In the chest pockets of his tunic he carried three photographs. In the right pocket were Mamma and Mary Jane in her picture hat. In the left, over his heart, was a wistful portrait of Bess that he adored more than any ever taken of her. She had written on the back for him: “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”
The first week of July the 129th Regiment moved from Angers to what had once been Napoleon’s artillery base, Camp Coëtquidan, near Rennes, for final training before going into action. Again to his enormous surprise, Captain Truman learned he was to be a battery commander. He was summoned before Colonel Karl D. Klemm and told to begin at once. It was his highest ambition come true and he was scared to death. He would have command of 4 guns and 194 men.
Thursday morning, July 11, 1918, shoulders back, head up, he walked out onto the parade field to face for the first time Battery D of the 2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery, “Dizzy D,” by reputation, most of them Irish Catholics from Kansas City. “They were a pretty wild bunch of Irish, I’ll tell you that,” remembered Lieutenant Hinde. “They had [had] one captain named Charlie Allen and they had two or three others there, none of them could handle them, and finally they assigned Truman to command the battery. He was a third degree Mason in a Catholic battery and we thought he was going to have a pretty rough go of it….”
He was not at all what the men expected. One of them, recalling the scene, said he looked like “a sitting duck.” Another remembered “a stirring among the fellows…. Although they were standing at attention, you could feel the Irish blood boiling—as much as to say, if this guy thinks he’s going to take us over, he’s mistaken.” A private named Vere Leigh would recall “a rather short fellow, compact, serious face, wearing glasses. And we’d had all kinds of officers and this was just another one you know.” To others Harry looked, with the pince-nez spectacles, like a store clerk or a professor and totally out of his element. “Yes,” said Private Edward McKim, “you could see that he was scared to death.”
Harry, who would remember the moment more vividly than anyone, said he had never been so terrified. He could feel all their eyes on him, feel them sizing him up. “I could just see my hide on the fence…. Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous.”
According to Private Albert Ridge, who later became a judge in Kansas City, the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them. As he was to confess long afterward, writing about himself in the third person, “He was so badly scared he couldn’t say a word….”
At last he called, “Dismissed!” As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer. (“And then we gave Captain Truman the Bronx cheer, that’s a fact,” said Vere Leigh.) As the day wore on, they staged a sham stampede of their horses. After taps, a fight broke out in the barracks and several men wound up in the infirmary.
In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were “busted” in rank. “He didn’t hesitate at all,” remembered Private Leigh. “The very next morning this was on the board. He must have sat up all night…. I think the First Sergeant was at the head of the list.”
Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you,” he said. “You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back now.” There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, “We got along.” But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn’t.
He proved a model officer and extremely popular with “wild Irish” Battery D. “Well, I would say that his major characteristic was great friendliness, that he had such warmth and a liking for people,” recalled Arthur Wilson. “He was not in any way the arrogant, bossy type, or Prussian type of officer. A lot of us youngsters, you know, when they put gold bars on our shoulders, why we thought that we sort of ruled the world. And he had, as an older man, a very quiet sort of a way of serving as a leader…. And he was a disciplinarian but he was very fair. I don’t know, I can’t describe what the personal magnetism was except that he had it.”
“You soldier for me, and I’ll soldier for you,” Harry told the men. “Soldier, soldier all the time,” his favorite colonel, Robert Danford, had said at Camp Doniphan.
For one month he drilled the men on the firing line, trying to teach them everything he knew about the French 75. They thought the weapon a wonder and, with practice, claimed, in Missouri style, that they could pick off a sparrow on a wire at 9,000 yards.
Working them hard, insisting on strict behavior, making them “walk the chalk,” and driving himself no less, he found his satisfaction in the task, his pride in the men, as well as his own newfound sense of power, were like nothing he had ever known. “Talk about your infantryman,” he boasted, “why he can only shoot one little old bullet at a time at the Hun. I can give one command to my battery and send 862 on the way at one round and as many every three seconds until I say stop.” Whatever dislike or fear of guns he had known before appears to have vanished. He knew how much was riding on his judgment now. “You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility it is to take 194 men to the front,” he told Bess. Were he to get them killed, he would never be able to look anyone in the face again.
How brave he might be once the high-explosive shells began flying weighed heavily on him. He kept thinking of a man Uncle Harrison once described who had the bravest kind of head but whose legs “wouldn’t stand.”
