by John McCain
There were only fifteen thousand active-duty U.S. marines in 1917, and they were scattered around the globe. Honest commanders in all services, including Pershing, acknowledged them as the best American fighting force in existence. As marines in the 5th Regiment were digging in near the village of Lucy-le-Bocage on the afternoon of June 1, retreating French soldiers streamed past them. A French officer instructed a company commander, Captain Lloyd Williams, a Virginian who had served in Cuba and the Philippines, that the German advance was unstoppable and he had better take his men to the rear. “Retreat?” Williams answered in a response that has figured prominently in marine lore ever since. “Hell, we just got here.” At the end of the marines’ first major engagement in World War I, the German soldiers who fought them nicknamed them Teufel Hunden, Devil Dogs.
The Americans successfully counterattacked at the river town of Château-Thierry on June 3 and 4 and pushed the Germans back across the river. Two days later the 4th Marine Brigade drew a tougher assignment: they were ordered to take a two-hundred-acre, densely wooded hunting preserve five miles northwest of Château-Thierry. Belleau Wood was not much more than a mile in length and a thousand yards across at its widest point. The order to attack had come suddenly from a French corps commander, and there hadn’t been a thorough reconnaissance of the area. The French reported the enemy was present in small numbers in the northeast section of the Wood. But since June 2 elite advance units of Germany’s 347th Division from the army group officially commanded by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, were entrenched throughout Belleau Wood. They would fight tenaciously to hold it. In front of them a field of waist-high wheat rippled in the breeze. A little to the west, a small elevation, designated Hill 142, looked down on the Wood.
The Battle for Belleau Wood began before dawn on June 6 with an attack on Hill 142 by the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines led by Major Julius Turrill. At zero hour only two of the battalion’s four rifle companies, the 67th and the 49th, were in position to make the attack on time. Bayonets fixed, they charged toward their objective in waves as German machine guns and artillery cut them down. They gained control of the Hill early that afternoon, turning back several German counterattacks, but Turrill’s battalion was decimated in the effort, most of the officers and men of its four companies killed or wounded. “Our casualties are very heavy,” one marine company commander reported to Turrill that morning. “We need medical aid badly. . . . Ammunition of all kinds is needed. . . . All my officers are gone.”
A poorly coordinated frontal assault on the Wood proper began around five o’clock that afternoon and was even costlier. As marines from the 5th and 6th regiments lined up to make their assault on the southern end of the Wood and occupy a nearby village, they had to stand their ground while German artillery shells hit their positions with increasing accuracy and intensity. As they waded through the wheat field, German machine guns, positioned to bring the whole field under fire, swept it end to end. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, which had to cover almost all eight hundred acres of the field, got the worst of it; by the end of the day it would list nearly 60 percent casualties. Entire companies seemed to sink beneath the waving grain. Reinforcements were chewed up in the murderous fire. As marines lay on the ground trying to make themselves invisible, a grizzled, forty-two-year-old first sergeant, Dan Daly, who had earned Medals of Honor in China and Haiti and would receive the Navy Cross for his heroism at Belleau Wood, shouted the line that would be the second exclamation of the battle to gain Marine Corps immortality: “C’mon, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” The 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines didn’t fare much better. They took the village of Bouresches by nightfall but had only forty or so marines able to fend off counterattacks through the night.
By nightfall the 5th Regiment had gained a foothold in the southern end of the Wood. As the fighting ended for the day and slipped into history and legend, casualties were the most suffered in Marine Corps history, nearly eleven hundred dead and wounded, more than those lost in all previous Marine Corps battles. And it was only the first day. It would take the marines three weeks to drive the Germans from Belleau Wood.
