Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  That night the men huddled together for warmth in barns and other outbuildings. Many could look up through broken roofs to see the stars now twinkling down from a sky as cold as it was clear. There were no fuel and no fires, and the wagons were still stuck in the snow far behind. When they did roll into the billet area in the middle of the night, the fresh meat and vegetables were frozen solid. The men refused to crawl from their blankets to cook. By morning a man lucky enough to have shoes found they were frozen so stiff that he could not put them back on his cracked and swollen feet. He burned paper and straw in them to thaw them out.

  The men ate a substantial breakfast and set off on the second day’s march. Donovan seemed to be everywhere on the road. Sometimes he spoke in a kind and affectionate way to his young soldiers so that they responded as a boy does to his father. Sometimes his words had a sharp bite to them, and men responded just as quickly to this. By some intuition he always seemed to know what manner to assume toward each of his suffering men. Always he appeared a man of resolution, cheerful and unbowed despite the fact that his pack too was piled high with the still falling snow and that he too, by the end of the afternoon, could not hide the utter fatigue that was engulfing the entire command.

  At noon, Father Duffy noted, the bugle blew mess call, but there was nothing at all to eat. The men slumped in the snow and failed to make even the sardonic remarks that soldiers usually delight in. Toiling through the drifts, the hungry men begged food from farms and villages, even though they risked a stiff fine if Donovan saw them. The French, impoverished by the war, gave them raw potatoes. That night the men again slept hungry and cold in cattle sheds.

  Kilmer wrote about the third day to his wife. “We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day—the third of a four days’ journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen stiff over our lamed feet.”

  On the evening of December 29, the 165th floundered through the snow into Longeau, their destination. French girls cheered the soldiers, and the men blew them kisses. They broke into “In the Good Old Summertime” and, standing knee-deep in the snow, with the bandsmen blowing through frozen instruments, they entertained the French girls with some good old American songs. Donovan grinned. He had brought his men through their first ordeal.

  The 32nd Battalion of French Chasseurs had been selected to instruct the 69th in open and trench warfare at Longeau. The regiment would join the French for their baptism of fire at Lunéville in the middle of February. A weary stalemate continued on the western front, and the Allies planned to use the lull in the fighting to train the fresh American troops so that, when the decisive spring battles began, they would be ready.

  The French and American commanders of the Field Officers’ School where Donovan had trained had been deeply impressed by his keen mind and quick command of the information learned. They now put in a request to transfer him to a new school that was to be formed. It would mean an advance in rank, but Donovan wanted no part of it. First he sent Lt. Oliver Ames to see Gen. Douglas MacArthur at division headquarters to try to prevent such a transfer. Ames reported that there was indeed such an order; in fact, it had been issued ten days before but had been held up because the Rainbow did not want to lose such an effective field officer.

  Donovan went to see MacArthur, who confirmed what he had told Ames. MacArthur listened to Donovan’s complaint. “Let’s go, Bill,” he cried. “Don’t let them get you away from the line. Fighting men are the real soldiers.”

  MacArthur and Donovan jumped into MacArthur’s staff car and drove the 40 or so miles to general headquarters at Chaumont, where the two men strode in unannounced on General Pershing. MacArthur did the talking. He told Donovan’s story and urged that Pershing keep Donovan in his command. Pershing nodded approval, and Donovan was free to rejoin his men at Longeau.

  “Perhaps I am foolish to stay here,” he wrote in his diary upon his return to Longeau. “Perhaps I should seize the opportunity of getting in that new school where I know both the commandant and the director. But I want to stay by these men here and finish the job. I told the colonel that I did not expect promotion, that I was content to serve as a major, and that I was going to turn out the best battalion in the entire army.”

  Donovan’s men were issued steel helmets, hand grenades, and two gas masks apiece, one English and the other French. They were now housed in the red-roofed village of Percey, south of the old fortress town of Langres in the Haute Marne. The officers were billeted in houses and the men slept in haylofts. Despite the chill winter, Donovan soon had his men running over the roads again. He encouraged them to box and himself put on the gloves with soldiers who challenged him. The Chasseur officers charged with training the 165th thought Donovan an odd sort of officer, but then he was an American, and Americans were indeed curiously democratic. There was no doubting the immense hold he had on his command.