Enthusiasm in the camp was fueled now by daily dispatches of Americans in action at last. Through most of that spring, while Captain Truman was at Montigny-sur-Aube, the numerical superiority of the Germans on the Western Front had become clear. The great question was whether American forces would arrive in time and in sufficient strength to make the difference. By June the Germans were back again on the banks of the Marne, within cannon shot of Paris. The situation was grim. The leaders of France, Italy, and Great Britain warned Woodrow Wilson of the “great danger of the war being lost” unless American forces became available as rapidly as possible. Pershing had been bound and determined to commit his troops only as a separate American command, but because of the emergency more than 250,000 Americans were rushed to the front to support the French under the command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Americans fought bravely at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Then, on July 15, the Germans unleashed another huge offensive aimed at Paris, the Second Battle of the Marne, sending fifty-two divisions against thirty-four Allied divisions, nine of which were American. In three days, from July 15 to July 18, the tide of battle turned. To Ludendorff, American forces had been the “decisive” factor, and the German chancellor later confessed that “at the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced…that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals…. That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”
But for the Americans, the worst was still ahead.
In the time allotted, Captain Truman had transformed what had been generally considered the worst battery in the regiment to what was clearly one of the best, as was demonstrated in conspicuous fashion the day of their departure for the front, on August 17. The 129th Field Artillery began moving out from a nearby railyard, one battery at a time. To a very large degree the war was fought with railroads. The movement of troops and equipment by rail was ever critical, hence great store was set on how well officers and men managed things when the time came to go. For artillerymen especially, “moving out” was a ter
rific undertaking. The trains for each of the batteries were comprised of some seventeen flat-cars, thirty “dinky” French boxcars (these marked “40 Hommes, 8 Chevaux”), and a single passenger coach for officers. Everything needed had to go aboard—troops, guns, caissons, field kitchens, horses, harness, hay, feed, battery records, extra supplies of every sort—in the quickest time, with the least wasted motions possible.
As it was, each battery managed to get on board and under way in about an hour. The time for Battery D was 48 minutes, a record.
They were rolling by eight in the morning and the trip lasted two days, their train passing close enough to Paris that they could see the top of the Eiffel Tower. Beyond Paris, except for the scars of war, the rolling countryside might have been Missouri or eastern Kansas. Then they were beside the Marne, traveling past Château-Thierry, scene of a great American victory, then along a narrowing valley, past Epernay, in the heart of the champagne country. They turned southeast. For mile after mile, in a landscape of broken wooded hills, one small village after another looked much alike with their orange tile roofs and single church steeples.
They were heading for the beautiful Vosges Mountains, in Alsace, nearly to the Swiss border, which was the extreme eastern end of the front. Long the sleepiest sector of the war, it was, the American high command had decided, the ideal place for green troops to get some experience holding the lines, as a preliminary to an all-out American offensive. The first American battle casualties had been suffered in the Vosges, the autumn before, and in the time since one division after another had been moved in and out.
The end of the line, hours later in the dark, was the town of Saulxures, by a swift little river in a mountain valley. In mid-August, on the night Battery D arrived, the air outside the train was sweet with the smell of giant firs and patches of purple thyme along the river banks. Harry would remember, too, how good the local beer tasted.
The following morning, August 20, puffs of white smoke could be seen in the sky five or six miles to the east, and, in the middle, a moving speck. It was anti-aircraft shrapnel being fired at an enemy observation plane, and the first real sign of war. But by then Harry was already on his way into the mountains.
III
“It was just a quiet sector to give the boys a little indoctrination in trench warfare,” recalled Sergeant Frederick Bowman, one of the small detachment that went with Captain Truman to locate a gun position. They traveled by truck at first, over twisting roads to a tiny, picturesque village called Kruth. Then, with horses and accompanied by a French officer who spoke no English, they began a hard, steady climb into the fir-clad mountains, up logging roads as steep as a roof. It was terrain such as the Missouri men had never seen, with rushing streams, beds of green moss inches deep, great granite boulders heaped on all sides, and everything heavily shadowed beneath the huge, shaggy trees. The enemy’s batteries were on an opposite mountainside. As Sergeant Bowman said, the topography was “kind of a V-shaped affair,” and so wild and rugged, it appeared, that either side might fire away endlessly and do no harm.
The sky was clear, the day warm and sunny, visibility excellent—not ordinary conditions in the Vosges—but the men and horses were well concealed under the trees. At one point only, when they came to an open ridge in plain view of the Germans, did the French officer have them go at intervals, one man at a time.
They found the spot they wanted at the edge of the trees at an elevation, Harry reckoned, of more than 2,000 feet above the valley. The men would remember making a meal of cold beans and beef, hardtack and a mess kit full of wild red raspberries picked en route, these topped off with champagne provided by the French officer.
Camping in the woods, they spent several days getting set up. Then the rest of the battery began the long, hard climb from below, hauling the guns. “It was surely some steep hill,” Harry wrote. Once, a can of lard broke loose from a wagon and bounced the whole way to the bottom. Clouds had moved in on the mountain, meantime, shrouding the trees in mist. The chance of being seen was no longer a worry, but in the damp air now even the least sound carried. To muffle the wheels of the guns Harry had them wrapped in burlap, which struck some of the men as silly. And indeed, the whole struggle of hauling everything into place seemed doubly absurd when, after days of doing nothing in the clouds, then days of rain, the battery was told to pack and move on again.