Replacements were rushed to the front, the 3rd Replacement Battalion among them. Two days earlier the battalion had been training for combat at a camp near the Swiss border. “We came across France in a hell of a hurry,” one man remembered. Two decades later that marine, Private Elton Edward Mackin, would begin writing a memoir of his experiences in World War I that he would continue writing for many decades. In 1974 Mackin recorded an oral history that would augment his manuscript when it was published in 1993 as Suddenly, We Didn’t Want to Die, a vivid, intimate, and often poetic account of the spectacle, suffering, and terror of war. “We heard the war scream and writhe and crash among the distant trees,” he wrote of his green battalion as it approached the Marne. “The guns around us added to the din, and suddenly we didn’t want to die.”
His battalion arrived at the front on the afternoon of June 7. “Dark of night would have been welcome then,” Mackin wrote, “so that a man might hide the terror in his eyes. The glare of sunlit day was hard to face with other fellows watching all your thoughts.” They were ordered to replenish the decimated ranks of 67th Company, one of two companies that had led the attack on Hill 142 the day before. It had suffered appalling casualties, including the company’s commanding officer. Only twenty-six of the 67th’s original 250 men were still fit for duty, Mackin remembered. He was one of “sixty scared green kids” sent to “join the . . . survivors.” They reached the lines at one o’clock on the morning of the 8th, having come through artillery and machine-gun fire to get there. He had already heard the “queer zeep-zeep” of machine-gun bullets, “like insects fleeing to the rear.” He had seen one of the insects extinguish the life of his friend “little Purcell,” who when he was hit had gazed up at Mackin with “the surprised look of a child hurt in play.” Mackin wept in grief.
They were told to dig in. “The more we dug, the better we’d be because it was going to be hell at dawn, and it was.” A German counterattack was coming, and German artillery pounded the marines in advance.
“Entire batteries took up the chorus. The clatter of a machine gun joined in, then another, as the rising tide of sound merged into a crescendo that stifled thought and, for a moment, paralyzed all motion. Shrapnel rained upon the ridge. A running figure dashed along the line. Men sought shelter behind half-finished mounds of earth and hugged the ground. Whole trees crashed down. . . . Fumes from the explosions became a blanket that crept over the forest floor like a pall. There were cries for “First aid, first aid!” Other cries—wordless, terrible cries—told of men in agony.
The company’s first sergeant, gruff and profane John McCabe, steadied the new guys for the duty that was now before them: to kill or be killed. “Fix bayonets, and watch the goddamn wheat,” he shouted.
“Are they coming?” Mackin managed to “croak from a throat that seemed to choke the words.”
“Yeah, when the barrage lifts they’ll come, and in numbers. . . . Shoot low and be ready to go meet them if they get too close.”
Mackin, referring to himself in the third person, wrote that using and facing bayonets was his greatest terror: “The very thought left him weak.”
The Germans attacked at dawn, “three massed lines of bayonets reflecting the first rays of the red sun.” They reached the American lines twice, Mackin remembered: “I saw men beheaded within twenty feet of me.” The enemy kept advancing as machine-gun fire swept their ranks but didn’t stop them. Mackin fought the urge to flee as incredulity turned to panic. “That thin line must go back. Damn it . . . why won’t it go back.” He killed his first man in the first of four German attempts to retake the Hill that morning. So did other “scared kids” in their initiation under fire, “many of whom died before noon that day.”
Scared kids. That is what combat mostly comes down to in the end. Scared kids fighting and killing other scared kids
. The main objective of a soldier’s training is to show him how to act while he is afraid, how to use a rifle and bayonet and his hands to kill a man he is afraid will kill him. A soldier’s training is supposed to be intense and unpredictable and realistic so that even if actual combat isn’t a familiar experience when you confront it—even though fear is choking your throat, even though your hands are shaking and your legs trembling, even though you are confused, shocked, terrorized, even though you want to run away—you still know how to fight, how to do your job, and you will still follow orders, you will still kill your enemy if you can.