  At Percey many a young American accustomed to throwing a baseball overhand learned the English overhead bowling delivery that seemed appropriate for hurling grenades with accuracy. They tossed the grenades into a pit, where they exploded with a satisfying roar. The men dug trenches for practice, and learned how to fire French machine guns, the Stokes mortars, and one-pound cannon. They lunged with fixed bayonets at targets.

  “I went out on the rifle range with a few delinquents and some prisoners as well as two or three officers,” Donovan wrote. “Prepared the field for tomorrow. I now have a string of eighty targets, half for auto rifles and half for ordinary rifles. The range sets in a little arroyo between two hills and makes an excellent place. We have completed a throwing place for grenades, and the men are now getting the idea. Most of them do exceedingly well.”

  Donovan rehearsed combat skills himself. One day as he practiced with his pistol, he made believe he was attacking a German position. “You must do that in this kind of work to get anything out of it at all,” he wrote to his brother Vincent. “I played at the defense of a shell hole, at killing a German while running towards him, and all kinds of things I used to do as a youngster on the stairway on dark nights.”

  Donovan now lived in the old château overlooking Percey. “Begin at my feet and move up,” he wrote to Ruth one night. “A pair of felt slippers, army socks, flannel trousers and the inside of a trench coat. That is real luxury. A blazing fire, a real oil lamp, and you have all the conveniences.”

  He also now had an orderly, John Patrick Kayes, a soldier who used to be Col. Vincent Astor’s valet. Other officers were quick to accept Donovan’s invitation to lunch or dinner, served in his room by the attentive Kayes. One evening Donovan gave a sumptuous dinner in honor of the commander of the Chasseurs.

  When fellow officers dropped in to see him, they found Donovan hospitable and talkative. “I called on Donovan this evening and found him sitting in a big, chilly chamber in the old chateau in front of a fire that refused to burn,” Duffy wrote in his journal on February 2.

  He had had a hard day and was still busy with orders for the comfort of men and animals.

  “Father,” said Donovan, “I have just been thinking that what novelists call romance is only what men’s memories hold of the past, with all realization of the discomforts left out, and only the dangers past and difficulties conquered remaining in the imagination. What difference is there between us and the fellow who has landed at the Chateau in Stanley Weyman or Robert Stevenson’s interesting stories, who has come in from a hard ride, and is giving orders for the boarding of his horse or the feeding of his retinue, as he sits with his jack boots pulled down, before the unwilling fire and snuffs his candle to get sufficient light to read his orders for the next day’s march.”

  Duffy and Donovan talked long, with Donovan doing most of the talking. “I get much comfort from the Major’s monologue,” the chaplain further jotted in his journal. “It supplies an excellent romantic philosophy with which to face the sordid discomforts which are the mo
st trying part of war.”

  Duffy called on Donovan often, as did Lieutenant Ames. Ames, who had served Donovan well on his mission to General MacArthur, had won his commander’s friendship and confidence. Donovan made him his adjutant. On January 27, an exuberant Ames wrote to his parents:

  What do you think the Major then did? He made me his adjutant, which is the greatest honor I’ve ever had; it couldn’t be so great with any other major but Bill Donovan, but he, to my mind, and in fact to every officer who really knows him, is the “livest” officer in the American Expeditionary Force; and some day when people at home begin to hear about him you ought to be proud that your son was once his adjutant. Perhaps you wonder why, if he is such a “live wire” he is not more than a major; the answer is that for the last two months, general headquarters have been trying to get him on the staff, but he hates the staff and has his heart set on having the best battalion in the United States Army, and with the most wonderful management has succeeded in “ducking it,” at the same time keeping in good graces. I’m awfully afraid, however, we’ll lose him soon, which would be a calamity.

