing machine guns and, with Robinson unconscious in the rear seat, shook off his pursuers in a steep dive, skimming over enemy trenches at an altitude of fifty feet to land his gunner at the nearest hospital. Both men were awarded the Medal of Honor. Ironically, the riddled Robinson lived to wear his medal, but Talbot died in a crash during takeoff eleven days later.

By the end of the war, Marine aviators had flown fifty-seven missions-forty-three with the RAF and fourteen on their own-dropping fifty-two thousand pounds of bombs and scoring four confirmed victories and eight others claimed. Four Marines were killed in action or died of wounds, and, besides the two Medals of Honor, they earned another twenty-eight decorations.

Much to his men's dismay, Cunningham requested an early return home for the 1st Aviation Force. After the signing of the armistice, there seemed little reason for Leatherneck aviators to remain in Europe-espccially since they were not wanted by the AEF. An officer of vision, Cunningham believed that "we could accomplish much more at home, getting our aviation service established under the new conditions of peace.";" In December 1918, the 1st Aviation Force sailed for the States. Some senior Marine officers were disappointed that the aviators did not have the opportunity to join their comrades-in-arms in an air-ground combat team and questioned the utility of aviation for the Corps.

In terms of public relations, the Marine Corps's service with the AEl hit the bull's-eye. In fact, less than half of its men had reached France. Yet to most Americans, the Marines' claim to be the "First to Fight" rang solid and true. The legionary romance that had enveloped the Corps during its campaigns in tropic climes was complemented by the glory of having beaten the Kaiser's crack troops in the greatest European war in a century. In the postwar decade this shining image would be kept bright by popular works such as Thomason's Fix Bayonets!, a narrative of the 4th Brigade's battles, and What Price Glory?, a hit Broadway play by a disabled Marine officer, Capt. Lawrence Stallings.

Yet most of the men who served in the Corps in 1917-18 never got "over there." In making his pitch to send Marines to France, Barnett had promised to meet the Corps's traditional commitments as well. Throughout the war, Leathernecks continued to serve in small detachments in the Navy's warships; naval stations at home and overseas kept their trusty Marine sentries; weak brigades remained in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Haiti; and three regiments stayed in the States to constitute the Advanced Base Force or guard vital oilfields along the border between Texas and Mexico.

The requirement for expeditionary duty also involved the Corps in the periphery of the Russian Revolution. In June 1918 the Czech Legion, an anti-Bolshevik army of freed prisoners of war that had fought its way cast along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, seized the port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Siberia. Leathernecks and bluejackets from the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet, the cruiser Brooklyn, joined landing parties from British and French ships to maintain order in the city. Most of the Marines were withdrawn in August, but a detail stayed behind to guard a Navy radio station on an island in Vladivostok Bay until November 1922.

Another body of Marines was never intended to enter the firing line. On 12 August 1918 the egalitarian secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, authorized the enlistment of women reservists into the previously all-male Corps. Mrs. Opha M. Johnson became the first of 277 "Marinettes" to don forest green, freeing combat-trained Leathernecks from clerical duties to join their comrades in France. While i iQMC limited the women Marines to administrative assignments, a barrier had been broken. Leatherneck magazine praised them, if a bit condescendingly: "Everyone is proud of the Marine girls. They carried themselves like real Marines ... and proved they were ready to go anywhere and conduct themselves with honor to the Marine Corps. 1132 As the Marinettes mustered out of uniform, Secretary Daniels paid them a memorably maladroit tribute. "We will not forget you," he declared. "As we embrace you in uniform today, we will embrace you without uniform tomorrow."

Merrill L. Bartlett & Jack Sweetman. Over There. The U.S. Marine Corps: An Illustrated History. Naval Institute Press. 2001.

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