Action is the most natural response to fear. Action might be running away from danger or running toward it. Though the latter seems counter intuitive, it isn’t. The exhilaration, the adrenaline rush of combat can suppress fear or at least hold it in check. Fear is most debilitating when the soldier feels helpless. When he can only hunker down and endure an artillery barrage or when he gets lost or separated from his friends and must wait through the night to find his way back, a soldier’s imagination will substitute for action and heighten his terror.
Mackin might have most dreaded a bayonet charge, but he would have been afraid long before he heard the order to fix bayonets. He and his fellow replacements would have felt fear intensely as soon as they arrived at the front, if not earlier. Rushed across France from the relative safety and comfort of a training camp and suddenly deposited in a place where the carnage and suffering of war were everywhere in evidence—villages in ruins, pitiable refugees streaming toward the rear, vacant-eyed, hungry children, the earth rent by shells, dead livestock rotting in muddy fields, field hospitals and walking wounded, burial details and stacks of corpses—they would have been shocked and scared by the stink, strangeness, and loudness of war, the “scream and writhe and crash among the distant trees” that Mackin described. Then they were shelled and shot at without being able to respond. They had to stand or crouch there and take it, close their eyes and pray. In such circumstances a lot of men break before they ever see an enemy coming at them with a bayonet.
Besides their training, soldiers’ self-esteem is their best defense against succumbing to fear. You hold the soldiers you serve with in a special regard that, for the duration of your shared experience of war, is more important to you than any other relationship you formed before, with the exception of your children. Most soldiers cannot bear to be thought cowards by those they serve with. Being wounded, even killed can seem less objectionable than making your buddies’ situation worse by not doing your job.
A soldier looks to his leaders, noncoms, and commissioned officers for instruction and for examples of how to behave under fire. Battles are the most confusing experiences a person will ever have. The leader who knows his business and gives direction, who sees what must be done and tells his soldiers what they need to do is invaluable in the chaos, terror, and din of a battle. Just his appearing purposeful and brave under fire is a powerful inspiration to men who look to him to make sense of the incomprehensible.
Combat veterans have the same effect on the battlefield, impressing green soldiers with their composure and competency in dire situations. Most replacements will have to admire those attributes from a considerable psychological distance since most veterans treat replacements, whom they do not trust and whose lives they expect to end shortly, with disdain. “Any man who carried the notion that someone was responsible for guarding them from harm soon knew they were mistaken,” Mackin explained, describing the experience of most replacements. “We who were to live awhile soon knew our way about, without a shepherd. There wasn’t time for a proper initiation.” Still replacements had role models present they could emulate, whether or not they could attain the same presence of mind and apparent (though not always genuine) indifference to the strain of combat the veteran evinced.
“We were too damned young and under fire too soon,” Mackin wrote, to become as hardened as the “grizzled, graying men of many enlistments.” Unlike them, teenage recruits who had been hurried to the front for a sudden, terrifying baptism of fire gained a “brittleness that was to mark all the remaining days of our lives.” They might have looked to veterans in vain for instruction, but they could usually rely on them for an example of how to function when terror gripped them. “Their cocky bearing, their sneering self-confidence and almost utter disregard for danger,” Mackin remembered, “coupled with a demand for absolute discipline, allowed us to follow them anywhere under any circumstances.”
Veterans might very well have scorned Mackin and his fellow replacements. But so many veterans had been killed in that first day’s fight for Belleau Wood that replacements would shoulder most of the fighting for the brigade from the second day there until the end of the war. And whether they liked it or not, replacements would determine whether the 4th Marine Brigade at Belleau Wood brought further renown or disrepute to the U.S. Marine Corps.
MACKIN AND FOUR OTHER replacements were ordered to guard the left flank of a platoon as it attacked a German outpost in the woods. They were too small a detail to be much help, Mackin wrote, but they were all that were available and, being replacements, more expendable than others. They crawled on their bellies into the wheat field, led by “a stony faced old timer,” Sergeant Louis Peterson, who halted them at a drainage ditch that offered partial concealment. The old veteran told them to keep down and quiet as they listened to German machine guns trying and failing to turn back the Americans and occasionally sending a burst into the field near them.