  Ames soon realized that being Donovan’s adjutant was not going to be a sinecure. He wrote home, “After the first four days, I was really all in. I was so unused to the speed. Donovan has a wonderful mind, the result of years of training, has energy, is untiring, his personality is the strongest I’ve ever come in contact with, and with it all he combines the most consummate tact.”

  For a short time Donovan rode a horse as he went about his duties. “Have been riding a Government borrowed horse for the last few days, and he was terrible,” he wrote. “He had a head, four legs, and a tail. That was his nearest resemblance to a horse.”

  The men went on maneuvers, took long marches, and repaired their clothes, now of winter issue. “The spirit of the men was wonderful,” said their commander. “They are all believing that they are in the best battalion in the army. Last night we practiced men in the relief of trenches. We were on a high hill, and down in the valley we could see the thin light of passing trains and hear the faint rumble of cannons in the distance. The men were quite impressed, and some a little frightened. All of them went quietly. I stood near the front line trenches they had built, and some of them were keenly observing the wheat field in front of them as if it were sown with Germans. They played the game.”

  One day Donovan’s brother Tim, now a military surgeon, rode 6 miles on horseback to visit him. He arrived more than a little sore. “It will probably be my last chance to see him,” Donovan noted.

  In the middle of February, Donovan led his men, some wearing new English shoes too large for them, away from Percey. They hiked about 10 miles to the train. “I marched at the rear of the column and kept men from straggling,” he wrote. “Men in addition to their packs had musettes of automatic ammunition. These weighed at least thirty pounds each.”

  When Thomas Johnson, war correspondent for the New York Sun, happened along in his car, Donovan persuaded him to load the ammunition in the back seat and trunk and carry it to the railroad station toward which the column was laboring.

  The battalion boarded a train of 40-and-8s and started on their way. Corporal Hogan wrote, “Cooties seemed to become especially restless in the close atmosphere of the boxcars, and each little cootie had a way of protesting all his own. Now when forty men roll around the hard floor of a dark boxcar, all scratching violently together, the resulting medley is not an inspiring one.”

  Some of the men cursed and some sang as the train went swaying and jouncing through the night. In the morning the men ate a ration of canned “Willie” and hardtack. They arrived at 6:30 A.M. in Lunéville. German observer planes flew overhead as they disembarked. The men marched to a nearby village, where they found billets. On February 21, the regiment paraded in the main square of Lunéville and was reviewed by Major General Bassiliere, commander of the 17th French Army Corps.

  “In the midst of it, an aeroplane,” wrote Donovan in his diary, “but it was driven off. It is strange how these Dutchmen get word of these things.”

  Bombers were expected every night. “In my house there is a nice large cellar,” said Donovan, “to which I know the way without a guide.”

  On February 27, the First Battalion moved out for the front.

  6

  A Wood Called Rouge Bouquet

  THE FIGHTING 69TH RELIEVED a French unit on a quiet sector near Lunéville. Donovan’s First Battalion was the first into the trenches. He set up his command post beneath a road culvert near Rouge Bouquet. Duckboards led to damp trenches cut through a woods to the jagged front line. Beyond, tangled with barbed wire and swept by gunfire, no-man’s-land extended to the German lines, perhaps 2 miles away. It was a quiet sector and the trenches were not well kept up.

  “Off duty the men lived in mean little dugouts, thinly roofed, poorly floored, wet and cold,” noted Father Duffy.

  Situated some 3 miles behind the trenches, the support area, which the men called Camp New York, was to Corporal Hogan “the muddiest camp in France. It oozed, quivered, and trickled. It slipped down our backs, matted our hair, got into our eyes, and savored our food. We floundered and splashed and clunked through its wallows.”

  Duckboard walks ran through Camp New York, but they were so narrow that when two men met, one of them had to step off into the muck.

  Donovan rotated the companies in the trenches so that at first companies A, B, and D were in the lines and C Company was kept in a support position. At night the men ventured out into no-man’s-land on patrols. They cut the wire and scouted for enemy raiding parties.