Harry had been ordered to take up a position about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. So his first action would be to shell the enemy with poison gas.
The battery moved after nightfall, horses, guns, and men laboring up and down roads now slick with mud and rain. And it was raining still the next afternoon when they took their new position, everyone exhausted from no sleep but also extremely excited and eager to commence firing for real at last. The targets were some German batteries four miles distant. The barrage was to begin after dark and to be what in artillery parlance was called “fire for neutralization,” to “suppress the activities of the enemy” without necessarily destroying his position.
When the command was given at precisely 8:00 P.M., August 29, four batteries of the 129th opened up. The piercing crash of the 75s went on for half an hour. Battery D fired five hundred rounds. “We were firing away and having a hell of a good time doing it,” remembered Private Leigh, “until…[we] woke somebody up over there.”
The barrage over, the night was suddenly still. There was only the sound of the rain. At this point the battery was supposed to move out with all speed, to take a new position before the Germans had time to return the fire. Horses were to be brought up at once from the rear, the guns hauled away. But the first sergeant in charge of the horses was nowhere to be found. The job of first sergeant was assigned on a rotating basis and the first sergeant that night was Glen Wooldridge, who didn’t appear with the horses for nearly half an hour. Then, with everybody charging about in the dark rushing to make up for lost time, things became miserably scrambled. Fearing the Germans would retaliate with a gas barrage of their own, the men had their masks on. Some were struggling frantically to get masks on the horses.
When the first German shells came screaming over, Harry was up on a horse trying to see what was going on. A shell burst with a shattering roar not 15 feet from him. His horse was hit—or slipped—and went over into a shell hole and rolled on top of him, pinning him down helplessly. By the time he was pulled free by a big, heavy-shouldered lieutenant named Vic Housholder, his breath was nearly gone—Housholder remembered him “gasping like a catfish out of water.” Meantime, half the horses and two of the guns had charged off in the dark, over a hill in the wrong direction to become hopelessly mired in the mud. Then all at once, the same unfortunate Sergeant Wooldridge, in panic, began yelling at the top of his voice for everyone to run, saying the Germans had a “bracket” on them.
Wooldridge himself took off. Others ran after him, though how many is uncertain. No one could see much of anything in the black night and pouring rain, and with such wild confusion all around. With their masks on, telling who was who was nearly impossible, even at close range. Private Walter Menefee said later there was only Captain Truman and maybe three or four others who didn’t run. “I led the parade!” Menefee admitted. Vere Leigh thought hardly anyone took off except Wooldridge.
In any event, Captain Truman stood his ground, and once having recovered his breath, let fly with a blast of profanity that had stunning effect chiefly because it came from the officer who, heretofore, had seemed so proper and reserved. “I got up and called them everything I knew,” was how Harry himself remembered the moment. He was livid and terrified.
For years afterward at reunions in Kansas City, with whiskey flowing, there would be much lighthearted banter and kidding over this first encounter with the enemy, Battery D’s so-called “Battle of Who Run.” But there was nothing the least comical about the situation at the time.
With his blistering verbal barrage and the vivid example o
f his own fierce courage under fire, Captain Truman succeeded finally in getting things in control. Two horses were dead, two others had to be shot. The guns, in mud to their axles, were impossible to move with manpower only. They could be rescued later, he decided, and marched the men back to base position through the dark and the continuing downpour.
At about four in the morning, after a hot meal, he went to his tent, collapsed, and slept for twelve hours.
He was worried sick, sure he was disgraced. But his superior, Major Marvin Gates, told him reassuringly that green troops often behaved badly their first time and to forget about it. Gates recommended only that Sergeant Wooldridge be court-martialed at once. Unable to bring himself to do that, Harry had Wooldridge broken to private and transferred to another battery, where, as it turned out, he later performed well and bravely.
In a letter to Bess, Harry said it had not been until the day after that terrible night that he figured out what had happened. “The men think I am not much afraid of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run and that is pretty scared.”
Because no one had been killed in the melee, the men decided that Captain Truman—Captain Harry—besides being cool under fire, was good luck. When time came to go back for the abandoned guns, a potentially perilous mission, every man in the battery volunteered. Harry, deeply touched, did the job with only the necessary men and horses.
At first light, September 3, the regiment was on the move again and in full battle dress—helmets, gas masks at the ready, blanket rolls, and full packs that weighed as much as 70 pounds, or more than half the weight of some of the men. A sign on Grand Avenue, Kansas City, had said: “Join the Artillery and Ride.” Now, to save the horses on the steep roads, everybody was on foot, officers included.
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