The Germans made no attempt to turn the platoon’s flank, so Mackin’s squad never had to fire their weapons. After a while it became clear the marines had taken the outpost, and Mackin and the others “inch[ed] up to get a better view of things.” The Germans fired a couple of machine-gun bursts their way that sent them sprawling back on their bellies. Mackin noted that Sergeant Peterson was the only one of them who hadn’t ducked. “He was keeping a good watch. . . . Those fellows never seem to scare. Not like us green kids.”
They remained prone and quiet for some time, while “the afternoon stretched into long shadows” and their sergeant was still silent on his watch. They became anxious about being left so far outside their lines as night fell. One of them called out, “Sarge?” and didn’t hear an answer. They all looked to their quiet leader, who was lying outside the ditch. “His chin rested on his folded arms . . . his field glasses lay idle in front of him as he studied the lay of the land.” At length the private who had called out to Peterson crawled to him, grabbed the old man’s foot and shook it, calling again, “Sarge?” Again he didn’t receive an answer, and he knew he never would. “We should not have left him there,” Mackin regretted later, “but the evening star was glowing against the east and we were suddenly a bunch of lost, scared kids—a long way from home.”
HOME FOR ELTON MACKIN was Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls. He was six when his father died in a boating accident in the Niagara Rapids, and he was left in the care of attentive grandparents. In an interview Mackin suggests a permanent coolness developed between mother and son after she wrenched him away from his grandparents’ home when she remarried. His mother and stepfather would have four children, whom Mackin would love. In the beginning he hated his stepfather for replacing his father, but in time he came to love him, hinting that he received from him affection that was lacking from his mother.
He had a high school education, a respectable achievement for a boy of his time and means. But he appears also to have been something of an autodidact, who, as his finely written memoir attests, absorbed not just information but a rhetorical style from the things he read. He said his paternal grandparents, his Irish family, were self-taught intellectuals though of modest means, and his grandda a “heavy drinking . . . mean, wild Irishman.” They were caretakers of the village library and brought home books, newspapers, and the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and other magazines. They encouraged him “to read, read, read.” His stepfather shared his interes
t in geography and history and “the world as a general thing.” Mackin was an avid newspaper reader and so, “when WWI broke in 1914, my world exploded into headlines.” He wanted to join the Canadian Army in 1916, but his mother refused to let him.
He reached a time in what he called his “bitter, bitter childhood” when he was obliged to leave home. This must be a comment on his relationship with his mother since he describes with affection every other person responsible for his care. “At the age of sixteen . . . without warning . . . I was simply ordered out of house and home at 4:30 of an afternoon in zero January weather.” He stayed with his maternal grandparents and later with an aunt and uncle in Niagara Falls, where he found work. In 1917, missing his siblings and stepfather, he returned home and finished high school, graduating that spring. His mother still wouldn’t let him go to France, even as friends and classmates began enlisting. Neither did the draft take him that year.
In December he went to Buffalo for a brief holiday. While there he read in the Saturday Evening Post that the 5th Marines had traveled to France with Pershing. “I threw the magazine across the room and I didn’t quit until I walked into the recruiting station at Lafayette Square and enlisted in the Marine Corps.”
The recruiters told him to make his goodbyes and report back in eleven days. There “was hell to pay” when he got home. His mother tried and failed to get him out of his enlistment. It must have been an unpleasant time. Mackin showed up in Buffalo again, five days early, and insisted on being shipped to basic training. He left for Parris Island that night. His memoir makes no mention of his training or any of his life before or after the war. It begins and ends in France. But in an interview he described his training tersely: “I lived through it.”
He shipped overseas with the 3rd Replacement Battalion in April 1918, arriving in Brest, on the Brittany coast, on May 6. The Great War would continue only six months more. Elton Mackin would participate in every major marine engagement, and his courage would earn him the respect of the veterans who had once awed him.