  “At daybreak this morning,” Donovan wrote to Ruth, “a patrol returned, bringing only a bouquet of tulips and forget-me-nots gathered in no-man’s-land. Incredible, isn’t it?”

  Sometimes the Germans, for no particular reason, peppered the American line with machine-gun and rifle fire. American artillery in back of the Fighting 69th, impatient with waiting, would open up on the German rear, and the Germans would shoot back. They fired huge aerial torpedoes, called minenwerfers, that came wobbling through the sky to blast enormous holes wherever they hit. At first Donovan’s men derided what they called flying G.I. cans, but when they heard the terrifying roar of their explosion and saw the destruction that they wrought, their ridicule stilled.

  Privates Arthur Trager and John Lyons of Company D were wounded in a fusillade, becoming the first casualties of the First Battalion. On the whole, however, there was so little fighting that Donovan led his men on cross-country runs, leaping streams and climbing over barbed wire, just to keep them trim. He also set up a blackboard in his command post and lectured his officers about the terrain and strategy.

  On March 1, two officers and 50 men of the First Battalion advanced through no-man’s-land and drove the German defenders out of a strong point in advance of their lines. Four men were killed, three wounded, and one missing, but the point was held against German counterattacks. Although a minor action, it was the first permanent gain made by American troops in France, making their first appearance in the lines.

  The German troops raided the trenches held by the First Battalion. They attacked seven times in one night and were driven off seven times. Tim O’Rourke, standing next to Lt. Thomas Young, caught a German sniper in his rifle sights and fired. “Boys, I got my first German,” he announced with satisfaction. The next instant a grenade, lobbed into the trench, exploded and killed him. Death was not yet such a commonplace that the men were not deeply shocked. An officer attempted to quiet the fears that rose up in each man.

  “Boys, we have two and a half million men behind us,” he said.

  “But they are a hell of a long ways behind,” replied an ashen-faced young soldier.

  The Germans, having grown weary of the unseemly disrespect the Americans showed for the informal truce in this quiet sector, opened up one night with a massive barrage. “High explosives, gas shells, shrapnel, and machine gun bullets made the night a
hideous inferno,” wrote Corporal Hogan. “The earth around us boiled and churned and groaned and shivered. The air above us hissed and roared and snapped.”

  Wild Bill was everywhere in the trenches, rallying his men. With Donovan’s strong arm around his shoulders, his firm and confident voice in his ear, a young soldier about to break felt his courage renew.

  Sergeant O’Neill remembered later, “Actually, he was the calmest man under fire I ever saw. Oh, you’d think he was standing at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, not in the middle of a barrage. And he was always in the middle of everything. Bill was not a dugout officer. That’s why he was such a great leader. Once the men realized that the major was going to keep calm no matter what happened, they began to count on him to do the right thing.”

  On March 5, the Second Battalion relieved the First Battalion in the trenches, and Donovan’s men withdrew to the relative security of Camp New York. Donovan did not retire with his men but stayed on in the line to give the commanding officer of the Second Battalion the advantage of his experience in the fighting.

  The Second Battalion’s baptism of fire was not long in coming. The Germans fired a devastating barrage. One minenwerfer landed squarely on the top of a ramshackle dugout, exploded, and dumped tons of rock and clay down on a lieutenant and 24 enlisted men. Donovan, standing with the Second Battalion’s commanding officer in the command post beneath the road culvert, listened to the first report of the calamity brought by a frightened soldier. The officer in command was almost as shaken as the man who brought the grim news. When Donovan realized that the officer was not going to hurry to the trenches to find out for himself what had happened, he asked for permission to go in his place.

  “No,” he replied. “Majors are not expendable.”

  Donovan waited for a moment, his temper rising, and then demanded that he be given permission to go. Confronted with Donovan’s flashing blue eyes, the commanding officer mumbled his permission, and Donovan was out the door on the run, slipping on the wet duckboards.