by Barrie Pitt
7. Point of Balance
THE German troops opposite the Americans had not long to wait for the expected counterattacks. On June 6th, the marines of the U.S. 2nd Division received orders to straighten a portion of their front, thus giving the defenders only five days in which to prepare themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, this proved quite long enough for the experienced troops of General von Böhn’s Seventh Army.
On the American’s left flank, the 4th Marine Brigade held a line which curled around the southern and western edges of a wood – Belleau Wood. It lay some eight miles west-north-west of Château Thierry on a hill which dominated the surrounding countryside, and if its trees were slender in form, they were so close together as to reduce visibility to less than ten yards. The six hundred acres of ground it covered were jumbled, boulder-strewn, cut by ravines which fell so sharply that the branches of the trees in the bottoms brushed the boles of those on the banks, and within this natural fortress the German troops – veterans, some of them, of fighting upon both Russian and Italian fronts – had constructed during their five days’ occupation a system of well-concealed machine-gun posts with interlocking fields of fire.
Immediately west of the wood lay the small village of Bouresches, whose stone-built cottages were in the same period transformed into rifle and machine-gun posts with interlocked fields of fire. From its nearest edge to the American lines lay fields thigh-deep in winter wheat, green, rustling, beaded with scarlet poppies – and two hundred yards across, while to the west and then north around the flank of Belleau Wood the ground was similar, but increasing in width to over four hundred yards on the extreme flank of the brigade front. Across this the marines must advance, before they could even begin the task of locating, and then destroying, the enemy posts.
During the afternoon of June 6th – twenty-six years exactly before the Normandy landings – the men of the attacking battalions waited in their lines, smoking, talking quietly among themselves, looking out curiously over the open ground at the innocent pastoral scene of leafy wood and soft-toned village. The weather was perfect June – heat haze, dancing midges, gentle breezes; and the utter lack of movement might well have been explained by the admirable local peacetime habit of an after-lunch siesta.
This peace was rudely broken at four-thirty by a bombardment of the wood and village by Franco–American artillery, whose commander had decided to adopt the new German practice of firing barrages without any form of preliminary registration, but also – unfortunately – without bothering to adopt the other new German practice of deducing correct ranges and bearings by mathematical calculation. The first twenty minutes of the barrage therefore, was completely wasted from the infantry’s point of view, for the vast majority of the shells soared away high over the woods and the village, to crash to earth far in the rear – only a tiny proportion having the faintest military use, and that only by accident.
When at five o’clock the marines climbed out of their trenches, the gunners were just beginning to find their target areas – but in accordance with orders, they now ceased fire.
Five yards apart, in four ranks, twenty yards between each rank, the marines advanced. Nothing had been seen like it, in mass innocence, in hope and at the end in unavailing heroism and self-sacrifice, since the British attack on the Somme in 1916 – and it is quite possible that the lack of immediate reaction from the enemy was due to disbelief that in 1918 such naïveté could still exist. For nearly a hundred yards the marines walked forwards in silence, broken only by the threshing of the young corn as they waded through it, by their officers’ whistles or shouted commands, and by the sounds of their own breath in throats dry with fearful excitement.
Then with the sharp crack of a thousand snapping sticks, the hidden machine-guns opened fire and the air above the wheatfields filled with red-hot nails, each humming like an angry hornet. There were cries of pain and anger as the men went down, shouted orders and warnings as others swayed momentarily out of line to go to their aid; gaps appeared everywhere through the marching phalanx, and inexorably the front line melted into the ground. But all along the front of the advance, the spacing was held, the pace maintained – for as yet the marines still believed in the wisdom of their training: it took another hundred yards and the deaths of half of those who had started out to force the survivors to begin thinking for themselves.
As their bodies were fit and their nerves sound, they thought to some purpose. Those on the left flank with still two hundred yards to go to the edge of the wood and no chance whatsoever of arriving there, went to ground; but those in the centre and on the right who were already close to their objectives when they came to their senses, covered the last few yards in a storming rush. Unfortunately, they then found that their troubles were just beginning, and that they had neither the weapons nor the technical ability to deal with them. Some form of high explosive or liquid fire is needed to blow or burn out the occupants of blockhouses, be they of stone or concrete – and Pershing, having spent his formative military years fighting Indians, had been content merely to equip his men with rifles, with which, to be sure, they were extremely expert.
In Bouresches, the marines were faced with three alternatives. They could use their markmanship and endeavour to shoot it out with the enemy through the narrow windows of the cottages, they could try to reach the doorways and attack inside the crowded rooms with the bayonet, or they could mass and flood through the village using a combination of both methods, and rely upon German morale to crack when the machine-gun posts found themselves surrounded.
In the face of the interlocking fields of fire, the first method was soon abandoned, but during the early part of the evening there were many attempts by single men or men working in pairs or trios, to put into effect the second method. Periods of comparative silence would suddenly end with screams and curses, the crunch of rifle-butts on flesh and bone, the bark of revolvers: but rarely did the machine-gun remain silent when next Americans moved in front of it.
Then the only surviving officer – Lieutenant Robertson – collected all the men he could find, and organized an attempt at the third method. Fortunately for American arms, it was dark before he could put it into effect. They crept forwards silently at first until the leading group were already past the outlying houses, and then were seen and fired on. The group immediately rose to their feet and charged forwards, followed by the remainder of the battalion’s survivors, and the night was full of fire and fury, the whine of ricocheting bullets, the clash of bayonets.
The Gods who protect the young and inexperienced by blinding them with courage and hope now aided the Americans, and by 2 a.m. the village was in their hands; but of the battalion which set out to capture it, only twenty men were still on their feet, and they had very little ammunition left. Fortunately, they were reinforced and re-supplied in time to beat off the inevitable German counterattacks, and the village thus remained in American hands.
But in Belleau Wood, the position was bad.
The western side of the wood had not been reached at all, as those who had intelligently gone to ground in daylight when the task was patently impossible, had been withdrawn to their own lines as soon as darkness had fallen sufficiently to give them some chance of success. This left unsupported those survivors of the 6th Marines who had reached the southern edge of the wood, and although they had been able while daylight lasted to put their skill with the rifle to good effect, and gain some penetration, when darkness fell the flashes gave away their positions with the result that they were bombed back to the edge again.
There they lay all night, and early in the morning another company came up in support – but once more as they tried to force their way through the wood, they were caught in the interlocking machine-gun fire. Their skill, their pride, their fierce determination, took them that June day almost three hundred yards through the chaos of tumbled rock and thick, concealing foliage – but at night, once again, they were bombed back to the line from which the
y started; and of the two hundred men who had joined them in the morning, only eleven came out with them at night.
The whole process was repeated the following day, but on June 9th the marines were withdrawn completely from the wood, which was then subjected to a bombardment from two hundred guns. If the artillery eliminated any of the machine-gun posts, it also felled many of the trees – which thus served both to obstruct the next advance through the wood and camouflage and protect the defenders to an even greater degree. ‘The trees looked like someone had cut them down with a scythe,’ wrote one of the marines in a letter home, but the scythe had not cut low enough, and when they went in again after the bombardment, the marines found that the debris had choked the wood completely.
However, they crawled forwards through it – and if they had not yet been reduced to the mole-like existence of the other armies on the Western Front, they were at least beginning to appreciate the reasons for it. They also took with them a supply of grenades, and they borrowed or cut themselves cudgels. With this help, they remained in the wood that night.
On June 12th they were withdrawn again, an even larger concentration of guns bombarded Belleau Wood and a fresh battalion was sent into the attack. Fortunately, the marines were prepared to learn from each other, even if they had not been given much chance of learning from their allies, and this time the wood was cleared along its eastern and southern edges, and nearly half-way up the western edge. But beyond that they could not go, despite their reinforcement by infantry from the U.S. 3rd Division, despite also their increasing use of such trench weapons as light machine-guns (the French Chauchat), light mortars, grenades, clubs, and even sawn-off shot-guns – upon which the American High Command had looked with a disfavour amounting almost to contempt when they had seen them in use in the British and French trenches.
Finally, on June 25th, nineteen days after it had first been attacked, Belleau Wood fell completely into American hands as the result of a fourteen-hour bombardment followed by a creeping barrage, behind which the marines advanced in a manner strikingly similar to that of the British attack on Loos in 1915.
The Americans were thus making technical progress at a somewhat quicker rate than their allies had done, but they had nevertheless started with exactly the same preconceived ideas. Their progress, moreover, could well have owed at least some of its speed to the fact that they had allies who had already trodden the same path, and who were willing to guide them, even if their proffered short cuts had been spurned.
In all, the 4th Marine Brigade suffered 5,711 casualties, and lost almost half of its officers. The Commanding Officer had also been badly wounded, and when interviewed in hospital remarked: ‘Don’t feel so bad about me. It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have been so close to the front in a first-class war.’
Given another year of war, perhaps even the Americans would have found their Corps Headquarters established some forty miles behind the line.
In the meantime, another battle had been fought out between the French and the Germans, some forty miles north of the scene of the American ordeal. Although small in scale compared with the three gigantic conflicts which had preceded it – one on either side at St. Quentin and the Chemin-des-Dames, and the Lys battle far away to the north – it was significant in revealing the lessons being learned by the respective army commands.
The first lesson concerned the value of time in military affairs. Twelve days had been allowed to elapse between the close of the main German advance towards Amiens and the opening of the Lys offensive, while twenty-six days had gone by from the end of Georgette to the launching of Blücher across the Chemin-des-Dames. It was beginning to dawn upon a number of interested observers on both sides of the line that such a lapse of time between two attacks lost for the second opportunities which may have been created for it by the first.
Whether Ludendorff’s Chief of Operations, Lieutenant-Colonel Wetzell, was the first to realize this fact or not, is immaterial: he was certainly the first to try to do something about it. During the planning stage of the Blücher attack he had suggested that as soon as the Chemin-des-Dames had fallen and the main purpose of Bruchmüller’s battering train had been accomplished, it should be immediately transferred a few miles westwards, to the stretch of line immediately adjoining the Blücher front. This front – between Noyon to the east and Montdidier to the west – was still held by von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army, on the flank of its original sweep forwards from la Fère.
Wetzell’s suggestions had not been accepted at the time, as Ludendorff’s aspirations had been fixed upon developments which he hoped would allow him to tranship his heavy artillery back to Flanders, in order to smash the British. But once the Quartermaster-General temporarily relinquished these hopes for the more alluring prospects of an advance on Paris, then the benefits to be conferred upon the main advance westwards by a second attack converging with it from the north were immediately apparent. One of the reasons for the belated arrival of field artillery opposite the Americans was that most of the available transport facilities were already engaged moving heavy guns and trench-mortars into position west of Noyon.
This task was a formidable one in the most favourable circumstances: when it had to be accomplished across a countryside full of reserves being rushed across the line of movement in an attempt to prolong the battle raging to the south, delays were inevitable. Men, horses and machines were already feeling the strain of the previous battles and of the continual movements between them, and it was thus six days after the Crown Prince had called off the attacks between Château Thierry and Villers–Cotterets, before von Hutier could announce that he was ready to launch another offensive. But as even this represented a considerable improvement upon previous performance, Wetzell and his colleagues were not unhopeful.
Their hopes were unjustified; Pétain had not been so fully engaged upon damming the flood to the south that he had been totally unaware of danger threatening elsewhere.
For one thing, Pétain – and others on the Allied side – was acutely conscious of the fact that after the battles of St. Quentin and the Chemin-des-Dames, the Germans occupied two vast salients jutting into France, in general outline not unlike that of a rather untidily filled brassiíre. The shortening of the German line consequent upon the elimination of the A between the salients would yield to Ludendorff an extra reserve of strength which all thought he could not eschew, and it would, moreover, bring the Germans to within forty miles of Paris along a wide front. Allied Intelligence therefore kept a very close watch upon the Noyon–Montdidier area, and as Wetzell had been inclined to sacrifice secrecy to speed in his movement of the battering train, both Foch and Pétain were well aware of the impending danger.
They had, however, differing views upon how it should best be combated. This was unfortunate, for one of them was completely right in his proposals and the other completely wrong – and the compromise in defensive tactics which resulted was therefore not as satisfactory as it could have been.
Pétain was right.
He had been right in his suggestions for the defence of the Chemin-des-Dames, but had there been foiled by the blatant disobedience of General Duchesne; on the front between Noyon and Montdidier he was to be partially foiled by the reluctance of Generals Humbert and Debeney – who shared Duchesne’s opinions but not his arrogance – to fall in completely with his schemes, and their intransigence had been stiffened by Foch, who issued a directive ordering ‘a foot-by-foot defence of the ground’.
Nevertheless, Pétain was able to insist that his plan for an elastic system of defence was used to some extent. Mr. Churchill, who was staying in Paris at the time, visited this portion of the front on the evening of June 8th, and later described the situation:
A strong picquet line of detached machine-gun nests, carefully concealed, was alone in contact with the enemy. Behind these devoted troops, for whom an assault could only mean destruction, was a zone three or four thousand yards deep, in which only strong point
s were held by comparatively small forces. It was not until at least 7,000 yards separated them from the hostile batteries that the real resistance of the French Infantry and Artillery was prepared. When one saw all the fortifications and devices, the masses of batteries and machine-guns, with which the main line of defence bristled, and knew that this could not be subjected to heavy bombardment until the stubborn picquets far in front had been exterminated, it seemed difficult to believe that any troops in the world could carry the whole position from front to rear in a single day…. The presage of battle was in the air. All the warnings had been given, and everyone was at his post. The day had been quiet, and the sweetness of the summer evening was undisturbed even by a cannon shot. Very calm and gallant, and even gay, were the French soldiers who awaited the new stroke of fate.
Perhaps here lay the seeds of trouble. Gaiety may well be a good mood in which to launch an attack, but for the conduct of a resolute defence, grim determination would appear to be the desideratum.
Early the following morning, Bruchmüller’s artillery began once more its thunderous overture. The bombardment blotted out the picquets and the strong-points of the intermediate zone, and at its farthest limits rained down upon those positions inspected by Mr. Churchill a few hours before, to such effect that the seven French divisions holding them proved utterly inadequate to beat off the attack which followed. This was delivered by thirteen of von Hutier’s divisions (nine in the first wave), rested after their labours south of the Somme but still cock-a-hoop with success, who swept across the obliterated forward defences and fell upon the French with such ferocity that Storm Troops had broken through the first position and occupied seven miles of the second before 11 a.m. By the end of the day, von Hutier’s divisions on the left flank of the offensive had reached the north bank of the river Matz – over seven miles in front of their start line – and on June 10th the river was crossed in the centre of the attack front, which thus bulged slightly (but only slightly) towards Compiègne.